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Tag: Brand Strategy

Five Surprising Brands That Embrace Emotion

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Looking for a quick hit of strategic inspiration? A dose of oxytocin in brand form? We found five examples that are hitting the mark by moving people. Emotional connection for the win.

Over recent years, the rise of emotion has been undeniable. The following five brands—across diverse categories and including one of Emotive’s own clients— offer proof that the era of emotion has arrived. Can you feel it?

1. Unlocking the potential of those who advance the world.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), global consulting firm.

Many brands claim to be human-centered, but few actually are. BCG’s succinct yet powerful premise—supporting the leaders who move us all forward—is inherently emotional and deeply human. And it’s refreshing to see that emotion and humanity is injected throughout the brand, even in how insights are presented.

Acknowledging the unique challenges of leadership today, and rather than preaching from on high, BCG presents expertise in a relatable and trustworthy way by inviting chief executives to “Hear from Fellow CEOs.” Their CEO Moments of Truth YouTube videos attract hundreds of thousands of views each.

The brand is also emotionally bolstered by fostering strong, ongoing relationships with past employees, referred to as alumni and considered part of the BCG family. BCG’s Alumni Program includes a learning library and events to connect current and past employees.

We get the impression that, through and through, BCG walks the walk in “unlocking the potential” of the people it serves and employs. Good feels all around.

2. Clean feels good.

Clorox, multinational manufacturer of consumer and professional products.

Clorox’s latest campaign, “Clean Feels Good,” pivots from the science of disinfecting to the emotional upside of cleanliness. They teamed up with a neurotech firm to measure and show how the everyday act of cleaning–far from a mere burden–is for many people a proven way to boost mood and foster a sense of wellbeing.

We notice that spot-on (or off) expertise, as seen in their online database of practical cleaning tips, is balanced with touches of emotion throughout the Clorox website, as in, “Follow our tips to save time, money and possibly the day.”

More than ever, Clorox positions itself as a health and wellness company that exists to help people thrive–not just kill germs. They don’t just grab attention by challenging expectations, they earn engagement and loyalty by highlighting a source of joy hiding in plain sight.

3. Powering the inclusion economy.

Katapult, leading omnichannel lease-purchase platform.

Spanning B2B and B2C, Katapult, an ecommerce-focused FinTech company is one of Emotive Brand’s clients–and an example of how feeling elevates brand in any sector.

With empathy and optimism, Katapult challenges the dreary status quo of retail purchase plans, dominated by predatory rates and gatekeeping via credit scores. A friendly, buoyant brand identity showcases a fresh point of view: Seeing the good in people is good for business.

For retailers, Katapult encourages openness to overlooked, unfairly excluded consumers. For shoppers, Katapult opens doors to major purchases, central to quality of everyday life but too often out of reach. We enjoyed the collaboration, and the chance to help level a playing field tilted for too long.

4. / Keep your options open.

Red Hat, leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions.

In an interesting twist, Red Hat’s recent marketing humanizes AI to show its potential flaws and differentiate the company’s offering. The result is a message that connects emotionally–as opposed to relying solely on the kind of forgettable AI technology proof points in which we are all now drowning.

The campaign ties back seamlessly to the compelling, central brand premise–creating better technology with open source. Rather than a bland functional claim, the concept of openness infuses the entire brand with purpose and feeling: Open source, open culture, open to possibilities.

As Red Hat explains on their site, “Red Hat exists not only as an enterprise software company but as a catalyst for change, built on the belief that open unlocks the world’s potential.” We appreciate the tight connection between the functional and emotional, a hallmark of the strongest brands.

5. Own the dream.

Rocket Mortgage, major online mortgage lender formerly known as Quicken Loans.

Rocket Mortgage’s recent rebrand is a dramatic example of leaning into the power of emotion. While homeownership is treated as a numbers game by most companies in the industry, Rocket has opened the door to deeper connection with prospects and customers.

They now show up with warmth, humanity, and recognition that what they offer is more than home loans—it’s the fulfillment of a deeply meaningful aspiration for most people. The brand shift is especially powerful in an uncertain economic climate, when many are doubting their belief in the classic American dream.

Visually and verbally, the new brand tone is clear, from a more approachable logo, simpler data identity system, and a voice of understanding and encouragement for customers making big financial decisions.

