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Tag: Brand Strategy

Business Growth: Steps to Success for the Mid-Market

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Leveraging new data about business growth from the National Center for the Middle Market, Emotive Brand identifies three key factors that make all the difference.

Business growth is always good. But sustained, consistent growth is always better.

Data from the National Center for the Middle Market shows that the best indicator of company’s financial future is not how fast it grows, but how often it grows.

Those that expand incrementally are more apt to survive, thrive, and outperform. Companies that grow consistently are more adept at aligning their organizations’ people and practices around what can seem to be competing priorities:

  1. They execute effectively in the present. Growth companies get today’s business done.
  2. They are more agile. The have processes that help them evolve quickly and shed unproductive practices, ideas, models, and attitudes that have lost their relevance.
  3. They consistently originate more fresh ideas and convert them into new sources of savings, differentiation, and profits. They innovate continuously.

These growing companies display key differences from their stagnant or sporadic growth peers. Unlike firms that stagnate, they do not attribute their fate to external challenges, such as the loss of a major customer, shifts in customer needs, or organizational challenges.

Rather, they focus on delivery factors including innovation, process improvements, and restructuring. They focus on the fulfillment or execution of their purpose-infused vision.

Our white paper captures key findings from interviews, client engagements, and extensive data review in a succinct white paper entitled “Purpose: The Pathway to Sustained Growth.” We invite you to learn about the practical steps you can take to achieve consistent, sustainable growth.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand brings more than a decade of work developing purpose-led business and brand strategies. Our team works with c-suite leaders at high-growth startups, global enterprise technology companies, consulting and professional services firms, and with mid-market companies.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm helping CEOs and their business thrive.

Do a Company’s Vision and Mission Statements Have Expiration Dates?

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Vision and Mission

We probably don’t need to convince anyone that having a vision and mission matters. They give you a North Star, help you focus on a goal, and act as a check for your strategic decisions. But how long should a vision and mission stay intact? At what point should you change your mission and vision?

Like many brand strategy decisions, it depends. At Emotive Brand, we believe a company should update their mission when it doesn’t match their strategy. Few would argue with this point, right? What’s more difficult than deciding if you should change your mission, though, is how it should change. When we work with clients, we develop missions that are inspirational, aspirational, and can stand the test of time.

Let’s talk first about the definitions. A mission is a tangible goal that can be used to organize teams around products and services to meet the goal. A vision, in contrast, is a company’s destination and unifying principle.

We like to share NASA’s vision and mission with clients because they both map so well to these definitions:

NASA Vision: “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

NASA Mission: “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and bring new knowledge and opportunities back to Earth. Support growth of the Nation’s economy in space and aeronautics, increase understanding of the universe and our place in it, work with industry to improve America’s aerospace technologies, and advance American leadership.”

NASA had another mission previously – one we actually prefer to share for its simplicity: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.” So why the change? The latest mission statement was updated after the 2016 election. The new administration likely wanted to take ownership over the strategy and reflect the Trump Administration’s pro-business stance and an America-first agenda. The vision has evolved, too, but isn’t so far away from what NASA stated as their vision in 2004, “To improve life here, to extend life to there, to find life beyond,” and also similar to what NASA stated in 2014, “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

While a vision – like NASA’s – usually remains stable for a long period of time, missions change more frequently.

How long can a mission last? Three years is likely too short of time, but 20 years may be too long to keep the same mission. Of course, when your mission no longer describes your business, isn’t believable, or doesn’t reflect the current management’s goals, you’re ready for something new. Changing a mission is acceptable and common. And as the NASA example shows, strong organizations change their missions all the time.

Ready to get started?

Here are some tips to make sure you aren’t revisiting your vision and mission exercise too soon:

Make it Aspirational

We recently worked with a company that wanted to move from a product focus to a solution focus. Even though the shift was still very much in progress, the company already knew the direction where they were headed. Changing their mission allowed them to be more aspirational and communicate their new focus both internally and externally.

Give Yourself Some Runway

It’s a balancing act to pick a mission that can work for today and tomorrow without cutting off possibilities or narrowing your focus too much. A great mission flexes with the future. For instance, we developed a mission for one of our clients, a new company offering food allergy treatment. While the company eventually may offer its services to adults, today they focus on children. We made sure their mission statement didn’t tie them to a specific audience and kept the door open to a broader market.

