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Tag: Alignment

The Evolving Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

No role in an organization has evolved more rapidly than the CMO’s. It used to be that owning branding, communications, and campaigns defined the job. Now, CMOs need to be experts on customers, marketing tools and advanced analytics, and business strategy. Brand management remains an essential duty, but in service of driving business growth. Most importantly, because a CMO’s work connects directly to sales, product development, IT, finance, and other parts of the organization, CMOs find themselves needing to play a growing role in aligning their organization around new ways of thinking and work that will help them engage customers more effectively.

For those in TL;DR mode, the quick takeaway is: CMOs are being stretched, so they might sometimes need a hug (but please ask first).

Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive look at some of the shifts that we’ve seen impacting how a CMO shows up:

From To
Voice of the Brand Voice of the Customer
Intuition & Instincts Data & Technology
Brand Management Brand Innovation
Strategy + Execution Alignment

 

Voice of the Customer

The amount of information we have about customers is only increasing. How does a temperature between 70-75 degrees impact consumer behavior on Monday’s v Fridays? What is the correlation between a new Netflix series and GPU buying decisions? What invisible patterns in customers can data now make visible? More and more, it’s up to the CMO to develop the customer insights that shape how a business goes to market. And because so many groups touch the customers, from sales to product to finance to corporate strategy, the level of collaboration required to align on these insights requires a significant investment.

Data & Technology

The increase in customer data a business can capture also gives rise to new suites of tools and technologies that a CMO can use to mine for insights, optimize campaigns, and deliver experiences across channels. When almost every brand action can be quantified, decisions about how to go to market are becoming increasingly data-driven. As a result, the CMO is responsible for leading the digital transformation of the marketing organization which requires deep partnership with IT (among others) to develop the tooling and data models that align with the organization’s technology systems. While a CMO needs to rely on her or his instincts and intuition when it comes to decision making, increasingly they need to justify their strategies with that data that points to a certain direction. The more fluent a CMO becomes in technology, the easier it becomes to reconcile data-driven insights with gut instincts.

Brand Innovation

More than anyone in the organization, a CMO needs to connect the dots between a brand’s legacy and its future vision. As much as products need to innovate, brands must as well to remain relevant: messages need to resonate with how the world is changing, and their expression needs to drive differentiation. But in doing this, a brand must also feel familiar and to take advantage of the equity it’s built with audiences. As brand management becomes increasingly data-driven, brand innovation is also becoming more dependent on analyzing trends, creating new audience definitions and segmentations, and audiences, and delivering next-level experiences that are hyper personalized and hyper-relevant. And these insights provide fuel for both brand and product innovation. The CMO that can use data to drive innovation across the organization is one that will stick around.

Building Alignment

It’s not enough for a CMO to develop a winning marketing strategy and execute flawlessly. As organizations become increasingly customer-centric, a CMO needs to bring every function in the C-Suite into the conversation about how to drive growth. From gaining the full embrace of Chief Revenue Officer for their marketing strategies, to the creativity of the CTO as you make your strategies more data driven, to HR working to bring new talent to the table, to the head of Product working in partnership around how to claim new audience segments, and the CTO finding budget to drive the strategy forward, marketing has become increasingly a team sport.

It’s no wonder that CMO turnover is high, and those in their positions feel they’re continuously in the hot seat. While the complexity of marketing is growing and budgets are coming under increasing scrutiny, there’s never been a more exciting time to be leading a marketing organization. All the data organizations have been amassing and the tools ready to parse it can reveal truly amazing insights about customers and how to connect with them. But only if a CMO can enlist the organization in lending a hand in making this all happen. And this comes down to storytelling and building alignment.

We’ve worked with many organizations to craft what we call a Growth Manifesto—a narrative that shows how the thinking that goes into brand development can open up new possibilities across an organization—from how people think about innovation to the collaboration required to bring new ideas to life. We’ve seen that a Growth Manifesto serves as an incredibly effective tool for building that alignment that is essential to getting every part of an organization living a new brand promise. While CMOs will always own the brand, communications, and marketing lanes of a business, as their role evolves, we’re seeing how they also need to become experts at building alignment between the functions that marketing depends on.

If you have thoughts about the new challenges CMOs face today please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to address specific marketing challenges in your business, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

How Do You Orient Your Team When Everything Seems Uncertain?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Shaky markets. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to business success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward.

