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Tag: Brand Strategy

Positioning Strategy for High-Growth Tech Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

High-Tech Companies Have Banished the Word Brand Strategy

I’m not sure when it happened. I only know it has. Brand strategy is no longer something the tech world is asking for. Well, let me be clear, they are still asking for it, they just aren’t using the term brand strategy. Positioning strategy is the new brand strategy, at least for high-growth companies where time is of the essence.

I’ve felt the shift first hand. As a co-founder of an agency, I’m the person who takes the incoming calls from prospects looking for an agency. It used to be that I would patiently listen for the words “brand strategy” to qualify a prospect. But over the past three years, I’ve heard that term less and less. Instead, prospects are using other terms to describe their most pressing business problems. It just took me a while to really understand what was happening and why.

The Factors I See at Play in a Desire for Positioning Strategy

1. Agile has become a way of doing business. Marketers need things fast. They want quick wins as they look to test new ideas in the market, prove that they work, and implement them quickly and successfully.

2. Competition in technology has never been as fierce as it is now. The rate of disruption and innovation that is happening is amazing. But with that comes the difficulty of keeping pace. It comes down to differentiating, getting to market first, and, if you make it, staying ahead.

3. Data drives everything. If you can’t prove a project has a strong ROI, it won’t happen. Iterating and testing strategy and ideas has never been more important. There is no harder role than being a CMO right now. And any CMO or marketer in today’s world needs to prove a strong ROI in the work they are doing, especially when outsourcing to an agency.

4. Valuation is critical to any high-growth company. Being in the wrong category can derail even the best tech company from achieving their vision of a successful exit. This is top priority for almost any high-growth business, whether it’s a startup or a publicly-traded technology company.

5. Positioning has never been so top of mind for leadership teams. It is where the rubber hits the road. Every successful brand needs to be strongly positioned in the market to thrive.

6. Strategy is no longer enough to shift a business or brand. Marketers are looking for strategy AND the assets needed to implement in market ASAP. They just don’t have the team or the time to figure it out internally. They need both strategy and activation.

These are the factors that have shifted the landscape of what leadership teams and marketers are looking for to help their business thrive, to help their brand be more meaningful, to hire and retain top talent, and to realize their purpose and vision.

What are high-growth businesses looking for today?

High-growth businesses are looking for ways to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. It’s about strategies  to help scale their business. Quick wins that can prove ROI for larger investment. And strategies gain better valuations. They are looking for the magic bullet.

I believe that in B2B and high-tech, brand strategy has now become the following things:

  • Defining the right category – developing a new one or moving to a different one
  • Positioning Strategy to ensure you are perceived in the right space, associated with the right competitors, envisioned by your target audience in the right ways
  • Creating a narrative to align your corporate strategy, vision, and why you matter to all of your stakeholders, internal and external
  • Messaging that resonates, that blends the rational and emotional in ways that differentiate and support both marketing and sales teams as they drive revenue and build brand
  • Websites that deliver the value proposition, convert leads, articulate the story, differentiate, and help any prospective buyer or employee see why you matter

Positioning Strategy

So, while marketers are not asking for brand strategy in the way they used to, they are still asking for it. In many ways it’s easier because they are asking for it in ways that address their most pressing business issues. Demanding it in sprints, delivered in ways that are actionable. They need strategy and the tools to launch that strategy in market, but it is still brand strategy.

It doesn’t matter what terminology is being used it. Whether it’s brand strategy or a small component of it, being a good partner is being able to adjust to the needs of prospects – meeting them where they are at, delivering what will impact their business. When they win, so do we.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

Why It’s Frickin’ Hard for Organizations to Brand Themselves

Posted on by Carol Emert

The need for a branding agency is hard to determine sometimes.

Many of Emotive Brand’s clients come to us after failed attempts to develop their own brand strategy. Just last week, a client sent us some themes they’d identified in an internal brand survey, along with a frustrated note: “We’ve gotten this far. We’re stuck. Can you help?”

Why is it so hard for organizations to brand themselves from the inside? Aren’t the people who live and breathe a brand every day the most obvious choice to articulate it?

That’s a logical conclusion, and clients who have tried often feel frustrated that they couldn’t move the ball. Invariably they are smart, knowledgeable and passionate about their organization. So why do their efforts fall short?