Do More than Describe – Create Excitement

Your mission’s goal is as much about describing your company’s reason for being as it is about firing up your employees. Missions that are solely descriptive fall flat. You want to communicate the role you will have – be it the industry leader, the market’s convener, or the company creating the most sophisticated technology. When you put a stake in the ground, you create excitement externally and among your employees.

Keep it Simple

Your mission should always be on the minds of your employees and well-understood by the rest of the world. If it is too long or complicated, it’s hard to remember and support. (Read NASA’s current mission above again if you don’t believe us.) Simplicity isn’t easy. In the process of writing your mission, you’ll likely throw away many, many options but, trust us, it is worth it.

Vision and mission development is hard work. While it is an interesting process and can bring a company together, it requires significant investment. When you create your vision and mission with its utility and longevity in mind, you ensure you don’t repeat the process again too soon. And if you are looking for help, do let us know.

 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

Enabler Brands Are Inspiring, Too!

Posted on by Chris Ames

Disruptor vs. Enabler Brands

These days, disruptor brands get all the attention. Companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber have each skyrocketed into popularity by rattling the industries they came from. We get it. There’s something inherently inciting, even American, about the idea of taking down the big guys with your off-kilter vision of the future. It’s easy to root for.

But here’s the thing about trailblazers — if everyone blazes their own unique trail, customers are faced with a dizzying network of singular (and often incompatible) solutions. In the course of one day, a person might bounce back and forth between ten different technologies, all of which claim to take the hassle and complexity out of life. I want to find a photo, but I’m not sure if it’s on my phone, my external hard drive, or one of my various clouds. Have you seen that popular new show? It’s exclusively on one of the streaming networks — but not the one you have. 

Don’t Downplay the Power of Unification

More and more, we believe there’s a strong case to be made for the power of enabler brands. The ability to bring everything together in a way that’s secure, contextual, and delightful is nothing short of a magic trick in this ever-shifting technological landscape.

In our work in the B2B sector, too often we see enabler brands limit the inspirational nature of their work. Whether it’s customer case studies, presentation decks, or collateral design, enabler brands can sing with the same sparkling brilliance as B2C disruptors.

While every company has its own unique challenges, here are some general thoughts on how enabler brands can elevate their impact.

Hone in on the results of the technology, not the technology itself.

Granted, your technology needs to be world-class and should always have a technical click-through for the nitty-gritty. But at the highest level, people are more interested in what new worlds you’re opening for them. That’s your role: to engineer what’s possible. Think of Dropbox’s recent redesign. They went from just a place to store your files to a living workspace that brings teams and ideas together.

How does this look in practice? Look at the imagery in your decks. What are people seeing? Is it moments of authentic human connection that wouldn’t be possible without your radiant technology? Or is it computer generated graphics and stock photography? During the next big conference, which one do you think will unite your team more?

Productivity is its own kind of delight.

Most enterprise tools aim to improve productivity. That might mean managing information, storing data, tracking issues, sharing updates, whatever you need to get the job done. But just because something is functional, that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful. Look at Slack. They have taken something often regarded as a chore — communicating with your co-workers — and made it, dare I say, fun? On their design blog, they discuss the importance of bringing humanity into the product. By putting people (not features) first, they have built a brand people love to experience.

Building a community is more rewarding than growing users.

As Scott Cooper writes on his blog, “The Changing Role of Brands,” enabler brands have the unique opportunity to empower the communities behind the technology. “Look at your audience with new eyes, in terms of community,” says Cooper. “Listen for the ideas that they believe in deeply or identify with. Let go of any preconceptions about your roles as a marketer and the relationship your brand has with people. Now ask yourself: how you can contribute meaningfully?”

When building your customer success stories, ask yourself what communities are truly benefiting from your technology? How can you champion their voices? There’s nothing inherently emotive about a 3-D printer, but whether it’s creating prosthetic limbs or affordable housing, people are using them in inspirational and innovative ways every day.

The biggest mistake you can make is thinking these efforts are somehow separate from the real work of your technology. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: people make decisions with their hearts. Investing in the human aspects of your brand is not fluff: it’s a holistic way to equip your sales team with better tools, attract and retain top talent, and foster a healthier, more productive culture. Instead of giving your team something to work on, you give them something to work toward.

