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Tag: Brand

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

Posted on by Nick Ott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infusing a Brand with Big Heart Begins with Big Thinking: How Small Design Cues Can Generate Great Big Feels

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

“We need to make our brand feel human. It needs to reflect our people and our customers. We need to tell a human, emotive story.”

 

This is how a lot of our conversations about brand design begin. If we were designing for packaged goods that sit on a shelf and give people a tangible representation of your brand, we’d have a well defined experience to address. But most of our work takes place behind the scenes in the B2B and tech space. There are no shelves or stores mediating the process, no physical objects or packaging. There’s sparse or no direct interaction with the end-user. And the technology itself is invisible which increases the challenge of crafting a bespoke visual identity that evokes emotion.

Curating a distinct visual style is table stakes when developing design systems. But we’ve seen that in B2B branding, sometimes the smaller, more nuanced design moves can transform a smart visual identity design into a deeply evocative brand that evokes just the right feelings. Because these design moves don’t hit people over the head, they may not fully register at first glance, but over time, they shape the response people have to a brand.

A sense of (e)motion

Motion elevates the game. While static logos aren’t going away, just about every brand needs to move in some way, shape or form—whether it’s a dynamic logo or a kinetic design system that pushes the limits. And it’s often the little moments that spark delight—the sudden blink of a circle, the anthropomorphic smile in a lowercase ‘e’, or a subtle twinkle of light to punctuate a moment in the story. It’s these moments that draw people deeper into the brand story in the same way that physical packaging might speak directly to a consumer with an elegant serif font or bespoke illustration.

Our recent work to rebrand Katapult—an AI platform behind the e-commerce scenes that gives customers a fair way to pay for their purchases online—was an opportunity for our team to bring all the heart, feeling and optimism of the customer to the forefront of the brand. Sure, the photography needed to capture the heart and goodness underlying the brand, but we had to go deeper. So we used their name as our launching-off point, or catapult, if you will. Rather than trying to force all of our storytelling into a logo symbol, we crafted a wordmark that evokes the feeling of the human hand signing for a bill of goods. That calligraphic sense of motion led our team to develop something more emotive than just a symbol—a brand feeling of being uplifted and elevated. This feeling—which came to be known as “The Bounce”—comes through at every turn, from the upward curve that literally bounces off screen, guides storytelling in infographics, or connects images, words and ideas together. Ultimately, “The Bounce” became more than a visual component—it became a deeply felt personality trait of the brand—and something the client could really get behind as an emotive representative of the brand, something much greater than a traditional logo symbol.

Sonic branding

Just like the barrage of visuals that we experience every day, our world is filled with sounds (a lot of it noise). In addition to motion, sound has a similar capacity to evoke feelings and brings another dimension to what a brand—and more specifically, a logo—can do. Sonic branding adds a richness to the brand experience, often creating a more bespoke and lasting imprint on how you experience (and recall) a brand. The Disney+ logo that introduces their content is a good example of a small moment that adds a big feel to how you interact with their identity. Now, it may be that I’ve seen/heard their identity more times than I care to count while watching with my 7-year old, but there’s no denying how seeing AND hearing that magical beam of light swoop over the wordmark makes a deeper impression. It puts viewers into a state of curiosity and preparation for what’s about to come on screen. The ability to generate that lean-in feeling is a mark of a truly successful logo experience.

Our recent rebrand project for Pindrop included a sonic dimension to the brand. Because Pindrop is a pioneer in the voice technology space, creating a sonic brand was a strategic imperative. It was exciting to work with our partners at MusicVergnuegen to craft an audio component that brought Pindrop’s invisible, future-forward technology to life with a sound of a safe unlocking. Similar to Disney+, it’s hard not to smile when their logo symbol transforms and resolves on an audio crescendo. It’s the little things that often make the most impact.

Design needs to solve problems and deliver on the goals of the client but also has the great potential to unlock new ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing a brand. See (and hear) more of our work here and let us know if we can partner together to help solve your branding challenges.

Leading With Beautiful Questions

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Many years ago, we got inspired by Warren Berger’s book, “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.” The basic premise of the book and the post we wrote at the time was that leaders simply don’t ask enough questions when they bump up against uncertainty.