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it. For companies to navigate wave after wave of uncertainty, you need a more responsive approach:

Understand how your employees are feeling right now.
Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation? The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

Address employees’ emotions with a clear story of how you plan to move forward.
While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future. All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment: corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. You must cut through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization.

Get employees focused on a future that they are empowered to create.
In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To move your business forward and ultimately grow in times of uncertainty, you need better ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And you need to equip them not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward. 

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it.

At Emotive, we believe that companies need more responsive tools to adapt to the future—whatever it holds. They need ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And they need to equip their organizations not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. 

When you understand the emotional state of your organization, you can move forward. Faster.

How do your employees feel? Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation?

The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

We use the lens of brand to audit the emotional state of an organization and identify alignment opportunities that can reduce friction, create efficiency, and drive growth. Our approach recognizes that businesses are more than just a collection of employees working towards a common goal. They’re complex networks of people with myriad emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When you actually know what’s animating people’s behavior—the critical emotional drivers—you can craft more resonant, engaging stories about what you’re all working toward. 

Emotional understanding only makes a difference if your growth story is clear.

While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future.

All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. 

We’ve created a wonderfully simple approach to helping businesses fulfill their ambitions. When clients need to realize important outcomes, we work side-by-side with executive leaders to co-author a strategic narrative of how—and why—they want to grow. We call this a Growth Manifesto, and it serves as a powerful tool for cutting through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization. It connects major initiatives—corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture—in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the promise of the brand and the actions required to support it.

Your growth story can’t be separated from the quality of storytelling.

In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To grow in times of uncertainty, you need to understand how your people are feeling. You need to address their emotions with a story of how you plan to grow. And you need to get them focused on a future that they are empowered to create. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

  • Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
  • Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
  • Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

This is a schematic that represents the different phases of our Fast Forward offering including the align & refine (immersion), diagnose & define (workshop), and develop & explore (deliver) phases

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel brands, cultures, and businesses forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Getting all the Stakeholders on the Same Page

Posted on by Chris Ames

In America, there is a strong belief that the success or failure of your venture comes down to individual drive. It’s you, and you alone, that can turn the tide in your favor. In reality, as even the most steadfast founders learn, much of your time will be devoted to appeasing external stakeholders. Sometimes, those who know the least about your vision will have the most influence over its chance of survival.

Navigating the C-suite requires knowing how to engage stakeholders by building and nurturing relationships. The meaningful enterprise has moved from a transactional foundation — where enterprises serve their own benefit, even at the expense of others — to a relational foundation — which acknowledges that interdependence among diverse parties is essential for sustained success. Here’s the thing about relying on others: it’s always slower in the short-term. But for those with the patience to sacrifice short-term speed for long-term agility, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Before we get too deep, a bit of housekeeping. What exactly is a stakeholder? A stakeholder is anyone who can affect or is affected by the actions of a corporation. The concept of the stakeholder was first used in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institute, and described them as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist.” This description is as wonderful as it is vague, allowing you to cast the net as widely or as tightly as you wish. Is it those who directly fund you? Or those who provide those late-night emails of clarity when you’re spiraling? In short, yes. For a bit more guidance, look to the difference between internal and external stakeholders.

Internal stakeholders typically comprise employees, managers, owners, and in some cases, volunteers, interns, or students. The importance of consulting with internal stakeholders is self-evident. They are the ones on the front lines. They hear everything, know everything, and work across all touchpoints. Think of them as the physical engine. You can’t get a tune-up from a specialist without bringing them an actual machine. Most founders understand how vital their own team is. The trick is bringing that same love, care, and attention to outside counsel.

External stakeholders are those outside the corporation who interact with it in some way. This could be funders, investors, shareholders, advisors, banks, finance companies, suppliers, policymakers, legislators, social media influencers, and of course, customers. Each of these groups of stakeholders is usually termed a “constituency,” and each constituency represents a homogenous group usually holding a similar interest in the organization’s affairs. Think of them as the team of specialty mechanics, each having a particular, bespoke solution to make your engine run a little better.