So, enablers, remember this. Disruptors will always hog the spotlight, but sometimes nothing is more exciting than being given the right environment to thrive.

Aligning Business Strategy to Brand Strategy for Long-term Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Planning for Tomorrow

We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning brand and business strategy. But many leaders dismiss the business strategy as something necessary for the brand strategy. However, without understanding where the business is going, the brand can’t help the business grow in strategic ways.

Aligning Leadership

It’s obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. But gaining clarity on the business strategy can’t happen in a silo. You can’t develop a coherent brand strategy without internal alignment around the business strategy. That means bringing together the product, engineering, operations, sales, marketing, and HR leaders alongside the CEO to align on the direction of the business.

Aligning executives around where the business is headed helps us create the right brand strategy to achieve the strategic goals for the business strategy. Facilitating intensive executive interviews and running workshops within the leadership team goes a long way. With clarity around the business strategy, we are in a better position to ensure that the brand strategy we develop is tightly and strategically aligned to business goals and objectives.

What Your Business Strategy Should Answer

It’s important that when aligning leaders around a shared and articulated business strategy, you answer the following questions. The answers to these questions help us do the strategic work for you.

  • What are the short- and long-term goals for the business? Is there an exit strategy? A merger or acquisition in the future?
  • What are the revenue and growth expectations? Are there specific target revenue goals the board is looking for? Your investors? Wall Street?
  • What is the growth strategy? What is your pricing model? Are you selling products or solutions?
  • What’s the human capital plan for achieving the desired business goals? Does that involve recruiting a different and higher level team in order to execute?
  • What is the product road map? Are you entering into new markets? Developing new products? What are you building vs. buying to enhance your product offering?
  • Is your business set up in the right ways to achieve your goals and objectives? Do you need to shift your organizational structure? Are you ready to hire in a C-suite team? What do they need from the brand?
  • How should you allocate resources in order to accomplish these goals?

These questions are integral for shaping the brand strategy – helping to guide your business toward its goals and objectives in the most efficient manner.

Clear Goals Enable a Clear Business Strategy

With the plan for the future of the business clarified, the brand strategy will answer:

  • What category do you fit into?
  • How do you define market fit?
  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What is your positioning in the marketplace?
  • Who are your top target audiences?
  • What is the value proposition?
  • In what ways is your brand unique?
  • How does your brand look and feel?
  • What voice does your brand speak in?

Business strategy and brand strategy need to work together. Aligning the brand strategy to your business strategy makes your brand better positioned for success. As a result, you will differentiate your brand and make it more meaningful. Defining a clear business strategy makes it easier to create a roadmap that is tailored toward your brand’s short- and long-term growth.

And most importantly, leaders who see the value in sharing their business strategy and long-term vision for their business will get far more value and a stronger ROI from a brand strategy.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

You may appreciate the following post on Developing a Go-to-Market Strategy.

To Every Marketing VP: How to Talk About Brand so Your CEO Will Listen

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

The Role of VP of Marketing – It’s Not Easy

Is VP of Marketing one of the hardest corporate jobs? We think so. As a Marketing VP, you have a set of responsibilities that varies dramatically day-to-day – and company to company. You touch every area of an organization and engage with almost every member of the leadership team to solve your business’s most pertinent problems. People look to you to drive demand gen campaigns, build awareness for products and the overall brand, support sales teams, support the company’s HR, and fuel recruitment efforts. And, of course, no technology marketing job is complete if you aren’t working to get included – and/or maintain your place – in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Even if you do all of these things well, though, nothing matters if you don’t have a strong brand strategy. Your brand strategy connects your work in marketing to the business strategy. It provides a backbone to everything you do. It explains what you do, why you matter, and what people should expect from you. If you don’t have a strong brand strategy, you risk confining yourself to the role of executor, not an essential member of the company’s leadership.

Whether you use an outside agency or bring together a team within your company, first off, you’ll need to convince the CEO to invest in the brand development process. We’ve found that this can be the most difficult step in developing your brand strategy because CEOs often don’t understand it! You mention “brand strategy” and you hear:
“We have a logo,” or, “I like our color scheme,” or “PR’s doing a great job getting us press.”

Maybe your CEO has had a bad experience with a branding project – and wants to avoid more of the same in the future. They respond to you with something like this:

“A brand strategy workshop? I don’t want to tell people my spirit animal!”