Since then, two things have happened. Mr. Berger wrote another book tying the art of inquiry to generating breakthrough ideas (which we all need today), and the world has started to get wobbly. Every leader we work with and talk to is grappling with the issue of how to drive growth in uncertain times. And they’re also looking for ways to unlock new and different thinking on their teams for how to grow. This creates the occasion for us to update our own thinking on the value of asking questions—beautiful questions—to choose the way forward.

Uncertainty can feel familiar

Say that you and some friends are backpacking through a place you’ve never visited before. The call you took from the trailhead drained your phone’s battery and your navigation app is useless (doh!). Your destination is a campsite next to a breathtaking alpine lake that is a jewel of the mountain range and a like-amplifier on your Instagram feed. When you come to a place where the trail forks, with no signs marking the way, one of your hiking companions (who has years more experience in the outdoors than anyone else), declares, “it has to be this way.” 

Who hasn’t been here before?

Either on a trail or in a conference room, strong opinions emerge, experience speaks loudest, the phrase “trust your gut” gets bandied about, and the bias for action short-circuits the deeper process of inquiry. What should you do? Follow experience and take the trail to the left? Trust your gut that tells you not to trust that other person’s gut? Or do you pause to ask a few questions? 

Introspection v. action

When we translate this scenario to the current business environment, it mirrors a lot of today’s context: navigating landscapes (economic, market, technology, talent, etc.) that are unknown or unpredictable with limited information to guide you to the promised land. It feels like every day there is a crucible moment that can slow down progress or knock your leadership team out of alignment. And alignment is the key issue here. 

A basic assumption in team dynamics is that too many questions will slow us down, and that quick answers will speed us up. This is true, but only to a degree. Without alignment around those answers, you’ll actually move more slowly people will drag their feet or hold back in other ways until the direction proves to be correct. It’s like a cycling peloton that rides single file—you can’t draft off each other in this formation. 

On the other hand, lemmings show incredible alignment. But maybe they should learn to ask a few more questions.

The question leaders face during times of uncertainty is whether they should lead with answers (and keep the foot on the accelerator) or lead with questions (and do the soul-searching that builds conviction and alignment)? We think the answer is both. And here’s a simple framework for how to do it.

Identify the operating narrative

Simply put, times of uncertainty = times of fear. When we perceive danger, our amygdala gets activated, and our fight, flight, or freeze instincts take over. Expansion, contraction, or stasis. And when this happens, we begin constructing our own narratives based on how we individually deal with fear. 

One person might choose to avoid risk (not taking another step forward), while another wants to leap into bigger risks (bushwacking to the nearest peak to get a better perspective). Your fellow hiker could employ head-in-the-sand behaviors that delay conflict (acquiesce but then grumble the entire time), while another could rebel (go back to the car to charge the phone). While these could all be appropriate actions, they put your organization at risk because they skip the most important step for how teams move through uncertainty. A leader needs to establish a unifying narrative first to build alignment. And then the action can follow.  

Ask beautiful questions

Because we all have different relationships with uncertainty, we need a way to get onto common ground. And the best way to do this is to ask questions that reframe the situation.

Berger’s books highlight how when we’re children, we’re full of questions because nothing is at stake when a kid asks a question. But as we mature many of us lose the willingness to reveal what we don’t know (except for the stellar innovators and leaders who are always in learning mode). By offering helpful guides to using a flow from “Why?” to “What if?” to “How?” Berger shows us how to gain awareness of what people want and need, what they’re avoiding, and where the new opportunities lay. 

Unfortunately, when the tension is running high and the talk turns to execution, people want answers and action rather than another @#!$& beautiful question. And there’s a price attached to this anti-question bias in business. As companies push away from asking bigger questions in the spirit of addressing short-term needs, they stop looking for the opportunities, trends, and threats that are just around the corner. And they let external narratives (the economy is slowing and companies in our industry must cut X, Y, and Z to survive) take over when they should be formulating their own stories (e.g. by shifting our efforts or leveraging our unique strengths, we can set the stage for the next five years of growth).

The best part of this is that questions are free, with the only cost being the amount of time you invest in exploring them. And by undertaking this process, can achieve results that range from alleviating stress to re-framing your opportunities to unlocking entirely new ideas for your business. 