Even in small moments, Rocket finds ways to engage. The online application funnel feels helpful and human, like when they explain that “prequalified” is just “another way of saying ‘let’s estimate what you could afford.’” After all, in a lengthy transaction as emotional and momentous as buying a home, a little empowerment at each step likely goes a long way.

Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Why is defining brand so difficult? Think of how quickly the bounds of brand design, voice, expression, and experience have expanded and continue to expand, thanks to the Big Bang of the internet and now the cosmic shift of AI.

If you were born somewhere south of the turn of the century, you may recall when brands were curated and controlled.

Mainly composed of a logo, tagline, ads, and packaging, brands were more like museum exhibits than living, breathing entities. That’s because so few touchpoints delineated the scope of people’s engagement.

Today? Not so much.

Here’s the thing. “Brand” is somehow just as easy to define, but harder to get your head and hands around: It’s everything—all the ever-multiplying experiences and impressions people have with and of your company, people, and products.

And all those moments of interplay between humans and brands release emotional energy that reverberates outward, in reviews, social media posts, tradeshow chatter, YouTube unboxing videos, reddit threads, and beyond.

That’s why it’s so critical to thoughtfully craft every brand experience and outcome you have the agency to shape.

Brand is how you respond to questions on Instagram. Whether your customer support is hands-on or MIA. How you treat your employees, and how they in turn show up for customers. The authenticity, or lack thereof, in your messaging and whether you lead or follow with design. It’s the choices you make and how they affect people.

Perhaps a strict definition isn’t appropriate for such a dynamic, expansive concept, anyway. So here are a few of Emotive Brand’s fundamental principles for giving your brand shape, meaning, and the power to move people–to action and loyalty.

Own and deliver on your brand’s emotional impact.

Putting emotion at the center of your brand gives you a barometer for decision-making and inspiration for meaningful, inimitable creative expression.

Ask people why they love a brand, and they often struggle to pin it down. They may list logical reasons like quality or aesthetics, but in the end it comes down to a feeling. How does the brand move them? Why do they come back for more of that feeling? What does that feeling mean to them? Brands that carry real emotional weight are the ones that earn love and respect.

This principle goes beyond relationships with customers. Take the value of an engaged workplace, creating specific meaning and value tailored to attract and engage employees and recruits with shared values and purpose, increasing innovation, productivity, creativity, and commitment.

No matter the audience, when it comes to defining your brand, emotional impact is key to unlocking business impact.

Think of your brand as a prism.

You can illuminate the same purpose, ideas, and values from different angles to connect with different audiences.

A single brand has many facets. The same purpose, values, and mission are reflected in different ways to connect with different audiences, whether potential customers or loyal devotees, longtime employees or new recruits, or–at the highest level of expression–the world at large.

For example, the statement of purpose or brand promise you’ve defined for customers should have a corresponding statement for employees—the same idea filtered through an internal lens. Imagine a hospitality company that tells guests to “expect remarkable experiences.” Translated internally as “creating remarkable moments,” employees are inspired to find ways to make every guest interaction worth talking about, thereby delivering on the customer promise.

Give your brand the freedom to flex.

Just like people, your brand needs the emotional agility to shift and meet the moment while maintaining integrity.

Even within the scope of one audience, how your brand shows up should vary depending on where, when, and with whom you interact. In your own life, think of the depth of communication with a new friend versus a lifelong bestie. A brand hasn’t earned the time and space in the lives of new customers and prospects to assume closeness or understanding.

As relationships deepen, your brand can be expressed in more meaningful, personal ways that align with needs revealed by the customer. Context matters, too. For an airline brand, a friendly greeting like “so good to see you again” conveys warmth when it comes from a familiar gate agent. Plastered on a sign, this message feels inauthentic and out of place.

At Emotive Brand, we create structure in the form of brand architecture, but the framework accommodates different phases of relationship-building, growth and change. Rooted in clear purpose aligned with a unique emotional impact, the brand can develop, expand and respond, connecting with people and shifting with the times.

Create your own definition of brand.

The concept of brand can be nebulous, but you can get a foothold by prioritizing what matters most to your business.

More often than not, the answer to “what is a brand?” entails a list of well-loved icons. Sure, references to Nike, Apple, or Google can give form to the concept, but solely thinking of brand in terms of big names isn’t enough. Especially when your vision challenges the status quo.

