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.
Continue reading “Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy”
There’s a lot of talk about the concept of a brand promise. But, what is it? Why does my business need one? How would it make my business stronger? How does it relate to my brand strategy? Here we explore the answers to these pressing questions. And perhaps more important, what kind of a brand promise does your business need in today’s world to have an impact?
A contemporary brand promise articulates an idea that goes beyond the rational benefits that worked in the past, and extols a higher-order emotional reward. A brand promise is not a slogan or advertising headline. It is not, by definition, a public statement (though it can be as long as your brand truly lives up to it). Finally, it is not a “unique selling proposition”. Indeed, its uniqueness and differentiating power comes not from what it says, but how it transforms the way your organization creates strong and meaningful connections with people.
Continue reading “What is a Brand Promise and Why You Need One”
Do you ever wonder about the strength of your brand? And its impact on your business? Do you monitor it and measure it? Do you evaluate it like you do for your business? If you wanted to know how it’s doing, would you even know what questions to ask? We’ve put together a quick diagnostic test to help CEOs assess when it’s time to for a strategic brand check-up.
If you answered no to any of these questions, your brand might need a check-up.
It doesn’t hurt to check the strength of your brand, but it could hurt if you don’t.
For more information on how to evaluate the strength of your brand and understand its impact on your business, check out Fast Forward, an agile way to address your brand at the intersection of your business strategy, marketing efforts, and sales.
Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In the dark old days of 2012, the process of tracking a lead through a sales cycle was a slow, manual process. With the rise of automation platforms and integrated CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, our pipelines are now routinely filled with promising leads. The only problem? Everyone else has access to the same toolkit. What might have been considered a competitive advantage is now table stakes. Demand generation might fill the barrel with fish, but it’s the strength of a brand that hooks the lead.
According to Forrester Research, 68 percent of B2B marketers said refreshing a company’s brand was the most important step to take in 2017.
“If your prospective customer doesn’t know your company or solution – or worse, your company or product value proposition messaging doesn’t resonate with them – it doesn’t matter how savvy your demand strategy,” says Scott Vaughan, CMO of Integrate. “There’s a resurgence underway to refocus on brand and positioning, baking these necessities into the demand marketing effort.”
As the role of demand generation evolves alongside technology, how we utilize this information should evolve in tandem. It’s something that Vaughan calls “brand plus demand,” a layered approach that combines the strengths of a strong brand with the tools of great tech.
Not all salespeople are religious, but every sale is an act of faith. The best way to build trust is with a purposeful brand promise. A brand promise is not a slogan or an advertising headline, it’s a natural extension of your mission, vision, and values. By establishing clear and consistent value messaging, potential customers can quickly determine if your solution is the right one for them.
Your brand promise provides more than just an appealing narrative – it can act as your company’s North Star for how you communicate, who you communicate with, and even the look and feel of your design. When it’s working right, your brand promise should filter and refine your demand.
So, demand generation has led hundreds of new eyeballs to your brand. What do they see when they first land? More importantly, how do they feel? All that awareness and relevance will be wasted if your brand experience isn’t a positive one.
Thoughtful brand experiences and communications not only build trust – they win business. From your website design to your blog posts to the contents of your white papers, every experience is a chance to demonstrate a sense of authenticity and purpose. Make every inch of your brand work to create demand for your unique offering.
Typically, B2B decision makers are a team of buyers, not a single person. As such, the one-size-fits-all lead doesn’t work anymore. Create unique brand personas to discover what your audience needs, wants, and feels. What makes them anxious? What makes them feel fired-up? What’s the worst part of their day? Can you fix that?
As Paul Graham of Y Combinator says, “The hard part is not answering questions, but asking them. The hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them, the better the odds of doing that.”
So, maybe everyone’s pipeline is overflowing with leads. If you want to win business, you don’t necessarily have to say it first – you just have to say it best. Differentiate yourself with a compelling brand promise, go after your personas, and make every experience emotive.
“The reality is that sustained demand marketing success relies on brand strength and differentiations,” concludes Vaughan. “It’s not brand versus demand. Rather it’s brand with demand.”
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.
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.
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.
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.
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
Building an online community is a great way for companies to encourage deeper relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and most especially – developers. Technology companies are particularly adept at leveraging active participation, good will, and sheer word-of-mouth power of the cloud crowd.
Many sponsor technical communities for developers like teaching, customer support, and newbie coaching. People flock to well-structured, well-run forums for advice, problem-solving, and to share their work and ideas.