To give you a sense of how asking beautiful questions can help you shift your narrative, below are a few inspired by Berger’s books:

  • Why are we in business? (And by the way, what business are we really in?)
  • What if we become a cause and not just a company?
  • What fears are holding us back?
  • What do we stand against?
  • Who does our company look like at its very best?
  • Where in our company is it safe (or unsafe) to ask radical questions?
  • Does our mission make sense? Do we embrace it? Does it unify us? 
  • What are we doing the way we’ve always done it?  Is it still working?
  • Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
  • If money were no object, how might we approach our work differently?
  • How might we create a culture of inquiry?
  • Does our future make us feel like dancing? How could it?

You’ll notice that these are open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have right or wrong answers. They’re not koans intended to stump people, but by they do have the power to get people into healthy debate (a conversation you enter into with a willingness to have your mind changed). And these questions are by no means exhaustive. Think up a few of your own that will rattle the cage (in a good way) during your team’s next meeting.

Translate questions into actions

Spending time in shared inquiry is the quickest way to regain alignment when things are wobbly. As a regular practice, it deepens alignment that allows your team to make decisions faster, think bigger, and reach higher levels of performance. By discussing these questions in ways that activate both the head and the heart, you identify the right actions to prioritize that will move the needle for your business while also keeping employees engaged and inspired.

When you’re aligned as a team and everyone feels that they’ve had their say, execution becomes easier. Decisions are more intuitive. You form collective gut reactions that honor everyone around the table. And you locked in on the key priorities for moving into the unknown. You might realize that the way forward lies in focusing on core customers. Or innovating your go-to-market motions. Or giving everyone in the company a day to reflect on a single question that will unify the team. Action is a force of expansion, and aligned action is the quickest way to make progress toward your shared goals. 

Your brand strategy is an alignment tool

Your brand strategy can be the catalyst for a culture of inquiry. Many of Berger’s questions are fundamental to building a brand that is authentic and differentiated. When your brand seeks to embody a purpose beyond profits, you get to explore the motives, orientations, and attitudes of your company. You create the space to ask difficult questions that lead to revealing and powerful answers that are rooted in meaning and emotion. This leads to a brand that navigates the world in a more purposeful way, asking the questions that need to be asked of itself, and discovering the meaningful connections that help them prosper.

Ask the questions. Live the answers. And thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

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

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

Posted on by Giovanna Blackston Keren

Do You Guys Do Messaging?

When clients ask us to share our ‘typical’ brand strategy process, we are careful to respond that there is no typical process as all client needs truly are different. The right-for-this-client scope of work comes as a result of a deep process of inquiry into our clients’ circumstances, budget tolerance, depth and expertise of team, and an assessment of what we think they will need to really make their brand perform in the market. Invariably, the question comes, “what about messaging, do you guys do that?” Indeed, what about messaging? A classic component of the strategy line-up, we’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about this deliverable of late.

Messaging, also referred to as Messaging Framework, Messaging Grid, or Messaging Platform, is classically a compendium of messages, written in plain-speak (i.e. not in Brand Voice), designed to translate the core strategic tenets of the brand positioning into relevant and motivating messages for each of the brand’s core audiences (current and prospective customers, partners, employees, etc.). Sometimes, each message will be accompanied by a ‘message pod’—a sample piece of copy, written in Brand Voice, to help a client understand how this message would actually execute in situ.

Why are Messaging Frameworks useful?

What’s great about the Messaging deliverable is that it takes strategy out of a Keynote (or PowerPoint, as the case may be) and demonstrates in real, marketing-jargon-free words what the ideas actually mean in practice. The deliverable goes a long way to take theory into practice and also show how versatile the idea is in its ability to be relevant and motivating for a variety of audiences. A seeming ‘score,’ but to be honest, we’re wondering if this is really the most useful tool for our clients.

When are Messaging Frameworks not what the doctor ordered?

Messaging Frameworks, while noble in intent, can sometimes end up DOA. There are a few reasons we’ve seen this happen. In some cases, our clients have a robust team dedicated to writing content. These teams are well-equipped to take Messaging and turn it into copy and content that extends and enhances their existing messaging. However, for many companies, this is simply not the case. Content is cranked out by all kinds of people, not necessarily writers, and trying to take messaging into copy can feel like a herculean task. Similarly, younger organizations, especially tech companies, are not well-positioned to write content that sits above product descriptions, features, and benefits. For them, brand is a new language and often the reason they’ve turned to a branding firm for help. Figuring out how to infuse their heavily product-focused content with brand messages is simply not in their skill set. Or in their timelines.

