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Tag: Brand Differentiation

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What Got You Here

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences – prospects, customers, and recruits – who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business – inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team, but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy – making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and may even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture

For many high-growth companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate for tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing

Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many high-growth company will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning

Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience

Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For high-growth companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what are they looking to solve, and how can you create messaging to speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why

It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition

In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition – inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Corporate Narrative

Investing in developing a corporate narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your corporate narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets

Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically lead redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency. 

Brand Growth in a Saturated, Competitive Market: Yes, It’s Possible

Posted on by Shannon Caulfield

Brand Growth Despite Growing Competition

Brands saturate our world. They are all looking to innovate faster, compete harder, and disrupt bigger. Why? Competition is tough – from both emerging and established brands. This forces companies to always be on their toes.

But competition isn’t always a bad thing.

Competition is what gives brands the motivation to do better and be better. If your market is crowded, it doesn’t mean your employees must work 18-hour days or that you have to outspend on advertising. Instead, what you really need to do is work smarter.

Here are some ways you can grow your brand even when you’re not the only player on the field.

 

Growing Awareness in a New Category: Make Competitors Your Allies

It might sound destructive, but partnering with competitors can actually benefit your brand – if you do it right. This is an especially good tactic when you compete in a new category. And you’ll likely find willing partners. In fact, 74% of companies are open to supporting opponents as a means for building brand or category awareness. Take kombucha, the drink of choice for Silicon Valley and hipsters everywhere. During the category’s early stages, the awareness rate was only 20%. Companies such as Health-Ade and KeVita went to tea festivals together and handed out samples of their products to spark buzz around the fermented drink. They came together with a shared mission of raising awareness and realized they could make a bigger impact together than separately. In turn, each brand was able to grow over time as the category grew into one of high demand.

Growing into New Segments and Channels: Take a Leap into Something New

If you aren’t ready to join forces with the competition, a co-branding partnership may be the perfect way to step out of your category’s predefined box. American Express and Foursquare, both players in the payments industry, leveraged each other’s reach to solve a unique motivation. American Express used Foursquare’s platform to offer discounts to their cardholders, reach a younger, tech-centric audience, and expand their merchant network. Foursquare leveraged the Amex partnership to push more users to shop via their phones, increasing user traffic. This cooperation gave each brand the data to reach new market segments, expand into new channels and, ultimately, elevated each brand’s position.

Growing Brand Loyalty: More Rewards, More Brand Love

Financial success does not equate to long-term loyalty. The modern-day consumer demands that brands deliver personalized experiences. Loyalty programs, in particular, connect brands with consumers and gives them a reason to stay. When AAA entered the market, for example, their primary value was emergency assistance. While this offering has been well received in the market, AAA established an even greater reason for their users to continue using the platform by offering third-party discounts and rewards. That value goes well-beyond a jump start.

Think Creatively to Grow

If you feel the only way you can compete is with expensive ads and promotions, think again. It takes a little creativity and effort to try unconventional tactics but, we promise, it will be worth it. And we’re happy to help.

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

Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Category As A Frame Of Reference

A brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. It will determine the points of parity the brand has to meet in order to be considered a legitimate player, and highlight opportunities to differentiate. As such, your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, a frame of reference is absolutely essential, get it wrong and your difference may be ignored: “Framing provides a mental structure that shapes the way we see the world. If a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored.”

It’s human nature to want to fit things into a category. The more innovative and disruptive your offering is, the more it needs a frame that people can relate to. If your brand can’t easily be defined, people often push it to the margins and leave it there. This is because its complexity is easier to ignore than to figure out.

People hold on tightly to their established understandings of what a category is and what it offers. Choosing the right category is about defining, or framing, what people are buying in such a way that your value shines through. The goal is to identify the best category that will help your customers “get” your value and make it relevant to them, while putting your competitors at a disadvantage.

When Your Brand Category Isn’t Serving Your Brand

If you are looking to grow your business, make sure the brand category you align with is still the right one for the brand. For some brands, the category they originally aligned with stops serving their needs. If you meet any of the following criteria, it might be time to break out of your current category and become a new breed of category creators developing new markets with innovative technology and products.

