Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Tag: Brand Experiences

Looking to Design Better Brand Experiences? Consider the Potential of Experience Design

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Big Challenges in Branding

As a brand strategy and design agency, we’re deeply immersed with what’s happening in the brand world. Sometimes, we are so focused on building the best solutions for our clients that we have to remind ourselves to take a step back and assess the big-picture challenges facing brands today.

Emotive Brand, did just this and attended the Design Gurus Summit and the Digital Design & Web Innovation Summit in San Francisco. Four days, many talks, panels, and iPad notes later, here’s what David learned:

Nailing experience design is what may make or break a brand moving forward. Read what it is, why it matters, and how to get it right today.

Experience Design Defined for Today

It’s clear that experience design has evolved. Historically, experience design was all about building a single, compelling experience. It was focused and neat. 

Now, experience design is evolving into a way of thinking. Using brand as a compass, experience design can identify and build experiences around differentiated value. This way of thinking considers how all products, services, solutions, and people play a role in delivering that value over time.

Every stage of the customer journey becomes an opportunity to provide further meaning to customers. Complementing innovation, this framework can help brands explore where to push beyond the traditional guardrails. Bringing in the challenge of time, it considers the implications and interdependencies of all touchpoints at all moments.

Why Experience Design Matters: Customers Taking the Driver’s Seat

Brands today are complex eco-systems. What we think of as the original customer journey (something linear, trackable, and controllable) is harder and harder to pin down. Customers are taking greater control of the brand experiences they want to drive and how and when they want to drive them. This means that brands that fail to deliver the ultimate experience at every point will be left by the wayside.

“From social ads to clothing labels to the welcome screen in your car, we are engaging with more brands than we can even keep track of,” notes David.

“But no matter where we choose to engage, we all want the same thing – a good experience. This changes the game for companies who must design for every moment, every scenario, every interaction, possibility, and new relevant channel to compete.”

So How Do You Nail Experience Design Today?

As that ultimate brand experience becomes more important to customers, so does nailing experience design for businesses looking to compete.

1. Join Forces with Brand Strategy

It’s critical that experience design be informed by brand. Having a clear, differentiated, relevant brand is what is going to bring every brand touchpoint together into one cohesive, emotive, and meaningful brand experience.

Without a clear idea of your positioning, how you want to make people feel, and what differentiated value you offer, you can’t begin to design the right overall experience for your customers. Leveraging your brand strategy to keep you on course can help your whole experience flex to customer’s needs while still staying true to the heart of what makes you different.

2. Organize Your Brand for the Experience You Want to Build

Often, companies aren’t structured to consider the whole experience and this is a problem. Design isn’t talking to marketing and marketing isn’t talking to HR and HR isn’t talking to customer service and sales isn’t brought to the strategy table…Everyone’s living within their silos, on their floors, and no one’s talking.

Businesses are structured like disparate pyramids while customers are operating like villages. It’s not neat or siloed. It’s messy, chaotic, and people are entering and exiting all over the place. Everything is in flux and organizations must be able to ebb and flow accordingly.

As new digital channels pop up and old channels shift, businesses will have to become more agile, more flexible, and more able to see the big picture at play – breaking down walls and bringing everyone around one table to assert the question: what experience do we want to design? And how can we design it together?

Designed for Benefits

Reconsidering the importance of experience design today means reaping the benefits for your business. Higher loyalty, more meaningful engagement, greater relevance – that’s what positive experiences build.

“I think smart organizations might reconsider its power. I am,” says David.

“Businesses that nail experience design will be the ones that learn to navigate the most efficient course, keep their passengers the happiest, build engines faster, all while keeping the plane in the air. That’s the potential, and it’s big.”

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading, this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors; and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Emotive branding isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and sets you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans – From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves – Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands – In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments – B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding – All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

On Creating Resonant Digital Brand Experiences Today

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Digital Brand Experiences

We asked our design team about their point of view on building resonant digital brand experiences today. Here’s what they said.

Historically, brands used to rely heavily on brand marketing and advertising for awareness of their products and services. But in the digital age, many brands are born solely online or as an app. In essence, screen only experience(s). What makes some of these brands good vs. great?

Great digital brands are true utilities. Once you get into someone’s life and seamlessly integrate into their every day, that’s when you find success as a digital brand. Venmo comes to mind first. It’s a brand that made paying people back—something we do every day or every week—fun. PayPal started P2P payments and acquired Venmo as a next generation digital experience. PayPal is good, but Venmo is great. Fun, easy, fresh, and simple.

A testament to a great digital brand is the number of “super users” the brand has acquired, as in the number of people that can’t imagine not using them every day. Moving beyond marketing and advertising, it’s brand awareness through repetition and word of mouth. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google are all very prominent digital brands today. Most people are “super users” of all these experiences. Now that’s true utility.