What’s a better option?

We’ve been asking ourselves how we can better meet our clients’ needs by giving them content they can actually use. The answer turns out to be not a Messaging Framework at all. The fact of the matter is, there are a variety but not infinite number of touchpoints that are suited for brand messaging. Rather than developing a framework of messages that must then be matched with a need and then recast in Brand Voice, we are asking our clients to tell us exactly what they need from the get-go. A sparkling new “About” section for your website? Check. We can do that. We know who the audience is and we know what key ideas we want to convey to them. We’ve got the Brand Voice down. Easy. How about a blurb for your LinkedIn profile? A sales outreach email? A CEO announcement to employees? PR boilerplate? Check. Check. Check and check.

It’s a new world. Time is money. Brands are erected in months, not years. We are increasingly helping our clients get right to the point with brand-led content they can use out of the gate. There may still be utility for a Messaging Framework for large, distributed companies with plenty of writers with time on their hands. But from our perspective, brand-led, ready as-is content is the way to go.

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

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

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The History of Brand

A lot of people – even those in branding – struggle with answering the question: So what’s a brand, anyway?

The term “brand” first emerged more than half a century ago as a way for cattle ranchers to identify their animals. In the late 1880s, packaged goods like Coca-Cola started taking off. Brands were used to differentiate them from the generic competition.

But as branding progressed, marketers realized there was more to the brand of Coca-Cola than just a non-generic name.

David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” defined brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”

The Dictionary of Brand defines brand as “a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.”

Marty Neumeier, author and speaker on all things brand, defines brand by first laying out what a brand is not: “A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product.” Neumeier goes on to say that “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”

As branding has evolved, brands have become more subjective – more about perception and accumulated meaning. Our conception of what a brand is has become more and more complicated, difficult to define, and hard to pin down with a single definition.

Defining Brand as Undefinable?

So, why is defining what a brand is so difficult? What insights can we gather from this difficulty?

1. Brands mean different things to different people at different times.

A single brand means something unique to each person – be it a current consumer, potential consumer, employee, recruit, or just within the world at large. Brands are dynamic. They can play a different role depending on who they interact with and when. Some people connect with certain aspects of a brand, while others connect meaningfully with another. And often times, a person’s relationship with a brand can really develop – increasing trust, loyalty, meaning, and engagement. Smart and successful brands work on reaching all the different audiences who matter to their business and aim to further their brand relationships with each individual.

2. Brands are amorphous.

At Emotive Brand, we often think of brands as nebulous and infinite. A brand can be the sum of brand experiences or interactions, but those experiences and interactions have infinite possibilities. Every touchpoint matters. Each moment counts. Although we work on creating structure for brands in the form of brand architecture, that architecture always accommodates for growth and change – so the brand can develop, expand, respond, and shift with the times.

3. Brands are about feelings, and feelings are complicated.

When you ask people why they love certain brands, it’s often hard for them to pin down. They might provide a list of rational and logical reasons, but in the end, it often comes down to a feeling. How does that brand really make them feel? And why do they come back for more of that feeling? Why does that feeling mean something to them? Successful brands today are always emotionally infused. They hold great emotional meaning for people and that’s what makes that brand loved and respected.

4. Highly recognizable, well-known brands are often used to define what a brand is.

More often than not, the question of defining what a brand is is answered with a list of popular, well-known, established brands. Think Nike, Apple, Google, etc. Although these examples can reveal a lot about what a brand is, just thinking of the definition in terms of these big names isn’t enough. Consider all types of brands – big and small, global and local, new and old. Maybe even consider what businesses lack a brand and what makes them different from businesses who have built a brand they rely on. There’s a lot to learn from all the brands we interact with every day. Each brand is meaningful because of something different, and this is often what differentiates a brand and makes it powerful to the people who matter to it.

5. Defining the impact a brand can have is often easier than defining what a brand is.

When we talk about defining what a brand is, we often talk about what makes a brand impactful for a business: stronger ROI, an aligned leadership, a more engaged workplace, etc. And when we discuss impact – whether it’s from a brand refresh, a new positioning, a great campaign, or just further brand engagement – that’s where we see the brand really working. That’s where we see it living and doing its job. Take the impact of an engaged workplace. Here, we see the brand in action – creating specific meaning and value tailored for employees and recruits of the right fit that increases innovation, productivity, creativity, loyalty.