  • You are altering your strategic direction and your business model is shifting.
  • Your product or offering is misunderstood by prospects and partners.
  • You have created a significant innovation or proprietary advantage.
  • Competition is stifling your ability to grow.
  • Your current category prevents your key differences from standing out as ‘must haves.’
  • Your category is in crisis or has fallen out of favor.
  • You are ready to extend your brand beyond current customer segments.

It’s Time to Create a New Brand Category

Creating a new brand category might be the best way to position your brand for success. But, creating a new category is incredibly hard. For most companies, it’s hard enough to explain what your product does and how it’s different from your competitors. And the task of explaining and defending a new product category can be too much for many companies to take on.

However, the rewards of creating a new category are great. High0companies that created their own category accounted for 74% of incremental market capitalization growth from 2009 to 2011. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market.

Category creators must be fearless and confident in their ability to lead the category, build momentum quickly, and maintain a reputation as the category leader over time.  Before creating a new category, consider whether your business has the resources and time available. Don’t just define a new category for your brand, but brand the category itself. In the end, creating a new category can be transformational for your brand and business if you do it well. Look for the best practices for defining a new category and what mistakes to avoid in our upcoming post.

Category Creators

This is the 1st in a series. Check to How to Create a New Brand Category, Naming a New Brand Category, and Launching a New Brand Category by downloading our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies.

Brand Differentiation: Where Do You Even Start?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Differentiation

In B2B marketing, creating brand differentiation is a critical output of all marketers whether you are managing a B2B or B2C brand.

When your brand is truly and meaningfully differentiated, it works as a magnet to attract new customers and employees, as a glue that keeps people loyal, and as a warm glow that means people always come back for more. So how do you differentiate your brand?

The problem for most brands is that they have yet to find a distinct place in the whirlwind of modern commerce. These brands are being buffeted by the winds of change and the waves of disruption. Every day they go further astray, lost in the vast “Sea of Commodity”.

And what do they find, if they actively seek out a point of brand differentiation that is based only on what they do and how they do it? Often, they don’t find an inch of difference between what they do and what their competitors do. They find themselves speaking the same language as everyone else. They use the same visual language. And realize that they market themselves in a carbon copy fashion.

Start with “Why”

The modern answer to the brand differentiation quandary lies in the question, “Why?”. As Simon Sinek puts it,

“People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it”.

This is increasingly true and with little wonder. Think for a moment how difficult it is from your brand’s perspective. Now, think about how difficult it is from your customer’s perspective.

All of us are inundated with marketing hype and claims. Not only in your category, but in every aspect of our lives. Our natural response is to turn off as much of the noise as we can. We do this by applying filters. Brands work as filters when they help us latch onto something important and meaningful. Once that connection is made, we can then forget about the rest.

But if your widgets are the same as the next guy’s, it’s going to take something truly significant to become the most trusted and respected widget seller.

How do you define your “Why”?

The answer is to explore and define your brand’s “why”. Deep in what you do and how you do it, lies a number of truths about your intentions and outcomes.  These positive character attributes can fuel the thinking that will lead your brand toward meaningful (and profitable) differentiation.

By giving your brand a “North Star” to aim for, you elevate the spirit, ambition, and drive of your brand and everyone connected to it. A purposeful brand promise is the best way to forge your brand’s North Star. When well crafted, and built through the principles of empathy, purpose and feelings, a promise allows everyone vital to the brand’s success to see the ideal it sets as their own and enables them to be an active part of it.

When this brand promise is translated into new forms of behavior, both for the brand as an entity, and for the people in the workplace, amazing and differentiated things start to happen. In the effort to fulfill on the brand’s promise, a new mood and spirit drives business relationships, product development, marketing campaigns, customer service, etc.

  • Senior management makes more aligned and purposeful decisions.
  • Managers create more productive and gratifying work situations.
  • Product designers stretch their skills and imagination.
  • Marketing teams build consistent brand experiences and stronger messaging.
  • Customer service teams work with greater empathy and compassion.

All these changes push your brand in the direction of its brand promise. As a result, your brand, business, and culture will thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy this post on Storytelling for Demand Generation

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Naming a New Brand Category is Harder Than it Looks

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Failed category labels are laughable. Before there were snowboards, there was snurfers. PDA phones preempted smartphones. Charga-plates rolled out before credit cards took their place. It seems obvious now why each current category name is so much stronger than its predecessor. But missing the mark with category naming is a mistake that’s easy to make.