We think there are three reasons:

1. Proximity

Insider status seems like the ideal place from which to observe a brand – and that’s true. Insiders are crucial keepers of their organization’s values and meaning. It’s important that their knowledge and passion inform their brand strategy. But the fact is that inside is too close in this case. A certain distance is needed to see the big picture.

If I’m standing against a wall, I see bricks. If I back up, I can see the entire building and if I take a helicopter, I can see its context – the creek that’s about to overflow, the neighbor whose buildings are getting closer and closer to its property line, the customers who love it and the ones who are looking for the building, but can’t find it.

Branding requires an aerial view to understand not only what the brand is about, but its competitive landscape and its audience. To understand a brand and a business, context is mandatory, and that generally means an unbiased third party – with a helicopter.

2. Influence

Related to proximity are two powerful influences: corporate culture and company insiders.

In any organization, certain truths are simply in the air, binding the organization together in a common viewpoint. But those unspoken truths are hard to see from the inside and even harder to evaluate objectively. And they’re almost impossible to buck, even if they are getting in an organization’s way.

An even greater influence are the viewpoints and beliefs of the CEO, founder and other leaders. By definition these people have strong ideas about what their company is about – and they are critical for informing a brand strategy. But only an outsider is well-positioned to evaluate these ideas objectively and perhaps rethink them, or even recommend setting them aside.

3. Insight

The marketers who undertake branding projects for their organizations are highly skilled in communications and management. But probably they don’t spend every waking moment honing their insight muscle.

Every great brand idea has insight at its core, but very few people know how to unearth or articulate insights. That’s where our client mentioned above got stuck – they had assembled the pieces, but couldn’t put them together into an idea that was simple and true and inspiring.

Invariably, the branding attempts we see from our clients are completely logical and accurate, but they fail to go beyond the obvious. The effort gets stuck at 1 + 1 = 2, whereas a great, insightful brand strategy will get you to 3.

Admittedly, a branding agency’s recommendation that you hire a branding agency is more than a little suspect.

But here’s a secret: Even Emotive Brand had a tough time articulating our own brand when we re-evaluated it a few years ago for a website refresh. In the end, we pulled it off – we are a branding firm, after all! – but we certainly feel for anyone who has gone through the exercise and had it fall short of their hopes.

Emotive Brand is a branding agency

Creating Meaningful Brand Connections

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Creating Meaning by creating more meaningful brand connections

In our latest white paper, “Transforming your brand into an emotive brand“, we introduce a number of key drivers of our thinking, including the notion of “Meaning/meaningful brand connections”.

In our white paper we top-line this key driver in this way:

Emotive and meaningful brands strive to operate at a higher level than conventional brands. They act, interact, and react in ways that make every moment emotionally meaningful. Your customers and employees are left feeling more secure and connected. They feel your brand has helped them grow as humans. They feel your brand has touched them through love and beauty. 

What do we mean by “meaning”?

Our pursuit of meaning goes beyond mere linguistics, as in “ABS means automatic braking system.” It also goes beyond the first level of outcomes, typically the “benefit” accrued, as in, “more stability in sudden maneuvers.” It often even extends beyond the second level of interpretation, as in, “so, your family travels more safely.”

And it always goes beyond the product level. Indeed, we search for meaning across a brand’s products, policies, processes, procedures, and practices. We interrogate the impact the brand has not only within the scope of the customer experience, but across a spectrum of meaningful outcomes that can appear on the individual, social, and environmental levels.

Our quest is to harvest the goodness that is now otherwise buried in the brand, and to bundle it into a set of high-order brand truths. These truths form the basis of the brand narrative we produce.

What are meaningful brand connections?

Meaningful connections come when a brand forges a link between what it does, and what people are seeking on a very deep, human level. We believe that deep down, we are all seeking the same three things:

  1. To feel safe and secure in our surroundings, our social situation, and in our hearts
  2. To feel connected to the people, ideas, and ideals that we care about, and which nurture us
  3. To feel we are growing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, through our thoughts, actions, and possessions

Seeing the world, and the brand within that world, through this lens helps us interrogate, dissect, and rethink the brand to find those traits and attributes that link directly to these deep drivers of people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

The value of bringing this meaning to the surface is often not clear, because it presents the brand in a new, and often unfamiliar light. It provokes anxiety by suggesting that what is truly meaningful about the brand is very different from the way the brand has been traditionally presented.

The resolution to this tension is the blending of the “commercial” and “human” meanings in future brand actions and communications. This gradual evolution can lead to true brand transformation, as the people of the brand embrace its truths and live out its promise.