So How Do You Get Around CEO Misconceptions About Brand Strategy?

First, you need to explain that a brand strategy is just that, a strategy. It describes why and how you do what you do. It creates meaningful and emotional connections between the brand and both internal and external audiences. One of the most important elements of brand strategy is positioning. Positioning is about separating your company from your competitors, telling the market where you stand as a brand, and explaining the part of the market that you will own.

Then, depending on what you are trying to accomplish, here’s how you should talk about the business problems your brand strategy project solves:

  • Demand Gen: A strong brand will differentiate you from your competitors and convert leads
  • Go-to-market Strategy: When you’ve got a great brand story to tell – crisp and interesting – you can increase customer awareness. You develop pull for your brand and drive sales.
  • Recruiting and Retention: When you purposely build emotion into your brand, you create the potential for not just customers but also current and prospective employees to opt in.

Language Matters: Talk Business

For example, if the project you want to invest in will drive all marketing initiatives for the year, explain to the CEO that your “repositioning” project takes a new cut at the company’s go-to-market strategy, helps to differentiate the product, and increases productivity of the channel and grow sales.

If you want to do an employer brand project and must convince your company’s Head of People or HR, talk about “internal alignment”,“culture”, and“behavior”, and how your work will ultimately reduce turnover and recruiting costs. 

Though it sounds counterintuitive, when you take the word “brand” out of the conversation and focus on the business problem, you speak in a language that a non-marketing person can understand. You also introduce accountability – solutions to business problems have measurable and reliable results. When you use business terms to sell your brand project, you’ll have an easier time reaching your audience and, ultimately, be more successful.

Emotive Brand a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

You may also like this post about aligning business strategy and brand strategy for long term growth.

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive and Transformational Technologies

Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, iOT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams?

As an agency, we work with many tech clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition. And while many have worked tirelessly to build the best technology in their realm, they struggle with how to position and message their product or solution to their target audiences.

Messaging for Disruptive and Transformational Technology is Hard

Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. Discussing features and benefits isn’t enough. In order to be truly disruptive, these companies need to change the perception of what is possible. Their messaging needs to articulate why potential customers should believe in their solution and how the technology will enable a different future. As such, B2B messaging needs to:

  • Articulate that there is a problem with the status quo of today
  • Ignite a shift in perception around about why customers should believe in a transformational way of thinking
  • Position the product or solution in a way that both rationally and emotionally articulates the value proposition directly to key target audiences
  • Clearly show audiences how your offering can transform their way of doing business

These are challenges we often see our clients having a hard time knowing how to integrate brand-level messages that center on the “why” piece of messaging the story. Instead, they lead with the “what” and “how.” When things are so complicated and are so transformational in nature, the messaging needs to be holistic in nature and incorporate the entire story – a story centered around the customer, not the technology itself. This departure from product takes courage.

Our role involves helping our clients make the complex simple. We find a way to unpack the technology and what it enables customers to do, and put it in more human terms. We make it easy for people to understand how the technology will help their business be more successful. Even the most innovative technology in the world will never see the light of day if people don’t understand know how or why to buy it.

The Role of B2B Messaging

To be successful today, tech companies have a lot to achieve. Selling product, influencing prospects, inspiring investors, building categories, building market share, and driving revenue. Marketing teams are on the hook to deliver meaningful and differentiated messaging platforms to help support sales and ensure the brand presents a unique offering. This means B2B brands need a strong narrative and compelling messaging in place to cut through the noise.

In our work with high-growth tech companies, we’ve seen first-hand how the role of messaging can drive change. Because of this experience, it has become more important than ever to get it right. There is a growing need to differentiate complicated technology products into easy to see “value” in the form of solutions that meet target audience needs.

Seems easy? Not so much. Much of our work is alongside CEOs who come from strong engineering backgrounds. They feel immense pride in the products they have worked so hard to engineer and develop. And naturally, they want messaging to lead with product. They see features and benefits as the only way forward.

However, we know this isn’t the only way. My background is in selling technology. I know first-hand what sales teams need to be successful, and I see the role of messaging as critical to the sales organization’s success. I have sold technology on three continents and bring this sales-led approach to every client engagement by adding a unique of understanding technology, how to position it, and how to create a brand narrative and messaging – messaging that addresses the big idea of why the technology matters while demonstrating how it solves a customer’s business problems.