In our last post about how to define a new category, we left off with what is most commonly considered the fun part of strategy: naming. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve identified that your existing category isn’t serving your brand’s needs. You’re ready to make a shift and have accepted the risk of creating a new category. And, you’ve appropriated the time and budget necessary to do so.

What’s in a name?

Category names make it easy for people to familiarize themselves with products and brands. They help people make choices and create loyalty. They set expectations about why brands belong. When a category name resonates, it paves the way for brands to develop meaningful connections with people.

When developing a new category, it’s tempting to come up with a catchy, quirky, or unique category name. Everyone wants to differentiate and make a mark. It can seem, understandably, that developing a category name that grabs attention will help your brand stand out too. But that’s not the case. Names that aren’t recognizable create confusion and uncertainty for customers. When the category name isn’t immediately clear, the brands and products it represents become muddied in those waters.

As we described in a previous post, people need context to grab onto something new. The framework your category creates sets the stage for your innovative product to become the category leader. But that also depends on the name being something that people understand without explanation. What the heck is a snurfer? No one knew. But snowboard is easy. Anyone who surfs or skates immediately gets it. And, it was no coincidence that when Burton coined “snowboard” they were going after surfers and skaters as a target audience.

Simplicity is Key

When it’s time to create your new category name, choose one that’s simple and recognizable. There are a few ways to go about it:

  • Two Known Words: Credit Card, Data Center, Sports Drink
  • Compound Name: Automobile, Bicycle, Laptop
  • Derive a New Word from an Existing Word: Browser, E-commerce

The timing of a category launch should influence which direction the name should go. If your product is truly innovative — with nothing on the market that compares — the category name should be a riff off an existing product. In this case, using two known words or joining them into one would be ideal. But if your brand is joining a group of products that are currently on the market, the category should confirm and validate behavior (people were already browsing the internet so coining ‘browser’ made sense).

When there isn’t a dominant category name, different labels make it difficult for any brand to gain traction. Most people stay within a comfort zone and too many options lead people to ignore the category all together. A name represents the ‘rules of membership’ — the specific characteristics that the products within the category must have in order to belong to the category. Once a name achieves dominance, people know what to expect and the brands within its umbrella follow suit. In our next post on defining a category, we’ll share tips on how to get buy-in on your new category name with important users, innovators, and industry commentators to help ensure a successful roll-out.

This is the 3rd in a series. Check out When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and what goes into Launching a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Disruptive Brands: How to Challenge the Status Quo and Succeed

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive Brands Are In

We’ve talked some about disruptive brands, why challenging the status quo and presenting information in a fresh way is an important driver of successful businesses today. Millennials value disruption more than any generation before. Many brands and businesses today are thriving because they aren’t afraid to do something new and make a splash. Companies everywhere are trying to figure out how to be the next Uber, AirBnB, or Amazon of their industry – innovating faster than their competition, hiring the most creative people out there, and doing something that’s never been done before.

Innovation and creativity are becoming more and more valued by employers today. Businesses realize they need new perspectives and people who are unafraid of bringing new ideas to the table, in order to drive their business into the future.

The Challenge of Always Challenging

Although disruptive brands are at the center of much of the media around successful business today, it’s not an easy job being a truly disruptive brand or business. Challenging the status quo and succeeding at it is a challenge in and of itself.

A new, change-driving idea isn’t enough. You have to actually make that idea come to life, and that’s a huge task. There are a lot of disruptive companies with innovative ideas who simply don’t make it.

For some, it’s overwhelming and seemingly impossible to prioritize ideas – focus isn’t appropriately distributed and impact gets diluted as a result. Succeeding at being a disruptor requires intense resiliency. Timing is always a challenge, as is getting others on board. Some visionaries have trouble seeing the value of incremental change and quick wins, coupled with their larger vision and greater creative energy. Others underestimate the importance of having a strong and unified team to make their vision a reality.

In the end, successful disruption requires not only a desire to challenge the status quo, but a clear vision, comprehensive research, planning, backing, and endless perseverance.