What’s the real value of being a digital brand today?

Consumers today expect a lot from the brands they buy from and/or show loyalty toward. They expect brands to understand them perfectly. They want personalized experiences and brand experiences that are tailored to their every moment.

And digital brands have the opportunity to give just that—to get down to that person, that place, and that unique moment. They have the data to serve up relevant content and experiences in a personalized way—essentially wrapping around a person and his/her environment at the perfect point in time. That’s what it’s all about. And when you pair that kind of deep knowledge of the audience and what they’re doing with utility, you have a very powerful thing.

The question every digital brand should be asking is, “In today’s busy world, what value does this thing add to a person’s life, right now?”

Where do you see digital branding headed in the future?

There’s absolutely no doubt that digital experiences are going to become way more powerful over time. That means less paper, fewer stores, more connectivity, more automation, and more machine learning. But it’s important to remember that as brands get more advanced and even more connected, they also need to behave more humanly. We see a lot of attempts to humanize the digital customer experience for a reason. Chat/Messenger bots are an example. People, for the most part, don’t want to talk to computers or be trapped in a world that feels separated from their own.

Moving beyond sites and apps, VR/AR is here, but not here yet. It’s going to be a long transition to truly integrate these digital experiences into our lives at scale and in meaningful ways. No matter what the form factor, digital brands can champion the human side of technology as it gets more powerful. SnapChat is a perfect example of using AR in a fun and simple way before we even knew what AR was.

Another fast-moving area is IoT and AI-connected devices and services. Think Amazon’s Alexa—she’s basically becoming a brand within her digital self. The Amazon brand has a digital voice that can have real conversations with us. Apple’s Siri has new friends. Our TVs are smart and we can control things in our homes like our cable, thermostat, light bulbs, door locks, etc. from anywhere. Brands will need to be confident, trusted, and safe in their design, feel, language, and approach.

What are some tactics that brands succeeding in the digital space are adapting?

Today, with more mass in the digital space it’s harder for people to remember who to go back to and why. It’s a crowded space and building brand equity is a big challenge. Everyone’s advertising and spending and it sometimes seems near impossible to gain that mass adoption. That explains why loyalty programs are finding a lot of success in the digital space.

The Nike Plus platform is a great example of this. It basically lifts a physical act such as a sport and surrounds it with a digital layer of data, engagement, competitive feel, and game aspect. It’s a non-commerce loyalty play that can eventually lead to commerce. It can also be considered a utility as well—your digital companion to your everyday fitness.

In the end, it’s the brands who’ve figured out strategically how to make people feel good and give them some sort of differentiated value that end up on top. So it’s about the emotional coupled with the rational.

Speaking of challenges, what are some other challenges brands trying to build resonant digital experiences are facing right now?

A lot of the times when brands fail in the digital space it’s simply about too many people trying to do the same thing. Like circling in on too small of a segment or trying to solve something that never really needed solving. The home delivery meals category is a good example of a category that is simply too competitive and brands are struggling to stand apart.

As designers, the big challenge is creating a brand story and experience in these predefined, digital spaces. The brand needs to work and be compelling screen after screen, frame after frame, pixel after pixel. And the thing is that people don’t look at it for very long. We have very short digital attention spans. Our hands are moving faster than we can even process. It’s a real challenge to stop a user in their tracks, but that’s the goal.

Then there’s also the challenge of balancing how much you push your digital experience into the future. Digital brands always have to be one step ahead. But at the same time, the experiences have to resonate with people. You can’t push too far or not far enough.

As a designer, what’s the most exciting part of building digital brand experiences?

The digital world is in a perpetual state of redesign. Think about how often Facebook updates its platform. There’s more opportunity for change when everything is happening digitally.

As designers, we constantly fiddle and shift—continually tailoring a brand moment to better fit a person and his/her world. And that’s exciting in a brand world where consumers are at the center of everything.

Also, digital always looks forward. It never looks back. It doesn’t even stay the same. And it’s not slowing down.  It’s a big, growing train, moving forward—full speed. That’s both an inspiring realization and an exciting challenge we have to accept and let fuel our creativity, innovation, and design approaches moving forward. 

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Law Firm Branding Project: Launching with Impact

Posted on by Sarah Herold

A law firm branding project isn’t just about the strategy or the creative – it’s about getting the law firm ready, aligned, and joined together behind the change. A new brand is an opportunity to build excitement and momentum around the future of your law firm. And the launch plays a large role in this.

But launching a global law firm brand and figuring out how you are going to share it with the people who matter to your business is no small task.