At Emotive Brand, we work with a type of leader that we call Visionary Reinventors. As category creators and market disrupters, they learn from other brands, but they’re not modeling themselves after them. Why look backwards when you’re trying to shape the future?

Think of what “brand” might mean to a B2B tech start-up—reliant on in-person pitches and tradeshow experiences to reach enterprise executives—versus a B2C innovator selling exclusively online to Gen Z. The former needs to emphasize the forging of connections in high-stakes, human-to-human interactions. For the latter, “brand” is centered on expressive, cutting-edge design and social media creativity to break through at scale.

“Brand” is yours to shape and imagine.

Today’s brand landscape is wide open. No more standard toolkit. No more checking the same old boxes. With the intended emotional impact of your brand as a guiding light, the path forward becomes not only clear–but exciting and inspired.

Own how you want to make people feel to accelerate connection and ignite business impact in ways no competitor can match.

Roundtable with Bloomerang CEO Dennis Fois and CMO Ann Fellman: Part 1

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The Power of Emotion

One of the most purposeful organizations we’ve ever collaborated with, Bloomerang helps nonprofits raise more with the end-to-end giving platform and expert team built for purpose.

This has been a particularly rewarding partnership, with client-agency alchemy arising from a shared belief. It’s the idea embedded in our name—that strategic use of emotion is central to the success of brands and businesses.

At the risk of making them blush, Bloomerang’s CEO Dennis Fois and CMO Ann Fellman are the kind of leaders we call Visionary Reinventors. They have the emotional intelligence and daring to push higher, and look deeper, for the good of their business, people, industry, and the 23,000 nonprofits they serve.

They were gracious enough to sit down with us for a roundtable discussion exploring how emotion is core to driving their tremendous growth.

 

Emotive Brand:  When you composed the RFP, emotion was front and center in terms of how you thought about success. We’re curious—where does this passion for emotion come from? What was missing from the equation prior to our work together?

Dennis:  My feelings were that Bloomerang fell too much on the empathy side, without any bite or desire or drive or ambition. The opportunity here is to change the [nonprofit] industry, where there’s a scarcity mindset—that you can’t ask for more. They [nonprofits] read bad reports: “Oh, Giving Tuesday was down.” The academia around it is depressing. And so there is this construct of constraints and not abundance. I want to create a bright light of ambition–fast-charging, but also with hope and optimism.

This is a time when we’ve never seen so much generational wealth. There are over 11 million millionaires in the United States alone. We’ve never had this amount of disposable income. There’s literally no reason why giving shouldn’t be going up every year. So this idea for emotion, this passion, needs to come through.

I want to sit on a rocking chair on a ranch when I’m older and reflect that we built a generational company that is looked on as, “They actually shook things up. They were the catalysts for more investment, more technology, better resources.”

But if you connect yourself to the industry and say, “We’re going to do more here,” then you need to bring empathy while also being a bit of a challenger.

Emotive Brand:  I’ve been sitting in a group of management consultants for the past two days, and one of the things that we heard loud and clear again and again was that leaders who are all empathy are the worst leaders imaginable—empathy has to be conjoined with performance for any impact to actually occur.

Dennis:  That’s well said. Yesterday at our kickoff, we talked about the issue that we have–and that’s complacency. We are doing so well. Our retention rates are off the hook. I have never seen anything like it. And you could say, “We are on a tear here,” but if you’re being intellectually honest, you say, “Are the gross retention rates, the fact that your customers don’t churn, because you’re that good? Or is it the feature of a complacent industry?”

If you allow the standards of the industry to define your standards, you’re done. And so there needs to be a perpetual engine, an internal drive to lift and change the industry, to overcome inertia. It’s very easy to forgive yourself for mediocre performance when you’re doing good work.

It’s a wonderful blanket of comfort to say, “Yeah, but I’m working on something really important. I helped that nonprofit. I am doing life-changing work here.” It’s a dynamic that we have to manage.

Emotive Brand:  Ann, amidst all the success that Dennis has just outlined, what did you believe was missing from the brand today or the equation that you were bringing to market?

Ann:  I grew up in B2B marketing. My whole career was tech, and speaking tech. I’d read paragraphs and be like, ‘What on earth did I just read? I have no idea what that said. That means absolutely nothing to me.’