So successfully challenging the status quo hinges on:

1. Balancing vision with the now

Implementation is hard work, even with a clear vision of what’s ahead. It’s important for disruptors to remember the value of incremental change and quick wins. In the end, it’s all about balancing long-term goals with short-term practicalities. Your larger vision should be what drives everything. But disruption doesn’t happen overnight. It takes planning and prudence to make it work. Big ideas need small ideas to back them up (and sometimes, check to see if they are even feasible). Big steps and big splashes need preparation.

2. Building a stable, resilient team

Balancing these two ways of thinking – small and big – requires a team of diverse thinkers and doers. Because disruption is all about change, building a cohesive, supportive, and aligned team is key. In fact, disruptive thinking itself often thrives in collaborative settings filled with different perspectives and ways of seeing. You need people who are willing to challenge each other – different backgrounds, different strengths, and yet a unifying charge to create and produce change.

Working as a team helps advance ideas for change. When a group feels like they have joint ownership over an idea, it’s more likely to become a reality with everyone rallied behind it. Even someone who challenges the idea can bring up important flaws and help frame the concept for people who might doubt its impact.

3. Knowing your market inside and out

One of the main challenges of behaving as a disruptive business, is the entrance of new competition. When a new idea catches on – and it often does like wildfire – you find others piggy-backing on some version of your idea. Suddenly, you don’t stand out as much. Think Uber and Lyft. Being there first can be both a benefit and a barrier, and differentiating and continuing to say something that resonates and keeps you ahead of the curve hinges on knowing your market inside and out. How can you continue to offer something different? How can you continue to challenge the status quo?

In-depth research and awareness of your audiences and potential competitors is key. Being one step ahead of the game can go a long way. And staying fully informed is key to making sure you have the right timing with the right people – a large part of the equation.

4. Fostering a culture formed on disruption

It’s important to consider how you can maintain the disruptive spirit of your business, even years down the road. Building a culture that is open to fresh perspectives, change, and embraces people who ask questions, challenge ideas, and show an innate curiosity, is key.

Disruptors are often restless. If you want to be a truly disruptive brand, you have to embrace this restlessness. Allow employees to find novel ways of creating, thinking, and learning. New information always drives new perspectives. Be transparent and create a culture of trust where people feel comfortable challenging each other and voicing their opinions in constructive, productive ways. Be open to seemingly bad ideas as well as the good ones. Work with each individual to make sure their voice is heard – helping them learn, grow, and continue to challenge even their own thinking.

Keep Disrupting…

At the end of the day, being an authentic disruptor isn’t dependent on a single idea, product, or breakthrough. True disruptors and truly disruptive companies continue to think and are, in essence, constantly and continually disrupting.

These companies build their entire culture around innovation and new thinking. They constantly work to recreate the chaotic, creative, disruptive, and innovative spirit that led them together in the first place.

Companies who continually challenge the status quo are never satisfied. These brands and businesses are open to change and thrive off of it. The status quo is always changing, and with their oath to challenge it, so are they.

Competitors might (and most likely, will) enter and adapt a version of their original idea. But the winners will always be one step ahead – never part-time, never half-in, never done. True disruption is about constantly shaking things up – challenging even the status quo you yourself have created.

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

Read our recent post on Messaging for Disruptive Brands

Discourse Analysis: A Powerful Tool That Ensures Your Strategy’s Success

Posted on by Taylor Standlee

Missing a Piece of the Picture

A powerful brand strategy that drives business forward requires more than an understanding of what customers say motivates them to engage with your brand or your competitors. It requires understanding the larger cultural forces at play that shape those same motivations and comparisons. That’s where discourse analysis enters the conversation.

For example, in our work with a major cyber security company, analyzing the discourses at play revealed shifts in the larger security conversations happening in our culture. We discovered we were moving from conversations of protection and attention, to those of proactive prevention and accelerated detection, shifting the security landscape from technical to more strategic.

By understanding the larger cultural shifts at play, discourse analysis can help marketers and branders tie their brands to something larger than just products or offerings. What they are really buying into becomes apparent – something more meaningful and resonant in peoples’ lives.

So What Is Discourse Analysis Exactly?  

People’s knowledge of a brand is constructed through the discourses – conversations and communications – that surround the brand, the category, the competition, and the larger cultural context. When these discourses shift, so do assessments of brands and their relevance.

Discourse analysis isn’t a new concept. It’s a proven approach from anthropology and media studies that brand strategists have refined and honed to support brand strategy today.