That’s why, at Emotive Brand, we believe strong B2B messaging is about hitting the sweet spot between brand, sales, and marketing in a way that excites, resonates, and activates buyers.

Getting it Right

Getting messaging right is a real challenge. Most often, messaging is an output of a larger brand strategy. As such, it has to crystalize what you do, why you’re better, and what you can do that no one else can. It’s not easy to articulate these values to your target audiences in both rational and emotional ways that activate them to do something.

It’s old news that a lot of B2B messaging – especially within the tech world – sounds the same. But there is a larger problem at hand – a problem we’ve seen happening for a while now. A lot of messaging used by B2B companies isn’t aligned with what the customers or the businesses they are trying to reach really value. What companies are missing is the articulation of something more than features and benefits: true opportunity, values, and meaning.

Supporting Marketing and Sales

We’ve talked again and again about the role brand strategy plays in supporting and driving business strategy. So when the time comes in the brand strategy process to develop messaging, it needs to align and support two major functions within a company: Marketing and Sales.

It’s about driving two workflows within a company. Marketing needs B2B messaging to build out a go-to-market strategy and create sales enablement programs. Sales needs messaging to know how to talk to customers, position the product or solution, and close deals. If the messaging isn’t strong enough, marketing teams struggle to fill the funnel and convert leads. Sales has a hard time responding to RFPs and closing deals. In short, it’s detrimental to both teams’ success.

Smart B2B messaging can drive marketing and sales forward, positioning you to better reach and connect with the businesses who matter to your success. To do so, make it:

1. Customer-centric

A shift needs to happen from product-centric to customer-centric. This means increased focus on articulating the valuable, unique opportunities you can offer your target audiences. In the B2C world, it’s easy to focus on consumers.

The mistake a lot of B2B companies are making today is thinking that the businesses they are trying to reach are only making rational business decisions. And while B2B does require a high level of rationale, it’s important to remember that there’s also a lot of emotions at stake for B2B buyers. Many businesses today feel that they have an important to role to play. They are mindful of cost, aware of how things are going to play together, and passionate about finding the right solutions fit to their business.

2. Research-led

In our client work, the tightest and most meaningful messaging we’ve developed for clients has involved some level of research – both quantitative and qualitative.

There’s a lot of value in talking to people one-on-one. It gives our team the ability, as a third party, to gain direct access to customers, prospects, and even lost deals to understand the audience’s needs first-hand. This level of empathy enables B2B messaging that can truly connect with people – with their rational needs on the right emotional dimensions. That’s why getting to the heart of their motivations, pain points, and needs is critical and can be the difference between thriving and failing.

3. Top-down

Like many strategic elements, messaging has to start at the top. This means the leadership teams must be involved. Moving messaging beyond features and benefits is a process, and key leaders have to buy into a more customer-centric approach or it will never be fully embraced. 

Once top execs are on board, they can work to align the sales and marketing teams at the highest level. This reinforces the messaging systems you’ve built by ensuring that people are talking about your business in ways that align with it across people and platforms.

The sales force is then equipped to utilize the B2B messaging in powerful, dynamic ways. They become more willing to provide feedback to marketing about what is and isn’t working. The collaboration between these two groups makes both the messaging stronger and the impact of the brand stronger. Driving ROI and sales.

B2B Messaging as a Driver of Business

Messaging can drive brand awareness, equity, and buying decisions by bringing your value proposition to life for your key audiences. With strong B2B messaging in place, your business can then develop a powerful corporate narrative that brings all aspects of the business, brand, and vision together.

In B2B, messaging can be a vital solution in humanizing your brand and business. It can make it easier for your sales and marketing team to connect with your future clients in important ways that will fuel your business forward. The transition from solely rational to a blend of both emotional and rational can be a challenge. When you take the lead and embrace the process of identifying what really matters to your audiences beyond just the functional elements of your product, sales will take off, marketing will start to pay-off, and your business will be positioned to stand out and thrive.

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

Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Category As A Frame Of Reference

A brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. It will determine the points of parity the brand has to meet in order to be considered a legitimate player, and highlight opportunities to differentiate. As such, your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, a frame of reference is absolutely essential, get it wrong and your difference may be ignored: “Framing provides a mental structure that shapes the way we see the world. If a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored.”