Why be meaningful?

Meaningful connections that flow from deep within the organization, and that reach deep down inside the hearts and minds of people, lead to greater brand appeal, differentiation, and loyalty.

The internal dynamic changes when the heartbeat of meaning is present; there is greater collaboration, self-initiative, innovation, attentive customer service, as well as higher degrees of engagement, gratification, and loyalty. This meaning-driven difference internally resonates externally, attracting prospects, recruits, suppliers, and communities to the brand.

Given the current pressures on brands, and the continuing challenges that loom ahead, many smart brand owners are seeking their meaningful difference. They see it as a high-level strategic choice that brings with it serious commitments of time, energy, and money.

Those who eschew the meaning option do so at their own risk. As more and more people become aware of their need for meaningful connections, and see that our culture offers few options, they will increasingly be drawn to those people, ideas, ideals, and brands that satisfy their core human needs.

Don’t stand idly by as meaning comes of age. Look deep within your world and see it as a person seeking meaning would do. Grab onto the meaning you find. Work hard to integrate that meaning into everything you do, every product you make, and every moment you have with the people important to your brand.

Transform Your Brand into an Emotive Brand Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

5 Things Executives Need to Know When Embarking on Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Investing in brand strategy is a big decision for executives to make today.  Plunging into an ocean of the emotional, strategic, and intellectual dimensions and depths of your brand is not what executives often want to spend time and budget on. Preconceived notions about ROI, doubts about the actual value of it, and the more obvious budget concerns to evaluate brand strategy are hugely challenging.

Many companies don’t even make it to this place – the place where they accept and understand they actually do need to invest in the brand to address their business problems. But for those that do, it can create amazing results — internally and externally.

There are a handful of important things we believe executives need to know before beginning a brand refresh or investing in a new brand strategy.

1. Strategy is only the first step

The task of creating, socializing, and implementing a brand strategy is not a one-step process or an endeavor that can be achieved overnight. The brand strategy is just step one – albeit a big one, that requires strength, endurance, thought, calculation, and time.

Here at Emotive Brand, before we begin work with a client, we want the C-suite to understand that their work does not end once the strategy is complete. The role of the strategy is to unearth what kind of terrain they are building on and to help build the foundation for the brand, but it’s up to them to build a structure for it…to maintain it…and to sell it. The brand strategy we create together will have no impact unless both employee and brand behavior changes as a result. Brand strategy without meaningful implementation is next to useless.

The creation of a brand strategy demands budget, time, and dedication. The socialization and implementation that follow the creation of a brand strategy demands more budget, more time, and even greater dedication. We urge clients to invest accordingly from the start. We want clients to bring a long-term commitment – forward-thinking and future-looking – to the work.

2. Schedule your time in advance

A huge part of commitment is time. It is essential to schedule time at the C-suite level from the onset. We work with clients to allocate and plan the appropriate time needed for every meeting and for digesting and responding to our work at every point of the process. Executives should understand the time requirement needed and be sure they can commit to it. The best way to do it is to schedule the entire project at the onset.

3. Approach the challenge with openness, honesty, and trust

Because we are trying to understand your business, and unearth emotions, meaning, and deeper purpose, we take a particularly in-depth approach. Often, the issues that prompt a brand strategy effort are just symptoms of a deeper problem. We help discover these problems where they exist. Our approach is detailed, thorough, exhaustive, and sometimes even personal. It is our job to see how teams work together and understand  each of their leadership styles so we can facilitate and align them to enable progress. We dive into company financials. And we speak one-on-one with each executive to ensure we understand their personal perspective. This is what allows us to align and facilitate change.  On every project we work hard to uncover what is happening internally and externally. The productivity of our relationship with executives thus hinges on openness, honesty, and trust. It’s essential for the C-suite to be clear and candid about the strengths and weaknesses of all aspects of the company. If we are clear where the business, culture, and growth is challenged, we can create new paths forward. Trust that you hired the right agency and their power to create positive change; your brand strategy depends on trust to push beyond where you’ve been.

4. Have the right mindset for change

You don’t embark on a brand strategy just to create a strategy. You embark on a brand strategy to transform your business; to help you reach your goals and objectives. In order to solve business problems, you must accept that things do need to change, and those changes will go much deeper than just a simple logo alternation. The strategy that we help you create will almost undoubtedly change the way you communicate externally and internally. It will alter how you and your employees behave. But, it may also force you to question if you have the right team to execute on the strategy. It may even alter what products or services you sell, or what the entire future of the company might look like. These changes may feel drastic, risky, or scary. However, with the right strategy, these changes can be momentous, far-reaching, impactful, and often times exhilarating. Transform your brand. Transform your business.