At Emotive Brand, we use discourse analysis to shed light on how and why people think and feel the way they do about your brand, products, category, and competitors. With a clear picture of the discourses at play, no-go areas are revealed, promising possibilities are uncovered, and teams are infused with renewed energy.

The approach is focused on understanding the ways your brand, your competitors, and your category builds meaning and resonance in people’s lives. In the case of cyber security, we learned that the opportunity to reach consumers wasn’t just about offering walls that provided protection, but presenting an entire immune system that could strengthen, flex, and prevent attack before it was even happening. Here you see how discourse analysis can be an ideal method for uncovering fresh and powerful ways to help enhance your brand’s strength.

Discourse Analysis Delivers

Discourse analysis creates a complete and mapped understanding of how your brand – within its competitive landscape – can sustain relevance, stand out, and mean something more significant to the people who matter to your business.

1. Keeping pace with change

Understanding the changing landscape is hard for any business – but failing to understand it inevitably results in missed opportunities. Discourse analysis helps our clients visualize the emerging patterns and existing norms of their category more clearly, while providing a map that can be updated in the future.

The evidence allows brands to see their possibilities in a new light and understand their competitors – perhaps better than the competitors understands themselves. The approach makes the journey easier for brands and businesses today – helping them chart potential directions, realize a vision, avoid pitfalls, and ensure the brand is ready to seize promising opportunities on the horizon.

2. Standing out

Brands and businesses today can’t just say something different, they have to stand for something more significant. This requires understanding both the status quo and the best ways of meaningfully challenging it. And changing the character or intensity of the conversations a brand leads or takes part in can power it in a new direction.

Discourse analysis builds a deep understanding of what the norms are, and why those particular ideas, practices, and values are meaningful to people in the first place. Once people understand the origins of these meanings, they can better tap into their power – challenging today’s norms in inventive ways that help your brand stand above the competition and go against the grain, while not forgetting why you matter to people in the first place. For our cyber security client, they were able to stand out by offering security that meant something different – something more. 

3. Becoming more meaningful

When you have a clearer understanding of the discourses that surround your category, competition, and brand, you can more meaningfully position your brand to compete. Your meaningful aspirations will be better articulated to the people you want to reach. Your culture will come to life. Values you align with will get lived and confirmed every day. And what’s authentically unique about your brand will shine true.

Your business will be positioned to thrive because your brand will reach a new level of meaning that resonates in all the domains that matter to your success. With more authentic meaning, people will be more engaged, more loyal, and your brand will be more trusted.

Discourse Analysis, Here’s How We Do It

Step 1: Identify the basis of competition in your category

This first phase establishes the scope of the analysis. It usually includes key competitors, the larger cultural context for the category, and key target audiences at play, as well as the brand itself.

Step 2: Collect data and organize evidence

This stage is all about gathering the naturally occurring data – the real world evidence needed to analyze how people and groups talk about what’s important to them with regard to your brand and its competitors. This evidence can come in the form of social listening, news and media coverage, consumer reviews, individual conversations, primary research, ads, packaging, promotional materials, etc.

Step 3: Conduct the analysis and uncover patterns  

In this phase, we use a set of proven tools from social science to identify recurring patterns in the evidence. This includes similarities and differences between the ways people relate to key brand benefits, needs, and desires that surround your brand, the competition, and the category.  The key question at this step is: what are the values and perspectives the category, competitors, and brand rely on to construct meaning and how have these developed over time?

This is the stage of deep pattern recognition and mapping. We reveal insights that help your brand discover the biggest opportunities at play – uncovering which ideas and values are not just culturally of the moment, but show the greatest promise for the future.

Because of discourse analysis, our client was able to promise more than just short-term security. They could offer a long-term, sustainable, proactive, accelerated solution for the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

 

Why Purpose-Led Brands Drive Business Results

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

At Emotive Brand, we believe that the root of many business problems is the gap between what the business requires (results) and what people desire (meaning). So when your brand matters to people, they are more likely to do what your brand needs them to do. Operating as a purpose-led brand, business issues become less of an issue because meaning drives results.

Emotive Branding: A Bridge

Through emotive branding, you build a bridge across that gap between results and meaning. And by better balancing the “give and take” of your relationships with people, they are more likely to be open to what you propose, support what you’re trying to achieve, and appreciate the meaning behind what you’re asking them to do.