It’s human nature to want to fit things into a category. The more innovative and disruptive your offering is, the more it needs a frame that people can relate to. If your brand can’t easily be defined, people often push it to the margins and leave it there. This is because its complexity is easier to ignore than to figure out.

People hold on tightly to their established understandings of what a category is and what it offers. Choosing the right category is about defining, or framing, what people are buying in such a way that your value shines through. The goal is to identify the best category that will help your customers “get” your value and make it relevant to them, while putting your competitors at a disadvantage.

When Your Brand Category Isn’t Serving Your Brand

If you are looking to grow your business, make sure the brand category you align with is still the right one for the brand. For some brands, the category they originally aligned with stops serving their needs. If you meet any of the following criteria, it might be time to break out of your current category and become a new breed of category creators developing new markets with innovative technology and products.

  • You are altering your strategic direction and your business model is shifting.
  • Your product or offering is misunderstood by prospects and partners.
  • You have created a significant innovation or proprietary advantage.
  • Competition is stifling your ability to grow.
  • Your current category prevents your key differences from standing out as ‘must haves.’
  • Your category is in crisis or has fallen out of favor.
  • You are ready to extend your brand beyond current customer segments.

It’s Time to Create a New Brand Category

Creating a new brand category might be the best way to position your brand for success. But, creating a new category is incredibly hard. For most companies, it’s hard enough to explain what your product does and how it’s different from your competitors. And the task of explaining and defending a new product category can be too much for many companies to take on.

However, the rewards of creating a new category are great. High0companies that created their own category accounted for 74% of incremental market capitalization growth from 2009 to 2011. Category creators experience much faster growth and receive much higher valuations from investors than companies bringing only incremental innovations to market.

Category creators must be fearless and confident in their ability to lead the category, build momentum quickly, and maintain a reputation as the category leader over time.  Before creating a new category, consider whether your business has the resources and time available. Don’t just define a new category for your brand, but brand the category itself. In the end, creating a new category can be transformational for your brand and business if you do it well. Look for the best practices for defining a new category and what mistakes to avoid in our upcoming post.

Category Creators

This is the 1st in a series. Check to How to Create a New Brand Category, Naming a New Brand Category, and Launching a New Brand Category by downloading our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies.

Investing in Corporate Narrative During Transition: Essential Tool for CEOs

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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Transformations and Transitions

The corporate narrative is an essential tool for CEOs. Persuading them to invest in one is hard sometimes.

Competitive pressures on businesses today are stronger than ever. And as a result, many companies are taking new directions, which are leaving CEOs to reevaluate their position, redirect employees, and build new identities and strategies that are going to fuel business forward amidst important transitions and transformations.

As many businesses today shift and flex to changing market demands, it’s easy for a large transformation or transitional period to leave critical audiences and stakeholders feeling lost. Lack of alignment, disparate value propositions across the organization, mixed information, brand behavior, unclear values, or varied messages from recruiters all add to this feeling. And a lack of clarity and/or mistrust among the people most important to driving your business in a new direction is detrimental to a successful transformation. 

Falling Short

When businesses are in the midst of a large transition, focusing on a corporate narrative is usually one of CEOs last priorities. Execs are more concerned with the changing business at hand, meeting profit goals, or fighting off the newest competition. But what they don’t realize is that a strong corporate narrative is the high-potential solution to these top concerns.

Misconceptions about the impact of a strong corporate narrative may be due to the fact that few companies have actually leveraged their corporate narrative to its greatest potential. In these instances, the narrative is stifled because it is formulaic and limited in its reach, use, and emotional impact.

The Value Received From a Corporate Narrative

When built and leveraged in the right ways, a corporate narrative can help your business stand out and fuel the people who are going to power your business forward.

1. Standing Out

Differentiation is one of the biggest outcomes for businesses who dedicate time and resources to a strong corporate narrative. Because corporate narratives operate as long-term solutions, they can help your business sustainably stand out (as compared to a short-term solution like leading with a new product or service). Successful corporate narratives tap into an unmet desire of the people they are trying to reach, and this is the most powerful differentiator. Meeting important rational and emotional needs for the people who matter to your business is the competitive edge your business needs during a time of transformation.