So I’ve always believed that this is not B2B. This is B2H. We are selling to human beings. We are selling to people who have emotions. Whether I’m making a software sale, or buying some consulting, I’m going to be emotional about spending that money. I just am. And so I’ve always been one to say, “Can we push the brand, the marketing, the message to an emotional level, because we’re humans.” We’re not selling to computers–yet.

It’s okay to put emotional color and commentary into your message and how you show up, because it’s more enjoyable. You remember when you have fun doing something. We had a wild kickoff yesterday, talking about some pretty serious stuff. We’re asking people to work harder, do more, and at the same time, we’re laughing and making jokes about poop emojis– [laughter]

Dennis:  Sorry.

Ann:  And so we’re being real human beings with emotion to connect. We’re going to do hard stuff, but we’re going to have joy in that. So when we think about what makes a really good company, yeah, you got to have all the tech, but you’ve got to have a powerful story that connects with humans, right there, front and center.

Emotive Brand:  That’s amazing. We just wrote a white paper about the role of emotion, and the research says it’s even more important in B2B. Maybe because the decisions are big and weighty, and there’s more riding on it.

Ann:  Yeah. You could lose your job if you make the wrong decision–put in some really crappy tech and you end up destroying the teams, their momentum, and morale. There’s so many layers of emotion behind these decisions.

Emotive Brand:  Our experience working with many tech companies over many years is that they undervalue the so-called soft skills and soft metrics that actually drive not just decision-making, but the change and transformation necessary for those companies to show up in the world in a really significant way. It’s interesting how much that’s pushed to the margins, especially in the world of B2B, where to Amber’s point, I think it has the most potential to make a difference.

Dennis:  Yes. This is a really good point. I understand where it comes from, especially when you’re talking about a technology company. Listen, the technology companies are by and large product companies. The goal as you scale is to sell the same product over and over. And if you’re not careful, it creates a very inside-out view—you want to stay very close to the true essence of the product, describe that in the best possible way and get everybody to say the same things over and over again. Obviously, that avoids a real understanding of how people buy, so that’s where leadership needs to step in.
Most organizations want to sell based on the value of change, and you can only sell the change if you have stories.

Ann:  It’s always the phrasing of ‘this thing does blah-blah-blah.’ But no. Now you need to fill in the last piece, which is, so I can do what? Who cares? So I can raise more, so then I can deliver more.

Emotive Brand:  As you frame the success of your leadership team, I can’t help but think that on some level, it’s because there is a greater sense of emotional investment, not just in each other, but in the success. It cannot only be a rational desire for success.

Dennis:  I think what all of us have in common is that it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to be working on a project like this. It’s where unbelievable financial success and outcomes and high quality company-building comes together with a genuine world impact. It’s not a unicorn story where we’re changing the world through AI. No, it’s real societal impact. Normally, you have to pick one of the two.

Ann:  Yeah, we chose the hard path. We chose to push ourselves further.

Emotive Brand:  It’s like a reflection of what you want for nonprofits. The bar raising.

Ann:  We’re choosing to raise the bar, and we’re going to take our teams and our customers with us in that choice.

Emotive Brand:  Yeah. I mean I love the proverbial eating your own dog food, but I’m curious, do you see brand as the mechanism to communicate that to your prospects and current customers?

Ann:  It has to. No customer wakes up thinking about your business every day or your product, unless there’s an absolute problem. So your brand is that positive manifestation of the outcomes, and then you’ve got to put it front and center, all the time.

Emotive Brand:  And so is success in your mind if Bloomerang is always connoted with unlocking that sense of abundance and opportunity? Is that the ultimate kind of emotional unlock that you hope to achieve?

Dennis:  I think so, because if we successfully do what you just said, then you basically blast it through all of the excuses not to grow. Now you’re confronted with your own reality–what is driving you? Well hopefully, it’s that passion for the purpose.

 

Our gratitude goes out to Ann and Dennis for taking the time to reflect with us. Keep an eye out for Part 2 of our conversation, focused on the power of partnership. We’ll look into the alchemy of Bloomerang and Emotive Brand’s stellar collaboration.

The Business of Transformation is Human

Posted on by Amber Johnson

How we feel matters. It determines—and has the power to transform—how we show up in the world and for each other, and in the end, the type of impact we create. We see it in our work with Emotive Brand clients all the time.