5. Be willing to be led

Executives are often hard-wired to lead, not follow. It is a naturally difficult adjustment to entrust power to an outsider. However, we ask executives to prepare themselves to allow us to do just that: to direct, to organize, to manage. This is our job and expertise; this is what you hired us for. So listen, trust, and follow our lead. We promise it will steer you to great and exciting places.

Emotive Brand works with high-growth executives to address the business problems they are experiencing by quickly evaluating the most pressing needs and developing a right-sized project that delivers quick wins though an agile brand strategy process.

Find out more about the outcomes we’ve delivered for our clients here.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

The Role of Insights

As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations.

In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of an insight?  

Insight is, by its nature, tricky to understand and therefore hard to define. Insights aren’t linear, like data or information. They are triangulated from information and other inputs – notably emotions – to then come up with something new.

Information is 1+1=2. Insight is 1+1=3, and the 3 literally feels different.

In branding, insights inform the core truths of your brand strategy and work as the foundation on which everything else is built. 

What is the goal of a strategist making insights in brand strategy?

There are probably infinite truths about any brand. The role of the strategist is to figure out which ones are the most important to the brand itself and at the same time resonant with its stakeholders. Good insights make sense both intellectually and emotionally. Once you find a powerful insight, you’re playing in very rich territory for the brand.

How do you get to an insight?

To drive brand success, the most powerful insights are the ones that triangulate powerful core truths about the brand itself, its target audience, the competitive landscape, and the broader cultural context. So strategists need to immerse themselves in the brand, its key audiences and the greater fishbowl it is swimming in, whether that context is business, technology, pop culture, or what have you.

To understand the brand itself, a strategist will investigate its origins, its history, its products or services, what its people and internal culture are like, what its highest aspirations are, and how it speaks and acts in the world.

For target audiences, it’s important to uncover peoples’ key challenges and aspirations that are relevant to the brand, their met and unmet needs (both functional and emotional), their perceptions of the brand and its competitors, and how the brand might best fit best into their needs and aspirations.

How do insights help change how people inside the brand see their business?

When we present clients’ brand story to them, it’s like we’ve articulated something that maybe has always felt true, but has never been fully expressed. It suddenly crystalizes what really matters about their brand and business – and this clarity can inspire action, excitement, a unified vision, and really power the brand forward.

Can companies do their own branding? What do you think is the value of an external agency?

It makes sense that the people who know a brand best should be the best at articulating it, right? But, my experience has been that many companies struggle to brand themselves.

There are a few reasons. For one thing, companies already have an emotional investment in who they think they are. Everyone will know how the CEO thinks about the brand, too, and inevitably that’s going to unduly influence the thinking.

Instead of unearthing real insights, company insiders will typically be operating on the more superficial level of information. As a result, they fall short of the depth and richness they know their brand story should have. When you look at internally developed brand strategies, they typically feel rather flat and obvious instead of rich and insightful.

Essentially, it usually takes an outsider to get a clean and unbiased view of the brand and then tell its story in a really powerful way. 

What are the key characteristics of a person who is good at unearthing insights?

The most important is empathy. Understanding emotional truths requires being emotionally attuned to the situation and the people. If there is no emotional attunement, there will never be an emotional insight.

You have to be a truth-teller, willing to put aside your own ego and ideas, and prioritize finding the truth no matter where it lies. This requires not bringing too much of your own filter and biases to it too.

At the same time, you must be analytical. This isn’t an exercise in just feeling. You have to be moving down a path of useful insights that lead to meaningful brand strategies that help your clients realize their highest aspirations as a brand and as a business.

When you strike that balance between empathy and analysis, you can create rich and compelling brand strategies that are absolutely game changing.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

Why are Feelings and Purpose so Important in Business Today?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Feelings and Purpose-led brands

Why are purpose and feelings so important now for brands? A meaningful brand is the persona-driven presence and experience of an organization that has proactively decided to orient itself around an authentic purpose. Such brands do so with the intent of emotionally connecting to people on a deep level, by addressing core human needs. Most significant, a meaningful brand strives to forge these attitude and behavior changing connections both inside and outside their organizations.

