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Tag: Brand Campaign

Brand Campaign: Emotional vs. Emotive Brands – What’s the Difference?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of an Emotional Brand Campaign

Have you seen a brand campaign lately that made you laugh? Cry? Smile? There are a lot of campaigns out there that pull at people’s heartstrings. And often the most shared campaigns are the ones that rely heavily on emotional content.

As a result, a lot of brands today are hyper-focused on creating emotional advertisements. People rely quite heavily on emotions to make decisions. Anyone in branding today knows this, but just because your brand produces one emotional campaign, doesn’t mean it’s positioned for long-term success. Today, to really connect meaningfully with people, your brand must be emotive, not just emotional.

The Requirements of Emotive Branding

Emotive brands are rarer than emotional brands for many reasons. Emotive brands don’t just create emotional ads. They forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections at every touchpoint. They are consistent with the emotions they elicit and make sure that these same emotions ring true through everything they do. Every touchpoint counts: the tone of voice your employees have on customer service calls, how your packaging and website make people feel, how people within your office talk with one another, how leaders welcome new employees, the emotions customers have when they first visit your store, office, warehouse, etc.

Being a truly emotive brand requires building an emotional experience that resonates with the customer at every point of their journey, which is no easy task. It requires a strategic mindset and complete alignment around what emotions your brand wants to elicit and how you plan to create and foster those emotions across all platforms, touch points, and brand engagements. When brands do figure out how to successfully behave as emotive brands, they are able to connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long-term.

An Emotive Brand Campaign Must:

1. Behave authentically:

Some emotional brand campaigns feel as if they are trying to elicit emotional responses purely to leverage their own business. These never work out in the end because they feel inauthentic. Being credible and authentically bonding with people through shared values, attitudes, and behaviors has more long-term hold today. Especially since consumers are more distrustful of businesses than ever before. Make sure the emotions that your brand is trying to elicit feel true to who you are as a business, what you promise people, and where you see your brand going. Your brand must behave authentically at every touchpoint in order to create an emotional impact that sticks with people in the right ways.

2. Focus on consistency:

Consistency doesn’t mean boring or always predictable. Building guardrails for emotions can be particularly helpful here. Give your brand room to play, experiment, and be innovative without confusing consumers or behaving in ways that are off-brand and dilute your emotional impact. This means diving deep into what kind of relationship you really want to build with people, whether they be your employees, consumers, other businesses, or competitors. How can you connect in ways that feel consistent, but still flex to people’s unique needs?

3. Build meaningful experiences:

Every brand moment is an opportunity to build further meaning and should be approached as so. Whether it’s an internal meeting, an external presentation, a small or big event, a phone call, an email, or a board meeting – there is always space to convey the unique meaning of your brand and evoke the feelings that are distinct to it. Truly emotive brands are continually thinking of new ways to reconfigure, reshape, redefine, and enhance these brand moments – infusing emotions and meaning at every moment in subtle, yet powerful ways. This requires creativity and dedication to making every moment meaningful.

4. Be human:

As technology advances faster than ever before and digital becomes the new norm, being human is even more important for brands looking to connect with the people who matter so much to their success. A key part of behaving as a human brand – relatable, connected, lovable – is being emotive. Humans are both rational and emotional creatures, so connecting on a human level requires both the rational and the emotional. Marrying these in an authentic way is what gets people on board. Behaving as a human brand today means being flexible and dynamic. It’s about being in-tune with how your brand is making people feel, and being able to adjust accordingly.

More Than an Emotional Fix

Emotional brands may give consumers a 30-second emotional fix, but emotive brands forge meaningful connections that withhold time, shifts in the market, and even new competitors. Our work developing brand campaigns has proved time and again that emotive brands are better positioned to behave authentically, meaningfully, and humanly – and as a result, better positioned to thrive. No matter if you are a B2B or a B2C brand, your success hinges on how you connect with the people who matter to your business. These connections must be meaningful. Learn more about the power of emotive branding to power your brand campaign and create a more emotive, and therefore meaningful brand campaign.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

When clients ask us to share our ‘typical’ brand strategy process, we are careful to respond that there is no typical process as all client needs truly are different. The right-for-this-client scope of work comes as a result of a deep process of inquiry into our clients’ circumstances, budget tolerance, depth and expertise of team, and an assessment of what we think they will need to really make their brand perform in the market. Invariably, the question comes, “what about messaging, do you guys do that?” Indeed, what about messaging? A classic component of the strategy line-up, we’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about this deliverable of late.