The most rewarding part of strategic writing and design is not spotting our work in the wild—perched on grocery store shelves, splashed across websites, or looming large on billboards. It’s having the opportunity to change how people think and feel about their work. You know, that thing they spend most of their limited time on earth doing.

At Emotive, we get to see clients’ faces brighten as we reframe what their company and brand stand for, to illuminate higher purpose and uncover deeper meaning.

When the strategy and creative are right, it’s clear–because sparks of transformation flicker before your eyes. Client teams light up with new ideas to shape all areas of the business. Their energy level and ambition rise. Too many leaders say emotion is intangible. We know it’s palpable.

How people feel matters more than ever, and can tank or propel the success of brands and businesses. Here are three reasons why.

Humans now face constant change and uncertainty.
The seismic jolt of the pandemic keeps reverberating, alongside a push to get people back into the office. There’s the specter of layoffs, political division, and the high cost of living. With technology, epitomized by AI, progressing faster than humans can adapt, upheaval is neverending.

“Change leaves people and organizations feeling confused, vulnerable, and fractured at a time when resilience, cohesion, and collaboration are necessary to perform at the highest levels.”

—Harvard Business Review

 

People are exhausted by constant change. So if you want to spearhead transformation, you have to give them something worth caring about, something they can feel and believe in.

People are fed up with corporate bullshit.
The scourge of shrinkflation. Greenwashing. Planned obsolescence. Employees’ and consumers’ tolerance for being deceived is depleting. That’s why the number of B Corps and Benefit Corporations keeps climbing, along with the popularity of de-influencers and the “right to repair” movement.

“During the challenging year of 2020, only 4.5% of B Corps failed, compared to 12.5% of American businesses overall.”

—Federal Reserve Board

 

Getting ahead of these issues, instead of waiting to be exposed and called out, is not just the right thing to do. By building trust and loyalty with employees and consumers, a proactive approach can save and sustain businesses.

Humans need more than products and paychecks.
Your brand or organization has a golden opportunity to lift people up at a time when all of us are fighting battles that wear us down. Like navigating education and healthcare systems that fall short, being squeezed as part of the sandwich generation, or needing purpose at work but struggling to afford soaring rents as a Gen Zer.

Retention, loyalty, and growth—the aims of transformation programs—are best served through genuine connection and alignment with how people feel and what they care about.

“The human emotions of people working at the centre of a transformation play a pivotal role in its success or failure.”

—EY and Oxford University report

 

At Emotive, we leverage emotion to transform brands and businesses in ways that contribute, even just a little bit, to a better world for people. No mere paycheck can compare.

Creating a Brand That Resonates: 3 Grammy-Worthy Lessons from Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.”

Posted on by Nick Ott

Is your brand telling a story for now or a story forever? Take a lesson from pop music and learn how to create a brand that lets your customers feel like they “can be someone.”

Imagine a slightly different 2024 Grammy Awards. In this one, there’s still a comeback performance from a reclusive 1980s star, but instead of Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” alongside Luke Combs, it’s Billy Ocean singing “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.” Can you picture Taylor Swift singing along rapturously to his lyric: “Lady driver, let me take the wheel”?

Probably not, but why? Both “Fast Car,” and “…Get into My Car” were released in 1988 and Ocean’s was the bigger single that year, number 15 on the year-end singles charts versus 76 for “Fast Car.” So, why was it Tracy on the stage in 2024 instead of Billy?

Emotional resonance
While Billy Ocean still has his fans (I’m one), his singles are largely characterized as novelty hits: bright, catchy, quick hits of dopamine. If “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car,” were released today, we’d say it was written with engagement in mind. It could inspire a TikTok dance.

“Fast Car,” on the other hand, has only grown in popularity, becoming a staple cover of artists spanning generations and genres, all of whom want to do what that song does uniquely well: connect emotionally with their audience. It communicates the eternal human desires for escape and rebirth—desires that are universal and enduring. It gives a voice to people with those desires. In this respect, Tracy Chapman is capable of speaking for them on an emotional level.

At Emotive Brand, we create brands that aspire to deliver the emotional resonance “Fast Car” delivers, and believe there are a few things that any company can learn by connecting the songwriting process to the brand-building process.