To summarize, a meaningful brand is:

 – Proactively meaningful across all brand touchpoints and experiences

 – Driven by a purpose that is embodied in a brand promise that reflects the positive personal, social, and environmental outcomes of the brand’s products and activities

 – Successful because the organization behind it takes a holistic and organic approach to change that addresses both the internal and external aspects of the organization

Why is the concept of becoming a meaningful brand important?

Very few brand owners can afford the luxury of simply leaving things the way they are. Turbulence abounds. Competition is relentless. Commoditization is rampant. Disruption is commonplace. Add to this the fast-changing attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of both customers and employees.

Brands simply cannot stand still. They need to take a proactive stance, create a solid, yet adaptable reason for being, and think of their brand strategy not in terms of whipping up icing for their cake, but rather as initiating the chemical reaction that turns raw materials into a new and exceptionally desirable cake.

They can do this by adopting the principals and practices of emotive branding. Working out from a purposeful brand promise, meaningful brands fundamentally change the way people within and outside the organization think, feel, and act. This is because a brand’s promise is coupled with a plan to transform the attitudes and behaviors that drive both the organization as a whole, and all the people within the organization. Throughout this transformation process, emotive brands evoke a distinct emotional aura that forges more heartfelt and enduring connections.

Why are purpose and feelings even important to a business?

After all, one could argue that it’s always been important to matter to others. The question is, at what level does a brand need to take it to matter now: at a superficial and vulnerable level, or at a deep and heartfelt level?

The past is full of brands that mattered by being, “better, faster, or cheaper” than their competitors. But most brands today find it hard to identify a clear and compelling competitive advantage. This leaves them resorting to bland, highly contrived, and readily mimicked points of differentiation, that easily get lost in the noise.

Brands that matter today take a different tack. They don’t work from the inside out, but rather work from the outside in. They use empathy to see their brand’s value through the eyes of the people they impact. They then develop a way of behaving that taps directly into deeply felt core human needs. Exposure to, and experience with, such brands positively changes the way people think, feel, and act.

This is because people are hungry for more meaning in their lives. Why? Among other things, people have been alienated by our aggressive consumer culture, feel stunned by the economic meltdown, and are increasingly aware of our social challenges. At the same time, they have started absorbing more and more different kinds of information that are making them feel ever-more distant from the institutions, including brands, that surround them.

Brands that are purpose-led and which evoke positive emotions stand apart because they directly and intentionally address the needs that result.

Why both B2B and B2C should take note

The issues that are prompting people to seek meaning aren’t exclusive to consumers. Every employee and business decision maker arrives at their desk each morning carrying the same concerns and deep-rooted needs. These needs operate below the surface and don’t enter into everyday conversation, or find their way into research studies. But they are there in the background, informing every decision and action, and shaping every mood and motivation.

So purpose, meaning, and feelings are equally important regardless of the market thrust of your brand, or the apparent lack of meaning inherent in an offering. Indeed, we believe even the most basic and dry offering can be elevated by seeing it through the lens of meaning.

What kind of leader is advocating this approach?

The leaders that are championing this shift toward meaning are united by a single trait: mindfulness. Regardless of their relative level of “charisma”, these leaders recognize the value of defining a “North Star” ambition for their brands and leading their organizations to it by listening to, appreciating, and directly addressing the core human needs of the people vital to the brand’s success.

These are leaders who want to be more than mere figureheads. They employ the personal power that comes from being purposeful and empathetic, rather than the dictatorial power that comes from their position at the top of the org chart. They bring people along by building belief, establishing trust, and making the needed changes both personally relevant and emotionally gratifying to every person involved.

By being human-centric themselves, these leaders create the human-centric brands that outperform their increasingly outdated and irrelevant competitors.

To learn more about the tenants of emotive branding and creating a more meaningful brand, download our paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.

The New Measurements of a Successful Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What does it mean to be a successful business?

In the new age of meaningful business, it’s time for more inclusive forms of value. It’s no longer enough to measure financial impact. Companies, brands, investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers are asking: what’s the social impact of your business? What’s your environmental impact? Your emotional impact? In other words, people are asking: Why should I care? Why does it matter? And they are also wondering, can you communicate the value of these impacts to me quantitatively?

In any successful business, there is value outside the actual venture. Endless factors play into the success of a business, and these factors differ from company to company. In other words, measurements of success for one brand may not apply to another. This makes finding a universal measures quite difficult.