Some communities spring up of their own accord, sparked by a lone enthusiast trying to solve a problem who attracts people with similar interests. But more likely, communities are created by companies willing to prime the pump and get things rolling. These communities can be of great value for companies looking to build loyalty, engagement, while sustaining relevance. So how can a company build a thriving, self-perpetuating community that’s aligned with company goals?
1. Objectives
Define the goals for your online community from the beginning. What are you trying to accomplish? Set clear objectives and expectations that are consistent with your company’s business and product strategies.
Business strategy and brand strategy are inextricably linked. Since the brand is the part of your company that customers see, your Brand Strategy is an essential part of any community initiative.
2. Audience
Determine who are you talking to. Who are they exactly? What do they need, want, and believe? What do you want them to do, think, or feel? At Emotive Brand, when we develop a strategy, it starts with deep understanding of all stakeholders, target audiences, customers, and yes, the community.
Persona Maps and Persona Journeys are extremely helpful here. Persona Workshops cast a wide net and then probe deeply into the key people your company wishes to influence. It’s easy to map their demographics, industries, job roles, responsibilities, and influencers. More important, you can discover their needs, pain points, beliefs, and feelings so you can match messaging and/or product solutions to answer the specific needs of specific types of people.
3. Content
What topics do you want to cover in your community site? What content do you want to host? What message do you want to send?
Brand Strategy helps here, because it includes Positioning to define your company offerings and the Messaging needed to target the right strategic messages to the right people, as defined in your Persona Maps.
4. Quality
Quality matters. Developers will spend a lot of valuable time on your community site researching problems, asking questions, posting solutions, studying documentation, and downloading code. So the least your brand can do is to create a clean, well-lit place that’s usable and attractive. Use your brand to guide the brand experience you want people to have when engaging with your community.
The Brand Promise that’s at the heart of your brand will give you the charter to invest in a high-quality community site.
5. Design
Developer sites are frequently created by engineers for engineers. But they shouldn’t look like freeware, even if running on an open-source platform. There needs to be a consistent, symbiotic relationship with the corporate brand, even if you’re hosting the community site separately from the corporate website.
Brand Guidelines will specify acceptable designs and prohibit unacceptable designs that might damage the corporate brand.
6. Tone
Geekiness is cool. We love geeks. Almost 97% of our CEO clients are engineers! We honor them. We make them heroes (check out our work for VMware). But that doesn’t mean that your community site needs to go overboard with geek-speak or drown in abstruse jargon. Simplicity, directness, and clarity are always the key to good communication.
The Brand Voice defines the way the brand speaks, and how it should not speak. It also sets the tone for the community discourse, which is crucial if you want a brand-appropriate site that grows because it’s inviting for people to join.
7. Style
The Brand Promise – the promise your brand makes to the people who matter – helps crystallize the brand’s role in the community. You can choose the proximity to the community that’s most comfortable for your brand. Branded communities fall into four camps:
Full engagement – with active participation by designated company brand ambassadors to provide technical support, ideas, postings, documentation, code, and site moderation.
Moderate engagement – company staff is involved for editorial purposes, policing member postings to prevent bullying, remove trolls and keep things clean.
Low engagement – built and then run with a let them come-to-me mentality, basically hands off, allowing community members to run the show.
No engagement – companies who channel customer support into static lists of FAQs, better than nothing, but it sure isn’t a community.
8. Dialog
There’s no better way to understand people who are important to your brand than by paying attention to the community. Communities are built to encourage dialog between interested parties in two-way or multi-party conversations. Your brand has the opportunity to participate and listen.
Brand Strategy can help you listen attentively and respond appropriately. Empathy should be the guiding light for any community, and rooted in any Brand Strategy.
9. Care and feeding
Once you start a community, it’s up to you to keep it going. It’s like a garden. You till the soil, plant the seeds, water and fertilize, pull the weeds, and encourage growth. You welcome the bees and birds, too. And you do it every single day. Only then can you enjoy the fruit.
How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community. A Brand Strategy specifies both the strategic shifts a brand is trying to make, and the behavior necessary for people to live up to. How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community.
Your online community may turn out to be a genial collection of like-minded enthusiasts or a contentious battleground trolled by argumentative egomaniacs. Either extreme can be valuable as long as you have them under your tent. When you build a community that’s aligned with your Brand Strategy, you can enjoy the benefits of reduced customer support overhead, loyal and interested long-term users, a rich environment bursting with good ideas, and a vast team of de facto ambassadors willing to spread the good word about your brand.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
Too often marketers and product developers don’t see the connection between product design and brand strategy. We’ve noticed this trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.