When it works like it’s supposed to, stakeholder consultation results in a relationship of mutual benefit. It enables us to spot trends, emerging challenges, and risks. It brings a fresh set of eyes to your venture, offering new perspectives which can be used to improve project design and outcomes. And as anyone at a cocktail party has learned, playing nice can form unlikely collaborations and partnerships. All of this helps your brand to:

  • Determine needs and expectations
  • Identify perceptions and attitudes
  • Evaluate implementations and actions
  • Establish the brand values and positioning of the corporation as seen by others
  • Ensure your decision making is more informed and in tune
  • Administer a greater chance of implementation and activation

So, when and how do you bring in the troops? Kevin Crump, writer, and Customer Success Manager recommends weaving them in as early as possible.

“If you engage your stakeholders early in the project — ideally during the planning stage — everyone gets a common understanding of the scope, the timing, the budget, and the resource demands from the get-go,” he says. “This means no major surprises later in the lifecycle, and no ongoing divergence between stakeholder vision and reality. That’s why we have menus in restaurants. We don’t just expect the waiter to serve us exactly what we want without discussing it first.”

In this lovely diagram from B2B International, a B2B market research company, we see how a method of planning, process, presentation, and promise can be used to maintain effective communication throughout the entire lifecycle.

Getting all the Stakeholders on the Same Page - Planning Diagram

This outline is a great bird’s eye view of how to approach stakeholders. But what happens when you’re in the weeds with someone difficult? Here are four strategies for making sure you don’t burn your only bridge out of town.

1. Seeing. You can’t solve a problem if you can’t identify it. The first step is to clearly identify your stakeholders and figure out what motivates them. Primary stakeholders are those directly affected by the work. Customers often fall into this category. Secondary stakeholders are those indirectly affected by the work. This includes support teams or those impacted by the outcome. Key stakeholders are those with strong influence and vested interest. This would be the executives. Each group has different interests, objectives, and agendas — many of which will be in direct competition. Identifying and ranking their influence and interest will help keep projects moving in the right direction. The truth is, not all stakeholders are created equal, so sleuthing out who holds sway and who is your best champion will save you a lot of stress. Ask yourself questions like:

  • What are their most pressing business needs?
  • What is the best way to communicate with them?
  • What information or details do they need?”
  • Do they fully understand your work or do they need some extra explanation?
  • Who influences them?
  • What are they responsible for?
  • Who do they report to?

2. Listening. This is much easier said than done but resist the urge to close communication channels just because you don’t like what you hear. When receiving negative feedback, I always have to remind myself that it’s very unlikely someone is doing this as a personal attack against me. (Though not impossible.) Nine times out of ten, even the most off-kilter comment is based on some insight, backroom conversation, or email you weren’t looped in on. Try to see where difficult stakeholders are coming from and put yourself in their shoes to better understand their motivation and goals. Do their needs align with your project’s objectives? Do they simply want things done a different way? Common ground isn’t always common, but it’s worth searching for.

3. Meeting. Never underestimate the power of individual communication. For one, it’s a more human, efficient way to explore diverging viewpoints. You can clear the air, vent, and hear things from a new perspective without the formality of a group presentation. And two, meeting without other stakeholders in the room takes the pressure off and prevents negative opinions from spreading. Sometimes, it’s about just letting someone feel that they are heard.

4. Proving. A sad truth: you’re probably going to lose a battle of opinions to a senior employee. That’s why you should arm yourself with cold, hard facts that support the direction you want to take.

“Change the game by quickly running a test and collecting some evidence,” says Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group. “Move the discussion from opinions to data. Share what you’re learning very openly. It may be that neither of your opinions was right.”

Especially in data-hungry Silicon Valley, data will always trump hunches. More than being right, it shows you’re taking a more analytical approach to your role, which will bolster your credibility for the future. Even if you can’t find a mathematical proof point, you can use the voices of actual customers to make it less about your opinion and more about what’s right for the market.

In the immortal words of John Donne, no man is an island. As much as we’d like to singularly launch our idea into the Fortune 500, chances are we’ll need the help of external stakeholders. So, here’s to the power of compromise, communication, and diversity of opinion.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in San Francisco.

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How to Bring in a Branding Agency (And Still Thrive as a Creative Director)

Posted on by Chris Ames

Agency or Enemy?

If you’re a Creative Director, chances are you’re some lovely mix of imagination, diplomacy, market knowledge, and damn good design sense. You bring focus to every project. You know how to communicate across disciplines and departments. After all, that’s why you were hired. So why in God’s name would you ever need to bring in an outside branding agency? And if by some cruel twist of fate you’re forced into this position, how do you avoid effectively hiring your replacement?