Purpose

Oftentimes, measuring purpose is ignored, put in the “aspirational” box, and left to sit – separated from business, undervalued, and never quantified. But we can’t separate aspiration from business. The two are intertwined and, in fact, hinge on each other. Alignment of purpose within a business energizes and focuses the brand towards success. Clear, strong, and inspiring purpose differentiates and gives brands a needed competitive edge. It empowers employees to do more valuable, impactful work and encourages a collaborative leadership team – a purpose-led business.

A purpose-led business helps everyone who is key to the business become aware of the impact they are creating each day. By measuring purpose, the “whys” become clear and tangible: why you go to work every day, why your work matters, why each individual’s contribution matters to the greater success of the company and the world at large. Focusing on purpose pushes the people who are integral to your business to take risks, think creatively, and dedicate themselves to their work each and every day.

Measuring Purpose

We wish we could tell you exactly how to measure the purpose of your business. The fact of the matter is that in order to quantify purpose for your specific business, first, you have to fully grasp and align your business – understand all the factors, emotions, and components of why you do what you do. In order to break down your purpose, you must approach it from all angles. What are your key values? Your main aspirations? How do you measure each of these tenants and promises?

In his article, “Measuring Purpose. The next key business imperative,” Hilton Barbour proposes ten potential questions that might help Nike measure its purpose: “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” We believe Barbour’s questions are a great example of how any business might measure and quantify their impact, be it innovation or inspiration, like Nike, or any different purpose.

  • What do we define as inspiration and what part do we play in that inspiration?
  • How many inspiring products do we sell (and therefore who do we inspire and to do what)?
  • What did those products cost to develop?
  • What do we make from them?
  • To what extent are we making money from products that continue to inspire vs. those that are re-inspiring vs. those that will inspire into the future?
  • What is the “inspiration” contribution of our product vs. that of the sponsored athlete, high school jock, and weekend warrior wearing it?
  • What innovations have we introduced in the last year for athletes?
  • How many of them have we sold?
  • What’s still in development and what are the projections for those products in the business case?
  • How quickly is our innovation cycle being realized in terms of saleable goods and what effect are those innovations having on our bottom-line?

We agree with Barbour that this introspection about measuring purpose is not only worth it, but necessary to do doing meaningful, purposeful, and impactful business.

Your brand’s purpose warrants measurement and time dedicated to building a personalized system for your business. Ask questions and believe in your purpose to the extent that quantification and qualification of it matters, that it truly does drive success both internally and externally. Build a measurement system that can be explained and communicated to all the people that matter to your business’s success.

One that:

  • Inspires and keeps your business moving and looking forward.
  • Demonstrates possibility and generates potential. That’s what purpose is all about.

To learn more about why meaningful brands should measure their positive impacts, check out our blog “If You Want a Meaningful Brand, Make a Meaningful Impact.”

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Creating an “On-Brand” Community for Developers

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Value of an Online Community

Building an online community is a great way for companies to encourage deeper relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and most especially – developers. Technology companies are particularly adept at leveraging active participation, good will, and sheer word-of-mouth power of the cloud crowd.

Many sponsor technical communities for developers like teaching, customer support, and newbie coaching. People flock to well-structured, well-run forums for advice, problem-solving, and to share their work and ideas.

Some communities spring up of their own accord, sparked by a lone enthusiast trying to solve a problem who attracts people with similar interests. But more likely, communities are created by companies willing to prime the pump and get things rolling. These communities can be of great value for companies looking to build loyalty, engagement, while sustaining relevance. So how can a company build a thriving, self-perpetuating community that’s aligned with company goals?

Here’s why a purposeful brand can help you create and run a vibrant online community:

1. Objectives

Define the goals for your online community from the beginning. What are you trying to accomplish? Set clear objectives and expectations that are consistent with your company’s business and product strategies.

Business strategy and brand strategy are inextricably linked. Since the brand is the part of your company that customers see, your Brand Strategy is an essential part of any community initiative.

2. Audience

Determine who are you talking to. Who are they exactly?  What do they need, want, and believe? What do you want them to do, think, or feel? At Emotive Brand, when we develop a strategy, it starts with deep understanding of all stakeholders, target audiences, customers, and yes, the community.

Persona Maps and Persona Journeys are extremely helpful here. Persona Workshops cast a wide net and then probe deeply into the key people your company wishes to influence. It’s easy to map their demographics, industries, job roles, responsibilities, and influencers. More important, you can discover their needs, pain points, beliefs, and feelings so you can match messaging and/or product solutions to answer the specific needs of specific types of people.