Finding a Shared Understanding of Brand

Even though it’s a difficult exercise, establishing a shared understanding about how you define your brand and what it means to your business can help guide both your brand and business forward. With alignment around what makes your brand unique, you can build a marketing strategy around it and allow your brand to reach its full potential. Talking about your brand, how you define it, what it means, and the impact it has can do great things for your business.

So, how would you define what a brand is? Share your comments below!

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

A Mid-Year Check-Up Across Business, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

The half-way point of the year is always ripe for reflection. We all survived Q1, the budget isn’t completely spent yet, and with any luck, we’ll live to see Q3. It’s a perfect time to kick the tires of your business, brand, and culture. What’s working? What’s failing? How can you fail better? How can you push things forward and end the year on a meteoric rise instead of a trickle?

Let’s run a brief diagnostic check.

1. How is your brand positioning? Are you top of mind? Is it clear, competitive, differentiated? Maybe your sales have declined, your targeted audience has shifted, or your product roadmap has evolved. Either way, positioning your business correctly helps separate your brand from its competitors. It’s one of the best return on investments for driving growth, fostering alignment, and situating your business and brand to thrive in even the most crowded landscapes.

2. Do your people have the tools they need? At its best, brand language is a tool people know how to wield with gusto. Your elevator pitch, your boilerplate, your corporate narrative – these are ways of clearly defining the purpose of your company and your unique role in bringing it to life. Anyone who’s been to a cocktail party knows the feeling of getting trapped in a sprawling 20-minute conversation from simply asking, “So, what do you do?” Get your story straight, concise, and attention-grabbing.

3. How are you expressing those insights externally? If you’ve got your story down, it would be a crime to keep it locked up. Blogs, podcasts, and thought leadership not only crystalize your vision, but they also build a community around your content. Readers can be coworkers, prospective clients, future employees, event organizers, or even the lowest of the low, other blog writers! It sounds simple, but brands with something to say should say something.

4. What’s the look and feel of those big ideas? A weird thing about business is that often the most important tools – pitch decks, sales playbooks, and conference presentations – are the ugliest. Forget stock photography. Instead, spend some design love on the tools that you will be using over and over to grow your business and tell your story.

5. How do all of these design elements ladder up? If your sales team is routinely Frankenstein-ing their own decks, if you’ve acquired multiple products that shift how people perceive you, or if you’re simply ready to ditch that chat bubble logo that stands for “community and conversation,” it might be time for a rebrand. Your visual identity is how the world understands you. Why leave any room for misunderstanding?

6. Do you have the right culture and values to bring these elements to life? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: culture is everything. It’s the foundation, the spark, the catalyst, the magic that turns a job into a calling.

7. Are you attracting and retaining the right talent to deliver on your mission? Top talent is a lot like falling in love. Great partners tend to seek you out when you’re living your best life, as opposed to desperately posting online. When your brand is strategically aligned and beautifully designed, you become a magnet for brilliant minds. In a way, everything you do for your brand ends up improving your employer brand, because who doesn’t want to be involved in something great?

8. Are you getting out there in the real world? In 2019, it’s never been easier to hide behind the computer. We cannot stress enough the value of physical events in the real world: conferences, experiential product launches, even inviting companies for lunch-and-learns. Get your brand in front of real people, because that’s where insights happen. You need to see the excitement in people’s faces when you solve a problem they care about. And you need to be gut-checked by people outside your bubble with good bs detectors.

9. Are you giving people time to think beyond daily cycles? Here’s a slightly counter idea: productive people need time to get bored. When you have alignment at the top and everything is firing like it’s supposed to, the best gift you can give creatives is freedom – because that’s how innovation happens. It’s Google’s 20 percent rule. Clarity of purpose leads to clarity of action. Give your employees the general direction they need to delight you with a left-turn.

10. Are you building a brand that you actually want to engage with? It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s like that Toni Morrison quote. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” There is so much sameness out there. Ditch the crowd and build the crazy company you wish you could have looked up to when you first started. Are you passionate, fired-up, energized about what you’re building and the story you’re telling? Because that’s the fuel that keeps you going in times of uncertainty. You can’t control the market, but you can control your brand and the feelings it evokes.