1. Consider the emotional needs of your customers (not just their material needs)
“Fast Car” is a song with a story: its protagonist is a woman stuck in a cycle of poverty and struggling to care for an alcoholic father. While many people can empathize with that, not everyone can see themselves in it. “Fast Car” feels universal because it tells us the emotional needs of its protagonist, not just her material ones: wanting to belong, wanting to “be someone.” Nearly everyone knows what that feels like, regardless of circumstance.

Brands should do this too, regardless of industry or offering, because one way or another, to some degree or another, every buying decision is an emotional one. No matter how rational or materialistic your customers may seem at the moment of decision, they are human beings with human needs, goals, and emotions. If your offering helps your customers cut costs or make a business process more efficient, perhaps your brand is helping them advance their career or gain the respect of their peers. As we’ve recently said to one client, “even CFOs have feelings.”

2. Make your story timeless
A good story can always grab attention, but to endure, it needs to resonate beyond the moment. Tracy Chapman’s own brand was that of an “activist” singer (her second single was “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution”). She could have written “protest songs”: straightforward stories about the specific political and social issues of her day, but songs like “Fast Car” offer a different perspective, framing social issues through the lens of perennial, emotional desires.

Similarly, while your product or service may be meeting a need that is very much of the now, your customers’ most important needs are their aspirations: longer term goals that are often both primal and enduring. You do your brand an enormous disservice if you don’t identify those aspirations and connect your offering to that distant horizon. If you make plain to your customers how you can help them reach their goals, your brand can truly resonate.

3. Share the spotlight
As we’ve seen, for most listeners of “Fast Car,” the song isn’t about Tracy Chapman, or even about an unnamed protagonist; it’s about them. Instead of putting the spotlight exclusively on the singer of the song, “Fast Car” lets listeners hear themselves within its lyrics and makes them the hero of a shared narrative.

There are few more important lessons for any brand to learn. Even with a truly revolutionary, world-shaking offering, a brand is almost always better off being an enabler of heroic change than the hero or heroine making that change. Iconic consumer brands (and iconic musicians) have understood this for decades, but many B2B brands still struggle with it.

Today, many brands are built like a Billy Ocean hit, with more hook than pull. Whether that means confusing their product with their brand, or hyper-focusing on the tangible benefits they offer at the expense of the needs of their audience, they tell a story exclusively about themselves, and one their customers can’t see themselves in. But if you can create a brand like “Fast Car,” tapping into near-universal desires for things like belonging and significance, you’ll forge emotional bonds with your audience that will endure beyond that first attention-grabbing moment.

Redefining What it Means to be a Tech Branding Agency

Posted on by Emotive Brand

This year pushed us to refine how we work with high-growth tech companies to deliver brand positioning that resonates—tight budgets, big expectations, and the ever-present need to differentiate forced us to deliver smarter and stronger. The lessons we learned didn’t just challenge us—they made us better.

They sharpened how we deliver impact, aligned us even closer with our clients, and the outcomes? They speak for themselves. Here’s what we learned about speed, emotion, simplicity, and alignment—and how those lessons are driving real sustainable growth.

The Speed Trap
Speed is non-negotiable these days. Clients demand it, and we’ve gotten pretty good at delivering—getting them what they need, in the way they need it, and at the level of quality we’re known for. But here’s the thing: speed only works when it’s a team effort, and that means getting stakeholder engagement from the start.

What I’ve learned is this: you can’t wheel in your CEO at the end and expect them to be on board with your new brand positioning and strategy. If they’re part of the decision, they need to go on the journey with us. When that happens, speed isn’t just fast—it’s transformative. You get that unanimous, “Yes, let’s launch this” kind of moment, where the team is aligned and energized. And that alignment often leads to bigger budgets, more opportunities, and an even greater impact.

The irony? Speed doesn’t mean less input—it means more. It requires buy-in, collaboration, and executive involvement at every stage. When that’s in place, speed becomes a strategy for not just delivering fast but for delivering bold, game-changing brand transformation.

Mergers and Acquisitions is an Emotional Journey
M&A is often framed as a numbers game—valuations, synergies, integrations. But what I’ve learned is that mergers aren’t just strategic—they’re deeply emotional. You’re asking people to let go of what they know, trust new teams, and find their place in a completely reimagined structure and company culture.