Messaging, also referred to as Messaging Framework, Messaging Grid, or Messaging Platform, is classically a compendium of messages, written in plain-speak (i.e. not in Brand Voice), designed to translate the core strategic tenets of the brand positioning into relevant and motivating messages for each of the brand’s core audiences (current and prospective customers, partners, employees, etc.). Sometimes, each message will be accompanied by a ‘message pod’—a sample piece of copy, written in Brand Voice, to help a client understand how this message would actually execute in situ.

Why are Messaging Frameworks useful?

What’s great about the Messaging deliverable is that it takes strategy out of a Keynote (or PowerPoint, as the case may be) and demonstrates in real, marketing-jargon-free words what the ideas actually mean in practice. The deliverable goes a long way to take theory into practice and also show how versatile the idea is in its ability to be relevant and motivating for a variety of audiences. A seeming ‘score,’ but to be honest, we’re wondering if this is really the most useful tool for our clients.

When are Messaging Frameworks not what the doctor ordered?

Messaging Frameworks, while noble in intent, can sometimes end up DOA. There are a few reasons we’ve seen this happen. In some cases, our clients have a robust team dedicated to writing content. These teams are well-equipped to take Messaging and turn it into copy and content that extends and enhances their existing messaging. However, for many companies, this is simply not the case. Content is cranked out by all kinds of people, not necessarily writers, and trying to take messaging into copy can feel like a herculean task. Similarly, younger organizations, especially tech companies, are not well-positioned to write content that sits above product descriptions, features, and benefits. For them, brand is a new language and often the reason they’ve turned to a branding firm for help. Figuring out how to infuse their heavily product-focused content with brand messages is simply not in their skill set. Or in their timelines.

What’s a better option?

We’ve been asking ourselves how we can better meet our clients’ needs by giving them content they can actually use. The answer turns out to be not a Messaging Framework at all. The fact of the matter is, there are a variety but not infinite number of touchpoints that are suited for brand messaging. Rather than developing a framework of messages that must then be matched with a need and then recast in Brand Voice, we are asking our clients to tell us exactly what they need from the get-go. A sparkling new “About” section for your website? Check. We can do that. We know who the audience is and we know what key ideas we want to convey to them. We’ve got the Brand Voice down. Easy. How about a blurb for your LinkedIn profile? A sales outreach email? A CEO announcement to employees? PR boilerplate? Check. Check. Check and check.

It’s a new world. Time is money. Brands are erected in months, not years. We are increasingly helping our clients get right to the point with brand-led content they can use out of the gate. There may still be utility for a Messaging Framework for large, distributed companies with plenty of writers with time on their hands. But from our perspective, brand-led, ready as-is content is the way to go.

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

The Next Frontier for Employer Brands: Healthy Behavior Change

Posted on by Carol Emert

At Emotive Brand, we’ve seen a jump over the last year in clients seeking help with employee behavior change. Better brand behavior isn’t the focus. Instead, organizations are actually trying to help their people live happier and healthier work and personal lives.

It’s exciting to see companies living out their employer brands through a greater commitment to their people, and to see them authentically rewarded with more trust and loyalty.

Several trends have brought us to this point, starting with greater competitiveness in recruiting – especially in Silicon Valley, which seems to be innovating the employee-employer relationship as fast as technology these days.

Other factors include better neuroscientific insight into the mechanics of behavior change coupled with proven successes, especially in the area of health. And putting all of that theory into action are new digital tools that can monitor, measure, and support healthy habit formation over time.

From our vantage point at the intersection of brand and business, we’ve identified four best practices for successful behavior change.

1. Open the door with a powerful creative idea

You can chuck a new benefits program over the fence through an email and a new section on your HR page.  Or you can really engage employees through a strategic internal campaign wrapped in a powerful creative idea.

To get to an idea that works, you need to deeply understand your people. How they perceive the problem. Their barriers to adoption – both functional and emotional. What their ideal end state looks like. The language that resonates with them. The cultural context in which they live and work.

Connecting the dots between these data points will provide the emotional insight that informs your messaging. This insight and the resulting creative idea should create a siren’s call that’s so true and powerful, your people open up to it instinctively.