3. Content

What topics do you want to cover in your community site? What content do you want to host? What message do you want to send?

Brand Strategy helps here, because it includes Positioning to define your company offerings and the Messaging needed to target the right strategic messages to the right people, as defined in your Persona Maps.

4. Quality

Quality matters. Developers will spend a lot of valuable time on your community site researching problems, asking questions, posting solutions, studying documentation, and downloading code. So the least your brand can do is to create a clean, well-lit place that’s usable and attractive. Use your brand to guide the brand experience you want people to have when engaging with your community.

The Brand Promise that’s at the heart of your brand will give you the charter to invest in a high-quality community site.

5. Design

Developer sites are frequently created by engineers for engineers. But they shouldn’t look like freeware, even if running on an open-source platform. There needs to be a consistent, symbiotic relationship with the corporate brand, even if you’re hosting the community site separately from the corporate website.

Brand Guidelines will specify acceptable designs and prohibit unacceptable designs that might damage the corporate brand.

6. Tone

Geekiness is cool. We love geeks. Almost 97% of our CEO clients are engineers! We honor them. We make them heroes. But that doesn’t mean that your community site needs to go overboard with geek-speak or drown in abstruse jargon. Simplicity, directness, and clarity are always the key to good communication.

The Brand Voice defines the way the brand speaks, and how it should not speak. It also sets the tone for the community discourse, which is crucial if you want a brand-appropriate site that grows because it’s inviting for people to join.

7. Style

The Brand Promise – the promise your brand makes to the people who matter – helps crystallize the brand’s role in the community. You can choose the proximity to the community that’s most comfortable for your brand. Branded communities fall into four camps:

Full engagement – with active participation by designated company brand ambassadors to provide technical support, ideas, postings, documentation, code, and site moderation.

Moderate engagement – company staff is involved for editorial purposes, policing member postings to prevent bullying, remove trolls and keep things clean.

Low engagement – built and then run with a let them come-to-me mentality, basically hands off, allowing community members to run the show.

No engagement – companies who channel customer support into static lists of FAQs, better than nothing, but it sure isn’t a community.

8. Dialog

There’s no better way to understand people who are important to your brand than by paying attention to the community. Communities are built to encourage dialog between interested parties in two-way or multi-party conversations. Your brand has the opportunity to participate and listen.

Brand Strategy can help you listen attentively and respond appropriately. Empathy should be the guiding light for any community, and rooted in any Brand Strategy.

 9. Care and feeding

Once you start a community, it’s up to you to keep it going. It’s like a garden. You till the soil, plant the seeds, water and fertilize, pull the weeds, and encourage growth. You welcome the bees and birds, too. And you do it every single day. Only then can you enjoy the fruit.

How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community. A Brand Strategy specifies both the strategic shifts a brand is trying to make, and the behavior necessary for people to live up to. How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community.

Your online community may turn out to be a genial collection of like-minded enthusiasts or a contentious battleground trolled by argumentative egomaniacs. Either extreme can be valuable as long as you have them under your tent. When you build a community that’s aligned with your Brand Strategy, you can enjoy the benefits of reduced customer support overhead, loyal and interested long-term users, a rich environment bursting with good ideas, and a vast team of de facto ambassadors willing to spread the good word about your brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

The Benefits of Purpose-Led Company Cultures

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-led Company Cultures

What happens when all the people in your organization feel better about the work they do?

When they know they’re helping others achieve greater well-being?

When they have a shared belief and feel a kindred spirit with their co-workers? For your business, the benefits are multifold.

There’s more alignment, engagement, and motivation in play. Collaboration and innovation become more natural and prevalent. So everything runs more smoothly. New ideas are popping up all the time. Blank, confused, and dispirited faces are replaced by purpose-driven looks of determination and smiles of gratification. Your business thrives.

If these returns aren’t enough…

Consider the extended benefits of the general well-being that flows from a purpose-led company culture. Happier, more content, and gratified employees take less stress out of the office. This means their commute is more relaxed and fewer accidents are likely to occur. This means they are kinder to strangers and less negative energy is created. This means they are more alive for their love ones and friends, and those vital relationships thrive rather then being tainted by those feeling unhappy and unfulfilled by their jobs. This means these employees live more balanced, and healthier lives. This means that they can work productively, bring money into their own lives, and, through their efforts, increase overall prosperity.