Here’s the truth: getting the product architecture right is where it starts. It’s not just a technical exercise—it’s about helping people see how their work fits into something bigger. Driving internal engagement takes empathy, emotional intelligence, and a lot of patience. When leaders and teams go on that journey together, you can move past the fear and resistance that derail so many mergers and acquisitions.

When the product and brand architecture is clear, everything else—company culture, brand positioning, and go-to-market strategy—starts to align. But if you skip this step, the whole thing falls apart. The real work of M&A isn’t just building a unified company—it’s building trust in what comes next.

Emotion as a Strategic Catalyst
For years, emotion was dismissed as soft or secondary to logic. But this year, I saw that narrative change. Leaders are finally recognizing that emotion isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic force that drives brand growth, brand loyalty, and product innovation.

In B2B especially, emotion plays a critical role. It’s what builds trust, inspires confidence, and creates the kind of connection that sets your brand apart. Decisions in this space carry personal and professional risk—people don’t just want rational benefits, they need to feel like they’re making the right choice.

What I’ve learned is that emotion isn’t optional anymore. It’s how you differentiate in a crowded market. It’s how you connect with your team and customers on a deeper level. And it’s how you transform your brand from something people notice into something they believe in.

Great Work Comes From Great Partnerships
I’ve always believed trust is the foundation of great work, but this year reinforced just how important it is. The best projects weren’t just about deliverables—they were about partnerships built on trust and mutual respect.

When leaders let us in—when they trust us to challenge their thinking on brand strategy and positioning and push them toward their biggest ambitions to achieve sustainable growth—that’s when the magic happens. These partnerships didn’t end when the project wrapped—they stayed connected. They came back to us for advice, shared their wins, and asked for guidance on new challenges.

The takeaway? The best work happens when you stop treating the relationship as transactional. It’s not just about the results you deliver—it’s about the trust you build along the way.

The Hard Truth About Simplicity
Everyone says they want simplicity. Clients want clear brand positioning, differentiated product positioning, cohesive product and brand architecture, and straightforward brand narratives. But here’s the hard truth: simplicity isn’t hard because it’s complex—it’s hard because it means letting go.

Letting go of old narratives. Letting go of the way things have always been sold. Letting go of the familiar and embracing something new. That’s emotional—there’s fear in leaving behind what feels safe, even when it’s not working anymore.

But when you push through that resistance, simplicity becomes transformational. It sharpens your story, aligns your team, and makes your brand or platform truly customer-centric. Simplicity isn’t a shortcut—it’s a leap of faith. And when you take it, the impact is undeniable.

The hardest work isn’t about strategic frameworks or deliverables—it’s about getting to the heart of what matters. Simplifying complexity, building trust, and leaning into emotion aren’t easy, but they’re where real transformation happens.

It’s been a year

This year brought challenges and clarity. For that, I’m grateful—grateful to our team, our clients, and mostly to my ride-or-die, business partner, and best friend for navigating it all with me. She just knows how to make shit happen.

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other – they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that 

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep up awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

need for change

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

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

Integrating Company Cultures After a Merger or Acquisition

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

High M&A Activity

Mergers and acquisitions are at an all time high, with $4.7 trillion of global deals signed last year according to a recent M&A report by KMPG.

And although the payoff of a successful M&A is great, these are high risk deals. It’s not just about the financial gains. Reputations are on the line. Stakeholders observe nervously. And in order to ensure the expected return on investment is delivered, a great deal of planning around integrating company culture must go into the preparation.

Cultural Integration Issues

After an acquisition, the merger is a difficult undertaking – and often controversial. Employees may feel confused or unsure about what the future holds. And uncertainty can undercut the upsides of the deal.

When there’s a lack of communication, an incongruent cultural fit, or a poor integration plan, many mergers fail to positively impact the business – not delivering on the expected ROI. In fact, research has shown that around 70% of M&A fail to deliver their anticipated benefits because of “cultural issues.”

Because most M&A have financial, operational, or positioning motivations as the driver, many organizations fail to recognize culture as an influence that can derail the deal. And neglecting how a merger will affect your people can lead to many problems down the road.