Here’s how.
Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and absorbs their point of view into the planning process, they can design more meaningful, more successful products.
Brand strategy synthesizes a company’s business strategy, purpose, and product positioning into a distinctive promise that informs everything the brand stands for. Who the brand serves, what the brand brings to the table, and why it matters to people. Over the long months it takes to build a product, it’s tough to stay true to the emotional impact you hope your product will deliver. The promise at the core of your brand strategy is the beacon you can follow, with constant guidance to help you build a brand-appropriate product experience.
How your product meaningfully connects with people matters more than you might suspect. You want the product to inspire meaningful feelings like excitement, amazement, or delight. Brand strategy sets the tone by establishing a voice that’s consistent with your promise. Brand voice is a delicate thing, which can include words, sound effects, and music. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s developed through a rigorous brand strategy process. It’s explored. It’s discovered. It’s developed. It rarely comes from QA engineers writing error messages.
Ever make a mistake using an app? How can it be a mistake if you happen to press the wrong button in a confusing UI? Ninety percent of the time, when a user gets derailed in an app, it’s because the app itself is too complicated or the navigation is deranged. In other words, it’s not your fault, Citizen User.
So is it ever appropriate for a sensible brand to write the word ERROR in a dialog box? The clue is the term “dialog.” A product is a dialog with a user. A human being. A person. A person like you does not need a product to waggle a finger and issue a stern warning. If the product needs to help the user make a better decision, it’s called coaching. Encouraging. Extending a helping hand. Dialog. Not an error warning. Not lecturing. Not accusing. Not criticizing. Brand strategy provides guardrails for voice and behavior so your product doesn’t veer off track.
Once you’ve built a product with your brand strategy firmly in mind, you’ll wonder how you ever built anything without it. And whether you’re building an app, an online service, a mobile device, a piece of electronic hardware, a wearable gizmo, or any product that a human being touches, you’ll never build anything without a brand strategy again.
Emotive Brand teams up with clients to ensure that the brand strategy finds its way into the product experience to make a meaningful impact on users. To experience brand strategy the Emotive Brand way, give us a call.
To read more on this subject: Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
We’ve been reading Warren Berger’s fascinating book, “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas”. The book’s basic premise is that we simply don’t ask enough questions these days. As youngsters, we were full of questions, but as we mature many of us lose this vital skill (while those who retain it become stellar innovators and leaders).
“A More Beautiful Question” is a helpful guide to developing a more question-based approach to life, society, and business. It explores a flow of questioning from “Why?” to “What if?” to “How?”, and demonstrates how this approach expands horizons by provoking awareness of needs, shining light on new opportunities, and helping ideas become realities.
Employer branding has gained more attention recently, however creating an employer brand that is meaningful and scales globally is no easy feat.
“A company has a reputation in the market for its products and what it sells,” said Jason Seiden, Co-Founder and CEO of Brand Amper. “But companies also have a reputation as employers.”
In today’s world, most every business needs to attract and retain top talent. An employer brand strategy explains why anyone would want to join or work at your company. And your employer brand can be one of the most valuable assets of your company, if you build it meaningfully.
In order to create a meaningful employer brand, it is important to answer some critical questions:
Start by rethinking how your brand can be more personally relevant and emotionally important to your employees. One way is to adopt a powerful employer value proposition (EVP) or brand promise. A people-centric, emotional-laden, and meaningful purpose helps your people understand what your brand represents and why it matters. A promise is a high-order thought designed to evoke common human emotions. The promise can readily cross cultural boundaries because the common emotions it evokes applies to everyone alike.
To translate your brand’s promise, move it from its C-Suite orientation to a strategy delivered in a human language. The strategy should focus on making the desired outcomes of the brand far more meaningful to each individual employee on a personal level, given their responsibilities and specific job function within the company.
Finally, show your employees how they can help your brand achieve its brand promise. Show them how the brand should ideally behave and how they should behave when representing the brand. Create a more unified brand culture – and, hence, a more unified global brand presence – by encouraging and rewarding meaningful brand behavior.
As the new behavior of your employees drives communications and interactions in a meaningful way, your local customers and prospects start to better understand and appreciate your brand’s meaningful intent. They start seeing your brand as more unique, more appealing, and more desirable.
This big idea should be designed to be “viral” in nature. As individual employees around the world choose to behave in a more meaningful way, the idea catches us quickly and gains momentum with ease.
To view our latest employer branding project, click here
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