When you consider all your employees, all their loved ones and friends, and all the strangers they encounter every day, the positive outcome of your company culture multiplies radically. Perhaps the idea of an employee being nicer to someone on their drive home may feel distant and unrelated to your business. But really, it’s not. Consider this: have you ever come close to having an accident because you were driving aggressively following a stressful day at the office?

What drives these positive business and social outcomes?

For many companies, it is a brand strategy that is built upon, and promotes, the concepts of empathy, purpose, and emotion. The purpose economy is gaining ground. Why do you need a brand strategy? Because it is a powerful and pervasive channel into hearts and minds of people, both outside and within the company. When thoughtfully crafted, a brand strategy works as hard at reshaping the company culture as it does creating appeal and differentiation among outside audiences.

A purpose-led company culture driven by an empathetic brand strategy, better understands what will improve the well-being of both customers and employees.

Brand messages and actions can create ways to promote the skills of empathetic understanding and decision-making.

A company culture driven by a purposeful brand strategy will help employees clearly see what they can do to help make the company’s meaningful ambition come true.

A company culture driven by an emotionally-sensitive brand strategy, will lead to policies and procedures that make the workplace itself a more sensitive, thoughtful, and gratifying environment.

Is your business and its culture benefiting from a purpose-led brand strategy?

Download our white paper on how to transform you brand with a purpose-led brand strategy.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

The Value of Mapping Business Strategy to Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Business strategy and brand strategy should be closely linked

There’s a perception among many executives that business strategy is strategic, and brand strategy is a marketing tool – and not a strategic asset. As a result, businesses set ambitious goals, but don’t consider how investing in and developing a brand strategy could help get them there.

As a brand strategy agency, we rely heavily on our client’s full disclosure of their business strategy – their goals and objectives, pitch decks, revenue reports, exit strategy – to build a meaningful, emotive brand that will transform their business, drive revenue, enable them to hire top talent, and power the company’s future success. But, in order for a company to measure success and see the value of the brand strategy, the business and brand strategy need to be aligned. By mapping the two together, we can create a strong, impactful brand that is geared towards specific growth goals and worthy of investment.

Mapping ensures that business can grow in any strategic direction

In any business situation, the brand strategy needs to reflect both the short-term and long-term goals of the business. A brand that aligns with the business plan ensures these goals become reality. Consider these three situations:

Startups need top talent to build and sell their products.

Most startups have aggressive hiring ambitions to meet their revenue goals. And in today’s world, because startups are all competing for the same talent – data scientists, engineers, and top sales people – they need to rely on a strong brand to effectively articulate why they matter. Investing in your company’s brand strategy will help recruit the right employees who are aligned to your brand and business aspirations. When recruits and employees connect to your brand’s purpose in more meaningful ways, the business will stand out from your competition and employees will drive business because they will be more dedicated, loyal, and committed to your success.

High-growth companies that are looking to scale at a rapid pace need a brand strategy to stand out in crowded markets.

Your brand strategy is an opportunity to better connect your product and/or services to the people that matter most to your brand, and involving your sales and marketing teams in the process is a smart way to help map your business and brand strategy together. By examining business priorities, we can develop a go-to-market strategy that will drive revenue, better support your sales and marketing teams, and boost loyalty with your customers and partners.

Established enterprise companies often need a brand refresh to meaningfully reconnect to internal and external stakeholders.

In competitive markets, business strategies have to shift and change over time to help sustain growth, maintain market share, and combat new competition. These shifts in business strategy can be hard for an established company to take on – both internally and externally. Whether you are preparing for an IPO, involved in M&A activity, or trying to stay relevant in a changing market, investing in a brand strategy refresh can help articulate these shifts. Presenting a cohesive brand, corporate narrative, and updated look that communicates who you are, why you matter, and what you stand for is necessary to shift your business and reconnect the brand to all your key stakeholders

Mindful leaders connect business and brand strategy, and reap the benefits.

Regardless of what stage the business is in, a brand strategy is the best tool to hone in on the impact your brand can make. Aligning the brand strategy to your business goals makes your brand more impactful and emotionally meaningful. It is the best way to create a road map that is tailored toward your brand’s growth. Those leaders who understand the value of a strong and clear brand strategy are better situated to lead their business. Use brand strategy to connect and matter to the people who are most important to your brand’s success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.