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Why Purpose-Led Brands Drive Business Results

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

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”

Investing in Brand Management?

A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused, and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon. Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry.

A brand strategy will take all that value and put it to work in new ways. It will elevate the importance and relevance of what is already known and believed about your business. It can also add many new reasons, both rational and emotional,that will create stronger bonds with customers and make your business more attractive to prospects. Finally, a well-constructed brand strategy can be used to unite and motivate your employees.

When your business has a focused brand strategy, all its working pieces generate increased sales, more preference, loyalty, and appeal for your offering and greater profits to your bottom line.

Three key advantages of Brand Management

1. Greater appeal and differentiation 

Your brand serves as a magnet, drawing prospects to your offerings. Buyers see more difference between your offering and those of your competitors, and act in your favor. Your brand stands out in an engaging way in the “me-too” world of your industry, and beats back your competitors.

2. Improved loyalty and customer retention 

Your brand works as a glue, binding customers to your brand so they stay with you, grow with you, and tell others about your brand. It helps you identify your best customers and to direct special efforts against them. There’s far greater ROI in keeping an existing customer than recruiting a new one, and a strong brand idea can optimize your marketing budget.

3. Employee engagement and alignment

Your brand works as a “North Star” that you’re employees follow. As a result, employees feel more engaged, work harder for your brand’s success, and become great ambassadors for your brand. And when recruits feel the energy of your brand, and see the results your workplace generates, they are more likely to join your business.

Today’s most successful leaders embrace brand strategy as part of their overall business strategy. By setting concrete brand goals, and developing strategies and tactics to  achieve them, they have seen their brands grow and prosper.

Arm your business strategy with a stronger brand. Develop a brand strategy that takes everything you do today to a new level. Then use your brand to win.

To learn more about the power of brand strategy, brand differentiation,and brand management please download our white paper Transforming Your Brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Does your Business need an Updated Brand Narrative?

Does your brand need a Brand Narrative?

Your brand does if it faces any of these situations:

  • Differentiation: Does your brand have a sober, unexciting, or blurry identity in an increasingly competitive and perhaps commoditized market? Are you able to cut through the clutter in ways that matter?
  • Growth: Is it getting harder to increase market share, drive sales, and improve profit? Are new markets and products growing quickly enough?
  • Talent: Is it getting increasingly difficult for your brand to recruit the talent you need? Is your top talent leaving? Are competitor’s hiring the talent you hoped to hire?
  • Engagement: Are your employees aligned and heading in the same direction? Is your brand being held back with issues around collaboration, innovation, and loyalty?
  • Complexity: Is your business growing rapidly in both size and scope? Have you just acquired a new company? Do you have disparate product lines and target audiences? Are your brand and workplace behaviors inconsistent and counter-productive?

Of course, a strong Brand Narrative will also help your brand even if it’s operating from a position of strength. Successful brands can further establish their preeminence, forge far stronger and harder to break bonds with both customers, prospects, and employees, and increase the perceived distance between themselves and their near competitors.

A good Brand Narrative adds a bright North Star to your brand strategy. It helps you create brand experiences that change the way people feel about your brand, based on the emotional rewards of your brand promise and the way you strive to make people feel in every interaction.

To learn more about the Emotive Branding Methodology, please download the paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

What it Means to be a Meaningfully Different Brand

Youngme Moon teaches business at Harvard and is the author of “Different – Escaping The Competitive Herd“.

In her closing she points to three characteristics of the brands of tomorrow – as they are driven to differentiate in order to succeed.

Here we summarize:

  1. “They will offer something that is hard to come by…restraint will be the new desire; whisper can be the new shout; there will always be a place for brands offering something that is hard to come by.”
     
  2. “They will reflect a commitment to a big idea…which is to say they won’t just be different in a litle way, they’ll be different in a big way; I would say the brands of tomorrow will be the ones that embrace this, even as they take that sharp left down the unpaved road.” 
     
  3. “They will be intensely human…which is to say they wil be conceived by individuals who are acutely sensitive to the complexities of the human spirit.”

In her book, Ms Moon is focused on the role of marketing and marketers. But the meaningfully different brand won’t (and can’t) come out of the marketing department. 

Continue reading “What it Means to be a Meaningfully Different Brand”

Does Your Business Need a Brand Narrative?

Here we explore the brand narrative as a key element of brand strategy, by explaining what constitutes a brand narrative, demonstrating how it supports the overall brand strategy, and showing the brand scenarios which call for a strong brand narrative.

What is a brand narrative?

A brand narrative is a central building block of a meaningful brand strategy. It is built upon the insights and information gleaned during the kickoff process, with a particular focus on the business-related shifts the brand seeks to make.

Continue reading “Does Your Business Need a Brand Narrative?”