If You’re Reading This Creative Brief, We’re Already Behind Schedule

Here’s a common scenario. You’re the Creative Director of a small design team. You’ve been tasked with a top-to-bottom rebrand with aggressive deadlines and even more aggressive stakeholders. There’s so much day-to-day client work that your team is stretched super thin.

It’s normally here, somewhere in-between the third revision and the second missed deadline that a decision maker mandates we need fresh eyes. The team is apprehensive to bring in outsiders and start from square one, but no one has any real bandwidth to argue against it. By the time the outside agency is brought in, everyone is exhausted, the work is stalled, the printer is out of ink, and someone keeps stealing your phone charger. Who’s ready for a design kickoff?

An Extension, Not a Replacement

When it works well, an outside branding agency is a natural extension of your design team, not a replacement.

“Ideally, you get an external agency that’s smarter than you are,” says Robert Saywitz, Senior Designer at Emotive Brand. “You’re looking for a true collaborator and extension of the team. No one wants to be manhandled, and no one wants to hear just tell us what to do. They should have an informed perspective and deliver creative ideas beyond the obvious solutions. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just hire some freelancers?”

So, how do you set yourself up for success? It’s all about education.

The Outside Branding Agency Checklist

  • Rally as an internal team. First things first, by the time you hire an outside branding agency, chances are you’re battle worn. Take a breath, rally the troops, and view this as an opportunity to get back on track. We’re all on the same team and we’re fighting for the same thing.
  • Educate the agency. No one knows the intricacies, politics, obstacles, personalities, and past iterations better than you. The more you embed and educate your agency, the faster, better, and more invaluable they’ll become. No one will benefit from keeping them in the dark.
  • Educate the decision makers. Get your decision makers aligned, informed, and available. Nothing is more frustrating than uncollated, contradictory feedback. Everyone needs to have a say, but at the end of the day, there should be one voice making the final call.
  • Set expectations early. If you’re going to set design guardrails, do so in the very beginning. Everyone must have clear delineations of what to keep, what to kill, and what can be reimagined.
  • Realistic deadlines. This one speaks for itself, but unless you want your external team to get sucked into the same whirlwind of chaos, they need time to operate and produce amazing work. If the rebrand was due two weeks before the agency was even hired, it’s time to rethink the schedule.
  • Turn the Creative Director into the missing link. No one is better suited to the needs of the internal company than the Creative Director. They can work as a bridge between designers, marketing, and the C-suite.

“When you’re the link, you’re the best way to facilitate what’s happening,” continues Rob Saywitz. “You speak the same language, you know the process. You know where the silos are and have the best chance at breaking them down. No one wants to enter a room excited to pitch new ideas only to discover the direction was already decided in a private meeting.”

Partners in Crime

Outside branding agencies can be a phenomenal tool to bring in fresh perspectives, accelerate projects, and spot the glaring inefficiencies that you’re too close to see. But without a champion on the inside, there’s a very real possibility that their best intentions will be mistranslated, misheard, and only add to the cacophony. Agencies don’t replace Creative Directors — they are a vibrant new dictionary for the Creative Director to read, take inspiration from, and translate to the internal team.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency based in Oakland.

Why Investing in Brand Enables Growth for Professional Services

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Professional service companies, categorized as mid-market, might be looking towards 2017 with a bit of trepidation. According to the National Center for the Middle Market 3Q 2016 Indicator, business growth has been identified as a top challenge for these firms. And mid-market or not, business growth is a real challenge for every sector of professional services in today’s hyper-competitive economy.

The Role of Brand in Professional Services

Even when personal brands are strong, as they often are for professional services, an overarching brand is necessary. Your brand is your firm’s most valuable asset. It sets the tone for the behavior of your employees and, most importantly, shapes how customers perceive your business. Consequently, your brand has a strong, direct impact on business growth.

And although it may seem obvious to invest in your brand to drive business growth, creating a solid case for doing so can be a real challenge. If the business is doing well, or even just good enough, people may perceive that any change will confuse customers or diminish the equity your business has established. It’s the common “why fix something that’s not broken?” thinking.

However, if a firm fails to continue to evolve its brand, it risks becoming outdated and irrelevant. The speed of change in today’s market is constant. And professional service businesses need a brand that is perceived as current if they want to attract top clients.