When it comes to the strength of your business, brand, and culture, there are one million things to worry about. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. If any of these topics are illuminating your “check engine” light, we’d love to chat with you.

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

Brand, Purpose, Culture: The Triple Threat For Business Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

In Tandem

We talk a lot about how businesses today need a strong brand, a clear purpose, and an inspired culture. Each of these brand components are playing a greater role in business success today. Sometimes it appears that if you just have one, you might be able to turn your business around. But this is no longer the case.

Without all three – brand, purpose, culture – working together and driving one another, rising to the top is not a possibility. Simply embracing purpose is no longer enough to stand out. Even the most talented people aren’t going to drive you into the future without a clear vision of what that future is. Likewise, a highly strategic and perfectly designed brand won’t succeed without purpose-led people who can bring it to life.

Purpose, Delivered

Purpose is only powerful when it is really brought to life – when it acts as the underlying driving force behind the business. And what brings a purpose to life? Your people. The culture you build. Your employees united around a strong, clear, aspirational future with a clear outline of how to get there.

A vague purpose is no purpose at all. Neither is a purpose that doesn’t dictate your leadership’s behavior and drives best practices that trickle down. So businesses who want to compete today don’t just have to lead with purpose, they have to deliver on that purpose – following through with every brand touch point, living their promise, driving towards their greatest goals, and bringing their employees together every day.

It’s in the Data For Business

When we look at the data, we see the role of purpose having more and more of an impact on business results. According to recent Gallup research, 88% of millennials claim they would remain at their jobs for more than 5 years if they “were satisfied with the company’s sense of purpose,” but only 27% report feeling satisfied with their current company’s values. And this low rating directly impacts business with low employee engagement, low retention rates, and increased difficulty attracting the right fit of talent – top concerns for execs today.

Linking Together Brand, Purpose, Culture

Strong cultures can’t happen in a silo. They require shared accountability and leaders who behave in purpose-led ways that set an example for the rest of the business. And although building a purpose from the ground up is always the easiest practice, it might not be an option for many businesses today. That’s why leaders need to understand how brand, culture, and purpose have to work together to position the business for success.

Although purpose has been accepted by many businesses and brands as a strategic priority, many are struggling to directly link it to their company’s culture. Because of this, purpose can’t do the job it needs to do. First off, HR, not always seen as strategic, needs to be involved. As people demand more transparency, more authenticity, and more purpose from the businesses they want to work for, HR needs to have a seat at the strategic table – helping build a purpose-driven culture that can come alive and drive the business forward.

It’s all about strong leadership, clear vision alignment, joining forces at the strategic table, and figuring out how to communicate an inspiring vision to employees. Because when employees understand why the brand truly matters – what is driving the behavior of the company and its values – they can then align themselves in ways that help the brand outperform the competition and position the business to thrive.

Into the Future

Brand, purpose, and culture are critical to the success of your business. Investing in your brand is a good first step into driving your business and its people in the right direction. But when you invest in your brand, you also have to invest in your culture and never stray away from the power of purpose. Understanding the ways in which culture and purpose are linked, and how they drive your brand forward, is key.

Getting aligned around purpose and delivering on that purpose at every touch point should always be a strategic priority. Infuse it into your culture and help it motivate your people forward. Your company culture – when truly led by purpose – can bring any strategy to life, position your business for growth, and situate your team and your brand to thrive no matter the obstacles ahead.

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

Brand Essence Is the Heart and Soul of Your Business

Posted on by Chris Ames

The Miracle of Brand Essence

To begin, we turn briefly to the world of basketball. The Los Angeles Lakers, a once-beloved franchise, have not won a championship in nearly a decade. This year, they will not make the playoffs for the sixth year in a row, the longest drought in team history. Yet despite this, every year, the Lakers sell more jerseys than just about anybody else in the league. How is this possible? Even though the team is weak, its brand essence is incredibly strong.

If branding is the heart of business, then brand essence is the heart of branding. Think of it as a tool, often just a few words, for capturing and communicating the conceptual subtleties of your brand. It’s the core characteristic that defines you – an intangible attribute that separates your brand from your competition. It is not a commodity, nor is it product related. It is the essential feeling evoked in your audience when they hear your brand name.