Here are some tips for launching your new brand:

Although pushing your new website live is often the symbol of a new launch, there’s a lot of things to consider that can create energy and excitement, and generate momentum before and after.

In fact, without any prior knowledge, a lot of people within your firm might consider branding as ‘marketing fluff’ – having nothing to do with what they do or care about. So a successful launch needs to convince them otherwise. Even if partners haven’t been involved with the project, the launch needs to validate the time, money and energy spent on the branding project. Prior to launch, it’s critical to lay the groundwork that will prepare internal audiences for what’s to come.

This is an opportunity to bring everyone together and rally behind the new brand. For a global law firm, it’s especially important for people across offices to see that everyone is engaged and celebrating the new brand.

Every law firm and its brand are different and your launch tactics should be guided by your brand strategy. When you are ready to press ‘go,’ here are some general tactics to consider:

  • Save the dates: build anticipation and excitement around the launch
  • A giveaway: gives people something that symbolizes the new brand.
  • A retreat: gets people aligned and rallied behind the brand.
  • A task force and/or brand ambassadors: facilitate and support training in each global office.
  • A Brand Book & or Brand Video: a rallying cry that brings everything together in an emotive and impactful way.
  • Internal and external newsletters: discuss what the change means and where the new brand will take the business.
  • A letter to clients: explains the new launch and what it means specifically for them.
  • Documentation and social sharing on launch day: spreads excitement across offices.
  • Brand central: allows people in each global office to go and pull down new collateral.
  • A brand manager: maintains momentum and keeps the brand on track and time, making sure resources are being allocated correctly.

Creating momentum around a launch is one thing. Maintaining momentum and keeping the brand impactful is another. When a brand is launched with success, it is able to maintain the momentum it needs to keep doing the work it needs to do for your business – positioning it to be competitive, grow, and thrive.

Check out how our latest law firm branding project for our client, BAL, created a brand that positioned their law firm to be a major player in the corporate immigration market, and launched that brand with success.

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

 

Launching a Global Re-Brand: Interview with Brand Strategy Firm, Emotive Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

As an Account Strategist at Emotive Brand, Sarah plays a pivotal role in helping us transform global brands in to more empathetic, purpose-led, and meaningful companies. Her ability to connect the worlds of writing, research, strategy, and design make her the perfect point person for tackling the nuances and challenges of bringing a new brand strategy to life.

In this post, Sarah shares her thoughts on why a global brand rollout can be tricky, gives guidelines on how to tackle obstacles that might arise, and execute a successful maximum-impact launch.

A global re-brand is a large undertaking. Where do you begin?

The real challenge for any global brand rollout is the challenge of execution. The bigger the brand, the more links in the chain. So when we embark on any global project we engage people across the organization and talk about implementation first. We make sure to get a clear understanding of all their brand channels, both internal and external. Understanding the complexities of a brand’s communication system allows us to come up with the strategic and tactical solutions that will make our work together smarter and easier to execute.

Who needs to be involved in a global re-brand? And how do you engage the right people at the right place and time?

It’s critical to involve a variety of stakeholders from the beginning of any global assignment. We strive to interview as many global players as we can to get a broad understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities that vary from region to region and to elicit the common themes that unite the brand. When developing the brand strategy for a global organization, key components like the brand’s Promise, Emotional Impact, and Positioning Statement should be crafted with company leaders because they are the drivers of the overarching business strategy. Once these strategic pillars have been established, we begin to include regional managers to gain their perspective on how to best adapt messaging and/or a campaign to their markets and audiences.

How is the creative process different for a global re-brand?

No matter how big or small the organization, a brand’s emotional impact is the driving force in the creative phase. The feelings a brand evokes should feel the same no matter what region or location. When developing a creative concept that has global reach, we have to be mindful that certain photography or language can be interpreted in different ways from culture to culture. What makes someone feel confident in the US might not make someone feel confident in Asia. Adapting an idea to suit different cultures and outlooks — while remaining true to the brand strategy— is a must for global brands. Making sure the creative and emotional elements tick all the boxes across an organization can be tricky, but if done smartly, it can prevent a creative concept from falling flat.

How do you maximize the impact of a global re-brand launch?

Today, we have technology to help us improve coordination and communication for launching a new brand, but there is also a higher expectation for relevant, localized execution. Cross-organization collaboration and a Go-To-Market strategy help put the right plan in place – telling the right stories, in the right channels, at the right time. To increase the impact of a global brand launch, part of the strategic plan should be laying some groundwork to prepare internal and external audiences for what’s to come. While a big flashy reveal can be fun and intriguing, it’s important to pace out your brand rollout over time – people are more likely to pay attention and stay excited if you engage them in digestible and personally meaningful ways.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.