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Why All the Talk About Purpose and Brand Strategy?

A HBR blog post by Graham Kenny details the difference between the increasingly popular idea of purpose and the traditional corporate drivers of vision, mission, and values.

His conclusion echoes our beliefs about the role and impact of a company purpose:

“If you’re crafting a purpose statement, my advice is this: To inspire your staff to do good work for you, find a way to express the organization’s impact on the lives of customers, clients, students, patients — whomever you’re trying to serve. Make them feel it.”

Mr. Kenny’s closing statement, “make them feel it”, goes to the heart of what it is to be meaningful as a company or brand. Meaningful ideas take the impact that you have on people beyond the cognitive level. Meaning goes much deeper by touching our universal, innate, and deeply-held aspiration to do good and worthy things in our lives.

Purpose changes the way people think, feel, and act

The feelings that flow from meaningful connections are profound, yet they often operate below the surface of consciousness. As such, people may not be readily able to talk about these feelings, but there’s no question that meaning resonates within us all, and has the power to change the way we think, feel, and act.

A strong and compelling purpose helps employees better understand, work to, and feel personally accountable for the company’s vision, mission, and values. Think of purpose as the energy that will make those elements work more efficiently.

Purpose leads to significant business outcomes

Energizing your workplace through purpose has further benefits:

– Purpose-led leaders and managers work with greater passion and in a more aligned and coordinated fashion.

– Engaged and motivated employees work with greater levels of collaboration, self-initiative, and innovation.

– Customer relationships prosper from more energized and purposeful interactions with the brand and its people.

– Sales, marketing, and advertising becomes more effective as they align more to the many outcomes that flow from the brand as it actively pursues its purpose.

What does this have to do with your brand strategy?

Why forego the beneficial energy that a purpose can bring to your company or brand? Why miss this opportunity to matter more to your employees? Why not use a purpose to elevate your brand above the competition by focusing on meaningful outcomes?

Purposeless is no longer an option for brands seeking to thrive and prevail.

For more information about how to transform your brand for the 21st century, please download our white paper.

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 Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Why Every CEO Should Pursue a Purpose Beyond Profit

It’s textbook management practice to formalize a company’s “mission, vision and values.”

And while these are important steps in helping form a direction and way of being for a company, many CEOs are nonetheless challenged with a litany of business issues:

  • Unengaged employees
  • An inability to attract the new talent needed
  • Customer defection
  • Lack of marketplace differentiation
  • Dissatisfied shareholders

This list goes on and on, doesn’t it?

Behind each of these business challenges is a big question: How can my business matter more to people?

When your business truly matters to people, they are far more likely to do what you need them to do.

They work with enthusiasm. They line up to join your organization. They become loyal advocates of your company. They put you at the head of the competitive field. They invest in your future.

How do you get your business to matter to people?

Modern businesses identify a “Purpose Beyond Profit”.

They step back and look at what they’ve been doing with fresh eyes.

They distill all the good that is buried under the layers, the data, and the anxiety.

They think about what people are really connecting to these days: companies that are doing good things, making work worthwhile, shaping a better future, and being a good citizen.

They then create a purpose that bridges what the company does well, and what people want from the company.

Operating on a higher, more emotional level than the obvious and the required business goal of making a profit, a Purpose Beyond Profit lifts spirits, engages minds, and touches hearts.

Easier said than done.

The biggest challenge for a CEO and team is to get the necessary perspective needed to sift through their complex business situation, and to arrive at the “truths” about the company that will fuel a meaningful, impactful, and hard-working Purpose Beyond Profit.

Which is why we have developed a method of helping companies reveal the hidden meaning of what they do, and to bring that to the surface through a compelling purpose beyond profit. We do this through emotive branding which is our brand strategy methodology.

We also help activate workplaces and marketplaces around a company’s Purpose Beyond Profit – with the goal of changing the way people see, think about, and act on behalf of the company.

CEOs who want their companies to be stronger today, and better fit for the future, will define – and heartily embrace- a Purpose Beyond Profit.

Want to understand how we help CEO’s and their teams to implement new strategies? Download the paper below:

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Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Are We in the Age of Meaning?

In our white paper, The Age Of Meaning, we explore the challenges and opportunities this new era presents to business and brand strategy.

Referring to economist Umair Haque‘s contention that we’ve left the “age of opulence” – a time of hyper-consumerism based on the mantra of “bigger, faster, cheaper, now” – we make the point that the age of meaning didn’t suddenly appear.