2. Make behavior change activity visible

Once you have peoples’ attention, they’ll be more drawn to a new program if they can see others participating. A sense of momentum triggers both FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and a genuine desire to be part of a collective action.

Think of the poor chump who is the first to give a standing ovation after a performance. Standing alone feels incredibly vulnerable – and foolish if nobody joins in. But once the standing O gains momentum and most people are doing it, the vulnerability shifts to the few people left sitting. A moment ago they were a regular part of the crowd. Now they appear either mean-spirited or clueless.

This principle, called social norming, is classically illustrated by this video of a lone Dancing Guy who convinces a whole hillside of picnickers to stand up and boogie.

For organizations, social norming points to the importance of seeding a new behavior change program with high-profile early adopters. Then make their activity visible, ideally both through external markers like a progress-tracking exhibition or swag, and digitally through workplace social networks, apps, or an intranet ticker showing an ever-growing number of participants.

3. Reward small actions and accomplishments

Gamification has exploded with the proliferation of apps promoting wholesome behaviors, from exercise to saving money to learning a language. Congratulatory badges and notifications have become expected bread crumbs down the path of behavior change.

Employers can leverage this trend by offering consistent, step-by-step rewards and incentives to get people started on a new behavior and then keep them on the path of progress. In addition to digital gamification, rewards can include personal recognition, financial incentives, and perks – whatever feels most true to the employer brand.

4. Break down big challenges

Sometimes behavior change is difficult because mastery requires an intimidating amount to learn or do. The sheer number of topics to master or actions to take can be paralyzing. Financial planning is one example. Losing 70 pounds through diet and exercise is another.

There are two ways to take the intimidation out of behavior change. One is to break down each step into pieces that feel doable. The second is to start with what’s easy. For example, someone might find it hard to create a financial plan that addresses all of their life goals. But starting with something that’s inherently rewarding, like saving toward a vacation, can open the door to a broader conversation.

If the process is then laid out in simple steps, ideally reinforced with a system of rewards, there’s a better chance of an employee getting all the way to the end.

A new frontier for employer brands

Behavior change is hard. Historically, it’s been a lonely endeavor. But we believe organizations can change all that by following our simple blueprint: Harness the power of your community. Break down big challenges into the doable. Offer motivating incentives. And deliver it all through inspiring communications.

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

Reducing Stigma Through Branding: A Moral Dilemma

Posted on by Chris Ames

Anti-Stigma Campaigns Need Authenticity

Inauthenticity is the Achilles heel of purposeful brands. More than ever, people gravitate toward companies that radiate transparency and accountability. We laud brands that shift our perception to break down stigmas. However, if these sensitive topics are clumsily handled, the backlash is harsh and swift. Failing to sell a luxury item is one thing. But misrepresenting a sensitive topic for financial gain? That’s another.

Nowadays, it seems hardly a week goes by without a public apology in response to a tone-deaf branding effort. So, how does a brand discover if it’s equipped to tackle an anti-stigma campaign?

Most people have trouble holding two ideas in their head at the same time, especially if the ideas are contradictory. It’s even harder for brands. Anytime a company puts an object out into the world – a branding campaign, an ad, a tweet – two ideas are presented:

1) The story of the object
2) The story of the brand

When it comes to the tricky world of branding for hot-button issues like awareness, social justice, or reducing stigma, audiences must reconcile these two stories.

What’s Your Brand Promise?

We’ve said it before, but at its best, a brand is a promise delivered. It informs people what they can come to expect from your products and services. Furthermore, it differentiates your offering from your competitors. A brand promise doesn’t materialize out of thin air. You should derive this from the intersection of who you are, who you aspire to be, and who people perceive you as.

Above all, does it make sense for you to be telling this story? Are your ideals and outcomes aligned with this cause? Or are you hoping to draft off the zeitgeist?

Storytelling Helps Reduce Cognitive Dissonance

Take the example of Pepsi versus Heineken. We have two beverages attempting to tackle big issues like systemic racism, transgender rights, and climate change.

In what could only be described as cultural drafting, Pepsi sprinkled in Black Lives Matter imagery into their ad with no real rhyme or reason. Unexplainably, it ends with a supermodel giving a police officer a soda.