2. Fuel Business Efforts

A strong corporate narrative can help fuel business efforts and drive innovation forward during a transformation by getting people inside and outside the company on board with the new vision of the business. When people are engaged and excited about what the brand and business can fulfill for them, they start behaving in ways that enrich the purpose and drive business forward. Consider all the app developers who have gotten excited by Apple’s narrative, developed their own apps supported by the platform, and as a result, driven Apple forward.

3. Power Innovation

Narratives have the power of opening up possibilities and opportunities for your business. Often, they help bring new audiences into what’s at play, and as a result, new voices get heard, people engage more, and innovation increases. For instance, having a strong narrative might attract new partners or companies to you that want to be a part of the story. Think of all the cutting-edge collaborations Nike has done. Because narratives encourage action and build a community around your brand, they attract more active people, which leads to more innovation. Giving people a narrative to buy into can help people see new possibilities and become more likely to experiment, explore, and collaborate. 

4. Pull People In

When trying to take a new direction with your business, it’s important that you bring people along on the journey. Investing in a corporate narrative can help build important relationships that will help your business sustain long-term success. Instead of pushing shifts on people, a narrative can help people feel like they are part of it, that they’re role matters. When you have a narrative, even during turbulent times, people are more likely to stand by you because they believe in what you stand for.

Your Corporate Narrative = Your High-Potential Solution

With a simple, flexible corporate narrative that fits the direction you want to take, and clear guidelines on how to use it, your business gets propelled in that direction. You become more differentiated, loyalty and pull increases, and innovation amplifies because everyone takes a more active role.

A strong narrative embodies the long-term opportunity your business offers and represents a sustainable future of meaning. It connects with the right people at the right time – bringing them into your collective culture that is formed around the vision, values, needs, desires, and aspirations that your narrative articulates so simply and so clearly. It is a foundation that can drive business success – a high-potential solution for any CEO looking to transform or transition their business in a new direction needs to be taken seriously.

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

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Laser-Focused Branding and the Sales Learning Curve

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Not For the Masses

Every company wants to climb the Sales Learning Curve — a model for establishing and ramping up a sales force and increasing sales yield — faster. But few focus on branding as a way to accomplish that. In fact, a laser-focused brand is a critical driver of your sales reps’ ramp-up and revenue growth. It sounds risky to create a brand and launch a product based on the needs of a very defined group. But it might just be a better approach to branding and marketing.

The Laser-Focused Branding of PubMatic

Take the company, PubMatic. Before contacting Emotive Brand, PubMatic had spent years trying to serve everyone in the ad-tech ecosystem. We helped them see that laser focus on a specific kind of customer would help them both create a stronger, more compelling brand, and clarify their business strategy. PubMatic chose to double down on publishers: this group struggled more than any other to keep up with ever-evolving digital advertising technology and to stay relevant. So we developed an Emotive Brand strategy for PubMatic that repositioned PubMatic away from ad-tech and to a marketing automation platform designed for publishers. While this approach intentionally left some potential customers on the sidelines, it’s paid off. PubMatic has had quarter over quarter revenue growth ever since they narrowed their focus.

Laser-Focused Branding and Getting to the Heart of It

The job of sales and marketing is to show how your products solve customers’ pain. As the PubMatic case shows, while a product may be relevant to many potential customers, narrowing your focus to beachhead customers — those accounts where the product-market fit is strongest — may be the best way to boost your brand. (Sequoia Capital, by the way, has a great piece on how companies create “sales ready products” and dives into beachhead customers in greater depth.) If you can’t get the attention of beachhead customers, you’ll struggle to gain traction and sales will come slowly. In cybersecurity, for instance, financial institutions are often early adopters of new technology. If a security company chose to laser focus its brand just on this group, it would likely uncover a list of common objections and learn which features matter — or don’t — to most financial services companies. Beachhead customers might not care about the same things as your wider customer base, but when you double down on the capabilities and features that really matter to them, you can increase the rate at which you climb the Sales Learning Curve.

Just naming beachhead customers or industry, of course, isn’t enough. You’ve got to have an intimate understanding of who they are and what matters to them. Our Customer Journey Mapping process is about deep customer research. We help companies understand the role a product and brand plays in individuals’ lives and then optimize the brand around this customer experience. The result is a brand that holds meaning in people’s lives.