Continue reading “Are We in the Age of Meaning?”

What is Emotive Design?

Emotive design is a component of emotive branding that engages people in a focused way that strives to evoke the specific feelings the brand seeks to own.

Using color, lines, shape, form, texture, light – and nothingness – designers create both passive and interactive experiences that resonant with the brand’s emotional space.

Emotive design is not overtly emotional design. Operating at a subtle and subconscious level, these design cues work to reinforce and enhance other dimensions of the way people interact with the brand.

Continue reading “What is Emotive Design?”

Leadership Is What Leadership Means

Gianpiero Petriglieri is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, a regular contributor to the HBR blog, and a prolific and insightful tweeter. Indeed, the title of this old, but relevant post is taken from one of his tweets promoting his piece on HBR, “There is no shortage of leaders.”

Professor Petriglieri’s main point is that the methods and goals of leadership are misplaced.  He suggests that the current narrow view of leadership development and practice is falling short of what’s needed in today’s world.

“There is no shortage of leadership at all.”

“There are plenty of strong leaders. Eagerly and effectively pursuing the goals they are selected and rewarded to pursue—in the ways they are trained and expected to.”

“Those goals are simply not aligned with the changes most of us wish to see, and their pursuit benefits only narrow circles on whose approval those leaders depend.”

A crisis of purpose

The result of these misplaced leadership methods and goals is nothing short of a crisis of purpose, according to Professor Petriglieri.

“There is no shortage of leaders, and perhaps not even a crisis of leadership. There is a shrinking of collective imagination, a crisis of purpose—and much leadership development, with its overemphasis on leaders’ skills and styles, is complicit in it.”

“When it focuses on skills alone, the leadership-industrial complex demonstrates the same self-interested narrow mindedness of the leaders it chastises. The emphasis on leading right lets us avoid the harder question—what we are leading towards.”

“While leadership remains a synonym of getting our way while conforming to the latest etiquette manual, we shall continue cultivating stylish instrumentality. To stop doing so, we must help leaders help us redefine the expectations, norms, and structures we labor within—and the ends they are designed to pursue.”

What does this say about your leadership style?

Have you focused solely on developing more effective skills and styles of leadership? Have you allowed yourself to work only in service of the goals others have selected for you, and for the rewards they offer when you achieve them? Have you let your sense of purpose and meaning take a back seat?

Little wonder if you have, given the pressures on performance in today’s world. But, given what your leadership can mean in this world – to your bosses, your followers, society, and yourself – leading “right” isn’t enough.

Ask yourself the most important leadership question, “What is my purpose beyond just doing what is expected?” Consider how by raising your sights, opening your heart, and freeing your mind, you can answer the question you’ve been avoiding: “What are you leading towards?” Finally, rethink your approach to leadership with this thought: “Leadership is what leadership means.”

For our White Paper on Successful Leaders for the 21st Century, please download below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland based brand strategy and creative agency

Meaningful Leaders Resolution #1 for 2015

Lead by proudly, confidently and passionately proclaiming a new destination for your customers, your employees and your business.

Going beyond profit, declare your intention to do well by doing good.

Give everyone the answer to their burning question, “Why?”. Why does your business exist? Why is that good? Why does that matter?

Continue reading “Meaningful Leaders Resolution #1 for 2015”

The Purpose-Pivot

Why smart brands are adding meaningful metrics

We recently came across a Huffington Post article, “Meaning is the new money,” that posits the notion of the  purpose-pivot.  According to the author, Blanca Rothschild, the term is a combination of “pivot” (being capable of turning around fast based on new knowledge, from Eric Ries’s book “Lean Startup”), and “purpose” (working to an ambition that transcends the goal of making a profit). In summary, a purpose-pivot is an idea that is “applied in a multi-dimensional way across all stakeholders, and involves redesigning HOW we succeed to include metrics of happiness, well-being, community, and the environment. Where traditionally a business would often choose to pivot toward a financial goal, instead it would now base the pivot on alignment with its defined higher purpose, while still keeping in mind the bottom line.”

As such, a purpose pivot is about adding new metrics to your current, financially-based, measures of success. These metrics help you forge meaningful connections between what your business does, and what is important to the people it touches.

Nothing that matters is easy

Rothschild notes that a purpose-pivot, however important to future success, is not an easy move to make. She offers six wise pieces of advice for leaders considering such a change:

1. It takes courage.

It may feel like the biggest risk you have ever taken in business. Depending on the size of the business or your levels of attachment, it can feel like turning around the titanic. Or free-falling waiting for a parachute to open.