In contrast, Heineken took something true about their product – people discuss complicated matters over beer – and transformed a bottle into an opportunity to dispel stigma through conversation.

The Specific Is Universal

Recently, we helped a global technology company address mental health in the workplace. There was no cognitive dissonance in their mission, so the question became: how do we approach such a large issue?

In the tech world, language shifts toward the hyperbolic. Given that approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience mental health issues each year, it would have been easy for us to lean towards big, universal messaging.

The only problem is, stigma isn’t always that overt. Often, it exists because a shadowy old idea has been allowed to live unchallenged in someone’s mind. As a result, a strong stigma strategy focuses less on the stigma itself and more on creating familiarity through education and the common stories of other people via empathy and compassion.

So, we created a way for employees to connect with each other, share their personal journeys, and access mental health resources. By zooming in on the authentic stories of individuals, we could address a larger narrative without coming off as preachy or dogmatic.

Reducing Stigma Is Not a One-Off Campaign

Lastly, nothing builds public trust like a proven track record. It’s easy to support a trending cause. But reducing stigma is not a one-off campaign, it’s a long-term commitment – and we can help you keep that promise.

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

Building a Brand Awareness Campaign: How to Get It Right

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish World?

The brand world follows the food chain – little fish look up to the big fish, everyone wants to be on top, and low visibility is often equated with eventual extinction. Every brand wants to be the next Nike or Apple, right? The thing is that those big brands – those top-of-mind, always relevant brands that even your grandma knows about – are rare. And if you’re a brand that’s still trying to build awareness, simply imitating what they do isn’t always the right strategy.

Brand Awareness Issues

At Emotive Brand, we’ve worked with a lot of brands who share a common frustration. They’ve put so much into building a business, product, solution, service – endless hours, heart, and soul. And it’s great. The problem is that no one knows about it. No one understands the true value that brand can offer, or no one seems to care. That’s where an awareness campaign comes in to help.

Creating a Brand Awareness Campaign

Brands look to an awareness campaign to drive awareness, spark engagement, and ultimately, foster loyalty. If you get your awareness campaign right (it’s hard!) your brand and business can grow in meaningful and impactful ways. Here’s our advice.

1. Turn Your Audience into Your Advisor

You don’t have to have millions of loyal fans lining up at 3 a.m. for your latest product to know who your brand-lovers are or what they care about. As long as you find someone who loves your brand, you can learn and gather deep insights about how your brand fits into their lives. And from there, you can find people just like them – people who have the potential to fall in love with your brand.

2. Locate and Listen to Your Brand’s Heart

Getting to the core brand truths that will drive your campaign requires getting to the heart of why people care about you – both functionally and emotionally. Although most brands focus on the functional, if you really want to grow your brand, understanding what emotional role your brand plays in people’s lives has unparalleled value. These insights will inform how you build a relationship with your target audience moving forward.

3. Create Consistency, Create Trust

Once you identify your target audience and why they should care, you can figure out how to meaningfully connect with them and stand out in a way that consistently reinforces those key truths. A campaign is a perfect opportunity to introduce your brand in a way that resonates and draws people in. Setting the tone for the future, you can begin to build consistency and trust with the people who matter to your business.

4. Timing Is Everything

A mistake lots of brands make when creating an awareness campaign is generalizing time. How much does coffee matter to you at 10 p.m.? Have you thought about your car insurance today? A lot of brands think of themselves as lower-involvement brands because people don’t care about them all the time. But what about 7 a.m. when you have to get to work? Or those moments just after a fender bender? What really matters is finding those higher-involvement moments and pinpointing when they occur. When you isolate the occasions when people care the most, you can recreate campaign moments in which people will be most emotionally poised to connect with you. This helps make it real and motivates people to take action.

5. Nothing Beats Authenticity

People can smell inauthenticity from miles away. As you’re establishing yourself in the market and gaining awareness, it’s super important that you be authentic and true to who you are. The way you reach out to people needs to ring true to your core truths. Don’t grab people by imitating the big players. Grab people by being particularly emotionally relevant to them and genuine about what your company is really about.

Lower Awareness Brands May Not Be at a Disadvantage  

Being poised to grow, ready to exceed expectations, and eager to connect with people is a powerful position to be in. Many brands would do anything for a blank slate – another opportunity to make a perfect first impression.