Sales Comes Into the Picture

Brand strategy and positioning answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams answer these questions every day. This is why our brand strategy work, if possible, always includes involving a company’s sales team. We don’t like to take Sales out of the field unnecessarily, but we try to leverage enough people so that the resulting brand strategy benefits from their front-line experiences. And once we have a new positioning and messaging, we often conduct training sessions with sales teams.

It’s easy to want to deliver everything that any of your potential customers desire. But when you target a well-defined customer group’s needs, you have to decide what your brand will support — and what it won’t. Laser-focused branding helps you more quickly pinpoint what matters most to customers which, in turn, strengthens your brand.

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

 

The Power of Creating a Compelling “Brand Vibe”

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We humans are very proud of our ability to think rationally. This cognitive power not only lets us understand and use facts, it also helps us build elaborate creations and fantasies.

We use our rational brains to conduct business. Cognition helps us sort stuff out, compare options, and rank priorities. Our rational, conscious brain is so “upfront” in our day-to-day work lives that we begin to believe it is our only way of thinking and acting at work.

Yet, as neuroscience is finding, it is now clear that this cognitive ability is not a stand-alone factor in how we perceive, sense, or act upon input. Indeed, we now see that emotions influence, if not drive, our thinking at every turn.

Emotions in play at work

We don’t readily admit it, but emotions – floating well below our consciousness – are in play all through the workplace. These emotions come to surface as feelings when people interact with one another, with people from the outside world, and with company news, policies, processes, and, of course, the gossip they hear around the water cooler.

These emotions are also very much at play in the marketplace as personal lives, news events, social media updates, and brand messages collide throughout the day. These emotions color how people feel whenever they interact with the outside world; including your brand. And, your brand strategy need to be focused around an emotive presence.

Is your ‘brand vibe’ in tune with people?

Given what we now know about how people make decisions, brands need to ask themselves a few questions:

  • To what degree are you proactively influencing the emotional “vibe” surrounding your brand, in both your workplace and the marketplace?
  • Could your brand behave in new ways that consciously address the unconscious manner in which people make decisions and take actions?
  • What would happen if your “brand vibe” started to resonate more profoundly with people?

People respond to meaningful vibes

I’m sure you’ll agree that you experience a nice “vibe” –  a significant, positive feeling – whenever you interact with, or think about, particular people (e.g. someone who inspires you), places (e.g. a romantic getaway), and things (e.g. your latest toy).

This is because you have recognized something within that person, place, or thing that triggers a connection to what you value, what you need, and/or what gives you pleasure. You may not be able to exactly say what causes your feelings, but you know you have them.

Now, think about your brand, and what feelings it is triggering; in other words, what is your “brand vibe”? Most important, is that “vibe” connected to something significant and meaningful to people? In other words, is your “brand vibe” one that rises above the fray, connects deeply into lives, and puts your brand into a class of its own?

“Brand vibes” hard at work

A distinct “brand vibe” not only lift the spirits of employees, it also creates an appealing way to stand apart in the crowded marketplace.

A clearly emotive “brand vibe” becomes a welcome feeling for everyone vital to your brand’s success, especially as they see how it helps them, the society, and/or the planet, in one way or another.

A strong “brand vibe” elevates your essential selling messages to a higher, more meaningful level; your stories take on a more compelling and inspiring aura, that makes more people get involved and engaged (and then, more likely to act).

How do you create a compelling ‘brand vibe’?

A powerful “brand vibe” is driven by a purpose – one that goes well beyond profit; it creates desirable and motivating feelings by capturing an ambition that taps directly into the needs, desires, interests and aspirations of the people you seek to influence.

When such a purpose is underscored by emotionally meaningful behavior of your brand, and its people, your “brand vibe” becomes stronger, more distinct and more powerful.

So, to have a meaningful “brand vibe”, brands need to go well beyond rethinking communications and key brand interactions (such as product launches, events, etc). Indeed, the entire organization behind the brand needs to evolve.

  • The C-suite needs to embrace, and live by, the new purpose.
  • Product teams need to refine user experiences.
  • The sales team needs to revise their pitch.
  • And, perhaps most important, HR needs to reorient the intent, attitudes and behaviors of the workforce.

A purpose beyond profit to inspire, an emotional space to exude, and an emotive behavior to bring it all to life. All there to generate a meaningful “brand vibe”. All key ingredients of emotive branding

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.