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Tag: Brand Strategy

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.

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”

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

  • Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
  • Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
  • Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
  • Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
  • See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.  

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

Eight Questions to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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.

Eight Questions to Ask Yourself to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

  1. Does your company have a purpose that your employees live up to every day? Is it meaningfully activated in your corporate strategy, inspiring how your business behaves, driving your brand, and most importantly, emotionally resonating with your employees?
  2. Does your brand have a distinctive brand positioning that sets it apart from competitors?
  3. Have you defined the right category for your brand that is right for today and tomorrow?
  4. Do your brand and product messaging cut through the clutter and resonate with your target audiences beyond just features and benefits?
  5. Does your company have a corporate narrative that tells your story to all your target audiences in a clear, compelling way? Is it still aligned to the business strategy and vision for the future? Is everyone in the company able to tell the same story?
  6. Does your company deliver on a clear and compelling brand promise to customers, employees, shareholders, and the world that they experience in a meaningful way?
  7. Does your company communicate in a characteristic brand voice that’s consistently applied by your people at all levels?
  8. Does your company have a visual brand identity with clear guidelines for consistent use at every touchpoint?

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.

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

  • Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
  • Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
  • Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

This is a schematic that represents the different phases of our Fast Forward offering including the align & refine (immersion), diagnose & define (workshop), and develop & explore (deliver) phases

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel brands, cultures, and businesses forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon.

Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry.

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

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

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

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

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

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

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

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

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

Learn more about the power of a strong brand strategy and brand differentiation. Download our white paper, Transforming Your Brand.

 Download White Paper

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

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How to Get the Most Out of Strategic Messaging

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Traditional Messaging Isn’t Working

For as long as people have communicated, we’ve had messaging. Many of the most well-known messengers are religious figures — the usual suspects like Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus. In business, messaging has always been part of some corporate function like marketing, communications, or investor relations. Messaging is not going away. What’s changed is the way we communicate. We and other agencies have for years delivered messaging in a one-page, multilevel framework. While still useful, these one-page grids are no longer valuable tools on their own.

So we’re evolving.

Our clients are willing to take more risks than ever before. They want their messaging to sound conversational and reflect their brand’s personality. It must appeal to very short attention spans. And the messaging we provide must be useful from day one.

Make it Useful

If the client puts our messaging in a drawer at the end of a project, we’ve failed.

Strategic messaging is the scaffolding for all future communications. What we deliver to clients starts with a positioning statement, a one-sentence description of the part of the market a company owns, and often a value proposition. These ideas are foundational and never shared externally. The rest of what we deliver the clients put in action right away.

We write 10-, 50-, and 100-word versions of a company’s strategic message. Often, we also incorporate this content into a narrative that can run anywhere from 1-2 pages (think of that as a story of your business and why you matter.) In some cases, we add a manifesto that acts as a declaration or proclamation which energizes your employees and customers. More messages, more formats, more impact.

Go Beyond Strategy Alone

Corporate messaging isn’t as clean as it used to be. Today, product and brand lines blur, which means messaging isn’t just about your brand/company’s value proposition. This kind of messaging can’t come from the strategy or the communications department alone. Instead, it combines ideas from marketing, product development, and the executives’ vision. Even so, strategic messaging doesn’t read like a product brochure. Rather, it describes both why a company does what they do and how they do it.

Core Messages Drive Unification

Remember that messaging hierarchy we mentioned? It keeps messaging consistent and consistency drives relevance, awareness, and action. When you always return to that multileveled framework, you go to market with a consistent story. No matter the touchpoint, your audiences hear the same thing.

Often we come into a company to develop brand-level messaging when corporate messaging is already complete. We adhere to the existing core messages so that what we create doesn’t live in a vacuum but, instead, part of a greater narrative.

Audience Very-Specific Messaging

Your customers and your employees don’t have the same role in helping you achieve your strategy, so why talk to them in the same way? Once we’ve crafted general messaging, we also develop content tailored to specific audiences. But that’s just a starting point. Increasingly, we are pushing our clients to think about who they don’t want to attract. This can be tough because no one wants to limit their ambitions. However, we’ve seen that the more companies narrow their target, the more successful they are in attracting the people they really want. Once they connect with customers where product-market fit is strongest, they can expand.