Emotion > Innovation

For the Lakers, that’s “Showtime.” Showtime was an era when the team played an exciting run-and-gun style of basketball. Led by Magic Johnson’s passing skills and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring, the team elevated the audience’s expectation of what basketball could be. Fans were no longer coming to watch a sport, they were here to watch a show – with all the swagger, excitement, and delight that that entails. A ticket to the Showtime Lakers was an emotional experience.

And that’s the key right there. Especially in overcrowded B2B markets, emotional brands are the only way to create meaningful, sustainable differentiation. In today’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? world, it’s difficult to maintain a performative edge through innovation alone. Eventually, you’ll lose your edge – and that’s when you must rely on the emotional attachment of your brand to keep you afloat till your next breakthrough. Apple hasn’t radically changed their phones in years, but they maintain deep product love through a clear articulation of their essence.

Some Examples of Brand Essence

Visa = Everywhere.
FedEx = Safe.
Disney = Magical.
REI = Adventurous.

Notice how none of these examples mention processing fees or delivery times or refund policies? This is the highest level of value your brand can articulate. Don’t be fooled by its brevity. It’s incredibly difficult to create something that is aspirational yet achievable, abstract yet grounded, universal yet specific. Where do you even start?

Elevate Your Brand Through Laddering

One way in is a process called “laddering,” which is often used to uncover the essence of a brand. As outlined by brand consultant Philip Kotler, “Laddering is based on the notion that brand meaning can be deepened by examining progressively more abstract implications of a brand’s features,” he says. “The bottom rung of the ladder represents the starting point, which is usually an attribute.”

An attribute leads to a functional benefit, which is the second rung on the ladder. Zooming out further, the implication of the functional benefit is an emotional benefit, which is the third rung. Finally, the crystallization of that emotional benefit would be the final rung on the ladder: your brand essence. As we climb up the ladder, the focus is less on the attributes of the brand and more on the role that the brand plays in consumers’ lives. For example, let’s look at Guinness.

Rung 1 attributes: alcoholic, malty, filling
Rung 2 functional benefits: satisfying, delicious, unique
Rung 3 emotional benefits: masculine, independent, in the know
Rung 4 brand essence: Guinness brings out your inner strength

Relentless Consistency

Sustaining an emotional brand requires superhuman levels of consistency across multiple touchpoints. After all, you are not just competing within your own industry for share of heart – every brand bombards people with emotional messages. To get traction, brands need consistency of purpose and execution at every customer touchpoint. In a fragmented social media landscape, this only gets harder every year. Brands need to be crystal clear in the expression of their essence, reinforcing it across time, media, and geographies in order to establish their role in consumers’ lives.

When you define your brand essence, you can:

  • Articulate the highest source of value in a memorable way
  • Increase the power of brand positioning
  • Guide decision-making for creative design, values, and brand story
  • Limit fragmentation and disparate projects that aren’t on-brand
  • Enable brand growth with values and message integrity
  • Provide “little epiphanies” and stronger emotional connections for consumers

Lastly, make sure you pick an essence that doesn’t feel right at the moment, but also asks long-term strategic questions to help you define your brand essence for the goals of your business for today and tomorrow.

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

Brand Relevance Is The New Differentiation

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We believe brands need to stand out, not just by being different, but by being both personally relevant and emotionally important to people.

We came across this statement by Elliot Schreiber, Ph.D on his blog “Brand and Reputation” that sums up the key difference between “differentiation” and “relevance”:

Relevance is More Important than Differentiation: Business strategists, Marketers and brand managers have been fixated on differentiation. Customers, however, are drawn to relevance – the things that “connect with them emotionally”. As I explain to my students, differentiation is all the people you date; relevance is the one you marry because you cannot live without them. It is emotional and irrational, but the bond is strong. Consider all of the competitors who worked on their versions of the iPad that would be different, faster, etc. Regardless of what was introduced, the customer preferred the iPad. It was the most relevant product on the market.

When a brand seeks a meaningful position through personal relevance and emotional importance, it starts by discovering what makes it potentially relevant and then focuses on evoking the emotions that will support, extend and highlight that relevance.

That’s the role of the emotive branding process: why + emotions = meaning.

For more information on our brand strategy methodology take a peak at our methodology.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design consultancy.