The other common misperception about the value of investing in your brand is that branding is a cost center rather than revenue driver. In fact, a 2015 Economist study indicated that 68% of business owners view marketing as a cost center. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Invest in Your Brand for Clear Returns

Here are 5 reasons why investing in your brand will positively impact your bottom line now as well as down the line:

1. Differentiation

With so many businesses offering similar services at comparable price points, firms start to blend together and have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Well-defined brands that tell a unique narrative and look different from competitors are able to draw attention. A tagline and a logo simply isn’t enough, though. In order to truly make an impact, you need to consider every brand experience and touchpoint.

2. Price

A strong brand commands a premium price. It allows you to justify your worth and create demand. Investing in professional services is a risk and, as a result, can be an emotionally charged decision. Customers will be willing to pay more for your service if they believe the risk is low.

3. Business Development

A steady stream of leads is vital to survival for professional services. Expanding the number of prospects improves the chances of conversion. A strong brand creates awareness across channels and keeps customers knocking at your door – helping you close deals and build confidence inside and outside the organization.

4. Alignment

In order to grow, professional service firm need to be aligned around the brand promise and story in order to create brand ambassadors with employees. The people inside your business are your strongest asset.

5. Endurance

Tough times are inevitable. But a brand with an established emotional connection with its customers and prospects is prepared to weather the storm. In the unfortunate event that your business suffers from reputational damage, a strong brand can help carry the business to the other side with its head held high. And as your industry goes through a period of flux, an investment in your brand now will increase the potential to grow today and into the future, leaving your competitors fall behind.

Thriving companies understand the power of their brands both internally and externally. And as pressure mounts on marketers to deliver growth and prove their ROI, investment in your brand is critical to the success of your firm. Invest in your brand to position your firm for growth.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Why Lack of Internal Alignment May Be Holding Back Your Business

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

When Internal Alignment Is Holding Back Your Business

The sky’s the limit. The future is full of opportunities. Until internal alignment becomes a dark cloud that prevents your business aspirations from being realized.

What happens when the brand is ready to grow and thrive, but there is no internal alignment from leadership about where the business is going? Nothing. The brand is paralyzed by competing visions and nothing happens. And a lack of decision making due to misaligned leadership is a problem that will hold up your business.

Strategy Without Alignment

A brand strategy is hard work and involves a tremendous amount of collaboration. When it’s clear that your brand needs to make a change in order to stay competitive and relevant, a brand strategy will articulate the shifts needed to grow and thrive. A brand narrative will clearly explain where the brand is going – what makes it different and special now and in the future – and gives your brand the launching pad to get there.

But if your leadership team doesn’t share the same vision for the business trajectory, it’s impossible for the brand to embark on the journey of transformation. Oftentimes, it’s not until businesses engage in developing a brand strategy that they uncover the depth of the misalignment. Before any progress can be made for the brand, the business needs internal alignment.

Focusing On Alignment

When you need to create momentum around your brand, internal alignment is the clear answer. The challenge arises, however, when leaders in your organization aren’t willing to share their honest vision for the brand. Sometimes leaders hold on to their vision as a form of intellectual capital – if the vision furthers their personal agenda for success it might be strategic to pursue it in a silo. Or other times, the vision is only shared with a select few as a power play to keep others at bay. Or general poor communication creates lack of trust and therefore reticence towards an open and honest dialogue about the future of the brand. Regardless of why leaders aren’t sharing a common aspiration for the business, overcoming the misalignment for the betterment of the brand’s future is critical.

Leaders Unite

Leaders must have clarity around the brand’s purpose in order to focus on making any strategic shifts. There must be agreement from all the key stakeholders in an organization about what the brand stands for and how that maps to the business. Since getting alignment involves teamwork and breaking down silos, a third party can be extremely useful.

Path to Purpose

At Emotive Brand, we’ve been on the front lines working with disconnected leadership and know all too well the challenge of articulating a clear brand strategy if there are competing views about the business plan. We developed Path to Purpose as way to bring executives together in a collaborative workshop series that aims to identify, articulate, and align leadership around the purpose of the company. By doing so, we help create internal alignment around the business strategy and map the brand strategy to it.

Our workshop paves the way for a corporate purpose statement and identifies the shifts your business should consider making in order to live its purpose more authentically. When you’re ready to push your brand beyond its stagnant state and truly reach its potential, you need a brand strategy with a strong purpose statement. If developing a brand purpose seems like an insurmountable obstacle due to a misaligned leadership group, consider Path to Purpose as the key to unlock your brand’s potential.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.