Focus on Business Outcomes

Strategic messaging is worthless if it doesn’t help you drive revenue, increase profits, or become a bigger player in your industry. That’s why we don’t take our clients’ strategy as a given. We’ve found that the process of crafting strategic messaging is as important as the final deliverable. We make sure we build alignment around the strategy before ever move on with messaging.

We always focus first on a company’s business goals. We bring in sales and product management, not just marketing, into the discussion. Sales helps us understand the customer pain points while product management gives us an understanding of the direction of the product line.

Simple, Clear Language

It’s not just important what we write but how we say it. We use simple, clear language so that everyone can understand and share it. This means words that audiences will remember and connect with easily. We leverage the voice of the brand to write messaging that brings to life how your brand wants to make people feel. With strategic messaging in place, your brand is ready to live, talk, and engage with the people who matter most to your business.

Emotive Brand is always keen to keep pace with the needs of business. Positioning and messaging is something we take seriously. If you need help crafting your strategic messaging, give us a shout. If you have different opinions on what is required to develop strategic messaging, leave us a comment. We’d love to hear your thoughts as well.

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

Return on Meaning: Five Evaluation Criteria for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands Rooted in Meaning Win Big

Return on meaning for businesses and brands is a compelling notion. In today’s world, it’s important to reconsider the ways you matter to people that are authentic to your brand’s purpose in the larger world. Now is the time to return to core human needs and evaluate where your brand fits in. This is why savvy leaders are taking a different approach to brand strategy. They are embracing the ideals of purpose, empathy, and meaning. They are creating newer, deeper, and more enduring connections with the people vital to their brand’s success, both within and outside their organizations.

In this approach, the keys to success are honesty and authenticity. In other words, the meaningful claims your business makes needs to be absolutely true. They also need to be seen as empathetic in order to resonate with the people involved.

How Do You Identify the Roots of Your Brand’s Meaning?

Consider how your product, policies, and procedures add to individual and collective well-being, both for your customers, your employees, and the communities and world around you. We suggest you explore these five areas as you pursue what matters most about your brand.

1. Human Safety/Security

In what ways does your brand help people feel more comfortable in the world, improve their sense of protection, or otherwise reduce feelings of insecurity?

2. Human Connectedness

In what ways does your brand give people a stronger sense of community, provide better ways to connect and communicate, or otherwise reduce feelings of disconnectedness?

3. Human Personal Growth

In what ways does your brand help people grow in body, mind, and spirit, or otherwise reduce feelings of meaninglessness? And inspire action and growth?

4. Positive Social Contribution

In what ways does your brand improve collective well-being across society or otherwise reduce social decline?

5. Positive Environmental Impact

In what ways does your brand work to ensure better lives for future generations or otherwise reduce negative environmental impacts?

Your brand may not be able to draw upon all five of these roots of meaning. At the same time, it may have multiple ways of creating meaning based on a single root. Regardless, the test is always how true the supporting evidence is and how well you see it through the eyes of others.

A Refreshing and Gratifying Audit

You should feel proud and gratified after such an audit. At its best, an exercise like this will reveal how your brand generates meaning in ways you never before considered. When you use these meaningful attributes to shape your brand strategy, amazing things happen. Suddenly, you’re able to elevate your story, connect on deeper levels, and fundamentally change the way people think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

As such, more positive energy is created within and around your brand. This energy attracts the prospects you need to grow and move closer to your vision for the world you do business in. It gives your current customers good reasons to become long-term loyalists and advocates of your brand. It draws in the recruits you need to grow and innovate. It aligns, engages, and motivates your employees. It gives your leadership new depth and purpose.

Return on Meaning: A New Path Forward

By identifying your brand’s deep-rooted meaning, you set the stage for a more competitive presence, a stronger organization, and a better future. This is because meaning naturally generates more meaning. As you embrace the meaningful goodness of your brand, you and your team are inspired to build upon it and to develop new roots of meaning.

Step back from your daily pressures. Walk in the shoes of others. Go back to the basics of core human needs. Gaze deeply into your brand and let it reveal the roots of meaning that will help your brand thrive now and over time.

Download our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Are you interested in learning more about how your brand can have a stronger return on meaning? If so, contact us at Emotive Brand.