2. It takes grit and determination.

Get ready for a journey. You will be learning new ways of thinking, new language and will be testing emerging ideas in real time in your own business or career. This is commercial innovation in action – there’s no text book just yet.

3. Step into purposeful leadership.

What happens in a purpose pivot is that your vision becomes vital to getting your team on board, and you will need to lead and inspire your team in ways that share your authentic mission, vision, and purpose. This will be new to most leaders who have been used to leading with financial and quarterly goals at the fore.

4. It takes authenticity, humility and trust in yourself.

You may feel naked in your first meeting sharing your new ideas, but you will also feel exhilarated at the freedom and joy that comes with aligning to a higher purpose, and seeing the purpose ignite your team.

5. You need to be married to your purpose.

You must be committed, really and completely, to the purpose and the pivot. There is no turning back. You may be tempted by shiny gold nuggets and easy wins that will steer you off track, but you need to stay committed.

6. Forget about work-life balance.

Integration is your new mantra. You are now actively seeking ways to bring energy and creativity to everything you do in work and play, so you don’t have to wait until you retire, or the weekend, before you have a joyful and meaningful life.

Making a purpose-pivot through brand strategy

When considering the idea of a purpose-pivot, a natural starting point and delivery vehicle is your brand strategy. When your brand strategy is built upon a platform of empathy, purpose, and emotion, it will integrate the idea of purpose-beyond-profit into your brand. When it includes ideas on workplace behavior, it shows you how to evolve your products, processes, policies, and procedures in ways that create the meaningful connections your purpose enables.

React to new knowledge: the traditional financially-led strategies are giving way to purpose-led strategies. To thrive in the future: it’s time to pivot with purpose.

For additional information, please download our latest white paper

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

Brand Strategies That Change Capitalism for the Better

According to philosopher Alain de Botton, Facebook thrives because it taps into an overlooked and underserved human need: the desire to have better relationships. So says a TechCrunch article recapping a recent speech he gave on the virtues of modern business.

TechCrunch correspondent Natasha Lomas summed up the Facebook story this way:

“Whether Facebook is actually serving that need well is a whole other question, but the appetite it taps into is undeniable. And de Botton argues that other core human needs continue to be drastically underserved by the modern business community — providing a fertile opportunity for startups to fashion and forge businesses that are successful exactly because they serve the goal of increasing our wellbeing.”

According to de Botton, business needs to move further up Maslow’s pyramid of needs:

“You just have to start with human need. What is it that really makes people happy? How we relate to others. The single greatest contributor to people’s wellbeing is what sort of relationships they are in. And we are hopeless at relationships. Think of Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs, at the bottom you’ve got material needs, as you climb up towards self actualization, meaning, friendship, connection etc. I would simply say that more of the economy needs to go further up Maslow’s pyramid.”

Just scratching the surface

de Botton sees huge business opportunities that are yet overlooked and underserved:

“There is a back to basics view that suggests that capitalism is sort of running out of steam because we’ve got everything that we need… I think that’s completely wrong. The world economy will only, as it were, have done its job when everything is perfect. There are so many needs which we haven’t yet learned to satisfy and a full economy will be one which properly delivers happiness across so many areas. At the moment we are just scratching the surface. We have managed to satisfy people’s basic material needs… but we’re unhappy, we’re squabbling, we’re looking for meaning. These are all businesses waiting to be born. Waiting for the ingenuity of entrepreneurs to harness human unhappiness and connect it up to profit.”

The role of brand strategy in transforming capitalism

Modern businesses need modern brand strategies that blend empathy, purpose, and emotion. Empathy as a cultural attribute naturally leads people to explore Maslow’s pyramid of human needs and to see how the assets of their company can be better matched to solving the problems and maximizing the opportunities those needs present. A purpose-beyond-profit, encapsulated in a brand promise, helps lift the sights of a company and its people, by engaging everyone in a meaningful and noble ambition to improve well-being. By recognizing the power of emotion, and learning how to modify products, processes, and policies so they evoke more positive, motivating, and gratifying feelings, purposeful brand strategies change the game of business, and help achieve de Botton’s vision of future capitalism:

“Capitalism has taken a real bashing over the last few years, is in deep trouble as a concept, assailed from all sides. Where we’re aiming to get to is a good version of business, a better version of capitalism.”

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.