Keep this in mind: while those big brands enjoy their position at the top, most people don’t feel delight in aligning with a massive company that everyone already loves. What many people crave is the thrill of discovery. Like stumbling upon a great unknown band or artist, there is a joy in unearthing a great unknown brand.

So focus on leveraging your position into an opportunity for people to explore and try something new. A lot of our clients struggle to see the tremendous emotional impact their small (but mighty) brand already has. As an agency, it’s our role to bring this potential to the surface, find those passionate brand advocates, and unearth the powerful core truths that will drive a campaign that can sky rocket brand awareness.

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

Nostalgic Brands are Capturing Hearts and Minds

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

A Nostalgic Age

As technologies continue to innovate and find new modes of connection, businesses need to move faster than the speed of light. But while moving forward is key to business success, many brands are looking backwards…and with success. Nostalgia is, no doubt, in. Bath & Body Works just announced the reintroduction of the old scents of the ’90s. The Sacramento Kings have embraced nostalgia with a new logo. Urban Outfitter’s is full of Polaroids, records, and retro cassette players. TV networks are bringing back ’90s favorites like Boy Meets World and Full House, which remind viewers of an age when scheduling a TV date with your neighbor was the norm. #TBT (throw back Thursday) continues to be one of the most trending and repetitively used hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. Even Facebook reminds us of what we were doing 10 years ago, today.

The Financial Review’s conversation around this current “Age of Nostalgia” explains it as a backlash against the fast-paced technology and the economic and political uncertainty that has left people feeling anxious about the future. The millennial generation, in particular, is longing for the familiar: the products and brands that remind them of growing up and that elicit feelings of safety, comfort, and happiness. There’s a yearning to bring back the “good old days”. The success of these brand campaigns demonstrates the power of nostalgia: this strong and sentimental longing for the past. People are literally buying into the past.

But if a brand is rooted in nostalgia, how is it positioned to evolve? Successful brands need to use nostalgic triggers to help them progress, while capturing and re-capturing the hearts of their audience. And here’s how:

Short-Term Campaigns

Nostalgia shouldn’t be a long-term strategy. Oftentimes, the most successful brand campaigns are short-lived – little reminders of a brand’s beginning and how far it has come. They make people remember why they fell in love with the brand in the first place and how that love has evolved. These campaigns conjure up happy memories that keep people loyal and connected to the brand.

Crowd-Pleasers

Nostalgic campaigns don’t have to reach the masses. Many nostalgic brand campaigns have been most successful by targeting the millennial generation. Much of the power of nostalgic campaigns lies in how tailored their meanings are for a specific audience. Everyone has different memories associated with the brand from the past, and these independent and meaningful experiences are what make nostalgia hold such impact. Millennials are often the most connected, owning the most devices and demanding speed in every form of media. So these feelings of a slower, simpler times are often felt more acutely within this audience. At the same time, the success of a nostalgic campaign has the most potential within the millennial generation thanks to their connectivity to social media. If anything is going to go viral, millennials need to be part of it.

Rely on Established Brand Equity

In the end, most brands can’t rely on nostalgia alone. Nostalgia is a complex emotion that has to fit into the way the brand already wants to make people feel. Nostalgic triggers should add to the brand’s emotional impact, but not necessarily replace it. The most successful nostalgic campaigns are done by brands that already have established brand equity. It’s not possible to hearken to the past if that past isn’t well known, recognized, and remembered with fondness. Brands that look to the past need something of value to look back on.

Emotional Storytelling

At Emotive Brand, we know that emotive brands thrive. No matter your audience, people want to buy into brands that make them feel something. Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion, some would argue, one of the most powerful of emotions. It is also a complex emotion. Adding feelings of nostalgia into your brand story can make it more powerful, personal, and meaningful to the people who truly matter to your brand’s success. These brand champions are the ones that make your story their own. Nostalgic campaigns are often successful because they hold such strong emotional impact. They make people remember the past with joy, delight in old memories, and remind them of the “old days,” and these positive feelings are quickly associated with and connected to your brand.

The most successful nostalgic campaigns use the past to make people feel joy at remembering those times and simultaneously excited and ready to invest in the future of the brand. They take their audiences on a journey with them, and people delight in the brand as a result. A brand’s nostalgic triggers helps it connect in meaningful, momentous, and memorable ways to the people who matter to their business: past, present, and future.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.