Here’s why your most pressing business issues today will be less of an issue tomorrow:

1. Brand Differentiation

Emotional meaning is the most compelling differentiator in today’s competitive environment. Yet few brands have woken up to the power of emotionally meaningful connections with people. They continue doing “business as usual” without seeing that beliefs, values, and aspirations of people have evolved. Today, people are looking for ways to create meaning in their lives. People seek out brands that stand up from the crowd and make them feel their lives are more meaningful. They respect, admire, trust, and turn to purpose-led brands.

2. Purchasing Behavior

People love to have choices. They are proactive buyers. They can quickly and easily assess and compare options. They can instantly find the best price. Look-alike products crowd the shelves and catalogs. Google lists thousands of options. TV and web ads vie for attention. But, at the moment of purchase decision, emotion takes over. If people feel there’s something unique and valuable about your brand, that feeling will influence their choices.

3. Price Sensitivity

A strong emotional platform shifts the “what” a person buys away from the purely logical land of comparison shopping and into a place where what one buys is “greater than the sum of the parts”. People seem quite willing to pay a premium if the purchase also comes loaded with emotional meaning.

4. Loyalty and Advocacy

Brands need people who buy again and again; it’s basic economics. Purpose-led brands inspire people to go out of their way in pursuit of their brand. They also turn people into powerful brand promoters who share their enthusiasm and satisfaction with family, friends, colleagues, and strangers on the web. Personal, heartfelt, and meaningful endorsement is far more credible and influential than traditional brand-driven forms of promotion.

5. Internal Alignment and Motivation

Brands are at the mercy of their staff. The most magnificent branding, advertising, publicity, packaging, distribution, reviews, and commentary can be vaporized by a single surly employee. The energy, focus, and dedication of valuable employees can be shattered by an emotionally dead and meaningless workplace. When unified by a clear reason why they are there and how they can make people feel (themselves, colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers, and the communities they serve) employees lift themselves up to the task with purposeful vigor. They move from being reactive to proactive. They collaborate more freely and productively. They shape and manage the way they deal with people so that every exchange is more emotionally meaningful. They find their work gratifying.

6. Social Standing

Regardless of what you make, how you sell it, or who you sell to, your brand has a footprint. Whether it’s a physical building in a community or something virtual, there is an economic, social, and environmental impact from what you do. How that impact is perceived will be clearly different for a person who is emotionally distant from your brand, and someone who finds your brand to be emotionally meaningful. Purpose-led brands never buy an excuse to do wrong things, but they do accrue significant understanding, patience, and compassion should things go wrong.

Purpose-Led Brands Thrive Today

Brands that focus on building a deeper, more emotionally meaningful connection with their key audiences will thrive in today’s world.

Purpose-led brands are better able to address the needs, values, interests, and aspirations of the people who matter to their business. These brands perform better because their emotional impact is reflected at every touchpoint.

Making your brand matter more to people can transform your business and position it for success. Brands rooted in emotion and meaning win big. The business results show it. So behave as a purpose-led brand and reap the benefits.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Startup brands stop leading with features and benefits!

If only more startup brands understood the value of brand strategy and how it could lead them away from leading with features and benefits vs. why the brand matters.

Convincing minds by capturing hearts: the new brand-building approach.

What comes first? The rational decision to take the next step on the path to purchase, or the emotional trigger that gets them started on that path? Aren’t we humans cool? We pride ourselves on our cognitive skills, our ability to weigh pros and cons, and our decision-making power. After all, these factors separate us from other life forms.

We also prefer to emphasize our thoughts because we are able to talk about them, explain them, and defend them. Continue reading “Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate”

How do you differentiate your startup in a crowded category?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Startups in crowded categories should lead with brand.

There are many wake-up calls for the founders of startups. One of the more difficult realizations comes fairly early into your journey; the day you wake up and discover that despite your unique, disruptive offering, you have plenty of company.

When you first started, when you made your investor pitch and got that angel round, you thought you were so far ahead, there was no category to contain you. But while you’ve been heads down, looking for funding, hiring people, grinding out product, and trying to get c Continue reading “How do you differentiate your startup in a crowded category?”