Integrating Company Cultures Is Key to the Success of Your M&A

1. Communicate Early and Often

When people on the inside feel as though they are left in the dark, they are unlikely to jump on board with change. Transparency is key here. When your people come along on the journey and see and understand the vision for the future, they are more likely to support the integration effort.

In order to ensure internal buy-in, you need people to feel confident in the decision to merge companies. You also need them to feel secure in their job and valued in their position. You need employees on both sides of the merger to get on board with the change. Keeping everyone in the loop about the change ahead is an important first step.

2. Examine Cultural Differences

In order to establish common ground, you have to recognize and address gaps. Define each culture and map them next to each other. Where are they not aligned? Determining differences is key to figuring out what shifts need to be made and where you might run into problems. Be clear and direct about disparities so you can tackle them head on.

3. Define Your New Culture and Develop a Cultural Integration Plan

A company’s culture is made up of the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are shared among all people within your organization. Oftentimes, culture is something that is difficult to pin down and, as a result, leaders may steer away from clearly defining their culture.

However, it’s very important to define the culture you are trying to build. Leaders should be aligned and clear so they can succinctly articulate the new organization’s aspiration for the future and then behave accordingly.

So it’s important to put in place the measures and incentives that will fuel the behaviors that will then drive your culture. Dedicate the resources needed to create tools for facilitating cultural integration, measurement, and management.

4. Celebrate Change

In the end, cultural integration is about both sides adapting and celebrating the new culture that is born from the merger. This is a time of coming together and taking the best that both organizations have to offer. It’s an opportunity for growth—to get aligned, adopt new thinking, strengthen your culture, and move your business forward.

It’s a Process and Brand Strategy Can Help

Oftentimes, M&As require an investment in brand strategy to really ensure the expected ROI is delivered by employees. Don’t expect the cultural integration to happen overnight.

Dedicating the time and resources to developing and articulating your new brand will help enable both cultures to understand the opportunities of the merger. And creating a newly developed employer brand after a merger will help everyone get on board and aligned with the new brand and the future of an integrated culture.

With the right investment and focus on employees and culture, all employees will meaningfully embrace the changes required during the merger and, as a result, your business will thrive moving forward.

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

The Real Cost of Brand Transformation

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Oftentimes, branding is seen as just another expense. Another project that needs budgeting. Another to-do to check off the list. Additionally, a brand’s visual identity and its implementation are often seen the same way—but they shouldn’t be.

Branding is only costly to a company if the company doesn’t fully tap into the brand’s value. Likewise, if you leave your brand’s visual identity to flounder in a presentation deck, it remains an untapped value. Understanding the value of your brand and what its visual identity means is key to shifting the conversation from a business cost to its transformative value.

Symbol of Change

Before the introduction of the visual identity, the rebrand is just words on a page, insights explained, or a strategy outlined. People can’t visually see their brand in action. It hasn’t come to life. That’s why the visual identity is one of the most exciting phases of the brand strategy process. It’s the first time business leaders really get to see the strategy come to life, and it’s oftentimes exhilarating, empowering, and transformative for them.

This is where the visual identity becomes a symbol of change. It represents what’s to come for the organization. It shows how the brand will flourish in the future. It demonstrates growth potential, transformation, and exciting possibilities. It emotes the brand’s promise. Executives can finally visualize where their brand is headed, and this new frontier is intoxicating to watch unfold.

In a successful visual identity presentation, everyone in the presentation is on their feet. The room is filled with excitement and ideas are flowing. Everyone is imagining the look and feel in real-time.

The Cost

The difficulty is that before this stage, leaders often can’t fathom their budget because they haven’t seen their brand come alive yet. This is why it’s important to prepare them for this moment early on. Help them understand that a visual identity might change everything, and that advanced planning is needed to support the upcoming shifts of this wake-up call that’s right around the corner.

Approaches like a phased roll-out or touch-point conversation might help prepare them for discussions about what aspects of their brand might hold the most impact. What are the most important elements to implement first? What’s the sign of change for the media? What’s the most transformative aspect internally? This kind of prioritization will help them get ready for what’s to come.

More Value

The value of branding will transform your business. It will touch every aspect of your organization and, through the visual identity, everyone will be able to see a part of themselves in it. So, it’s critical that the brand—and visual identity—be valued from the start.

Plan for cost, but focus on value.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

For more reading on our point of view on branding, check out this post.

Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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”