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Tag: 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.

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

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

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

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

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

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

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

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

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

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

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

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

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

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

 Download White Paper

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

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Brand Differentiation: Where Do You Even Start?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Differentiation

In B2B marketing, creating brand differentiation is a critical output of all marketers whether you are managing a B2B or B2C brand.

When your brand is truly and meaningfully differentiated, it works as a magnet to attract new customers and employees, as a glue that keeps people loyal, and as a warm glow that means people always come back for more. So how do you differentiate your brand?

The problem for most brands is that they have yet to find a distinct place in the whirlwind of modern commerce. These brands are being buffeted by the winds of change and the waves of disruption. Every day they go further astray, lost in the vast “Sea of Commodity”.

And what do they find, if they actively seek out a point of brand differentiation that is based only on what they do and how they do it? Often, they don’t find an inch of difference between what they do and what their competitors do. They find themselves speaking the same language as everyone else. They use the same visual language. And realize that they market themselves in a carbon copy fashion.

Start with “Why”

The modern answer to the brand differentiation quandary lies in the question, “Why?”. As Simon Sinek puts it,

“People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it”.

This is increasingly true and with little wonder. Think for a moment how difficult it is from your brand’s perspective. Now, think about how difficult it is from your customer’s perspective.

All of us are inundated with marketing hype and claims. Not only in your category, but in every aspect of our lives. Our natural response is to turn off as much of the noise as we can. We do this by applying filters. Brands work as filters when they help us latch onto something important and meaningful. Once that connection is made, we can then forget about the rest.

But if your widgets are the same as the next guy’s, it’s going to take something truly significant to become the most trusted and respected widget seller.

How do you define your “Why”?

The answer is to explore and define your brand’s “why”. Deep in what you do and how you do it, lies a number of truths about your intentions and outcomes.  These positive character attributes can fuel the thinking that will lead your brand toward meaningful (and profitable) differentiation.

By giving your brand a “North Star” to aim for, you elevate the spirit, ambition, and drive of your brand and everyone connected to it. A purposeful brand promise is the best way to forge your brand’s North Star. When well crafted, and built through the principles of empathy, purpose and feelings, a promise allows everyone vital to the brand’s success to see the ideal it sets as their own and enables them to be an active part of it.

When this brand promise is translated into new forms of behavior, both for the brand as an entity, and for the people in the workplace, amazing and differentiated things start to happen. In the effort to fulfill on the brand’s promise, a new mood and spirit drives business relationships, product development, marketing campaigns, customer service, etc.

  • Senior management makes more aligned and purposeful decisions.
  • Managers create more productive and gratifying work situations.
  • Product designers stretch their skills and imagination.
  • Marketing teams build consistent brand experiences and stronger messaging.
  • Customer service teams work with greater empathy and compassion.

All these changes push your brand in the direction of its brand promise. As a result, your brand, business, and culture will thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy this post on Storytelling for Demand Generation

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Co-Founders On Brand Strategy Today

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Co-founders, Bella Banbury and Tracy Lloyd, weigh in on what matters in brand strategy today.

It’s important to remember that, in the end, the age-old question is always the same. Client needs all come down to “How do we differentiate our brand?” It’s just the way people ask the question and the way we answer the question that evolves. Here’s what we’ve been seeing more specifically in the market:

1.Heightened attention around data security:

Since 2016 was all about using data, now it’s all about safely storing and accessing that data. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 50% of business ethics violations will be related to data. There are lots of questions and doubts about how brands are collecting information and keeping it safe. People are distrustful and worried about privacy issues. Smart brands are focused on security and smart storage. And those brands that can keep data safe, and their users even safer, are winning.

2. Even greater demand for trust:

Companies with a culture of trust have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of three, and high-trust companies are more than 2½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations than lower-trust companies. Nothing is as important as trust for any brand looking to make an impact moving forward. In 2016, we saw a lot of brands lose people’s trust, both internally and externally, in banking, in technology, in the automobile industry, and in the food industry. So this year a lot of brands are working on building and keeping trust this coming year. And this effort always comes back to brand strategy – helping brands make promises that they can keep to both build and keep the trust earned. That’s what we do.

3. Purpose divides:

The conversation around purpose-led business continues. There is more and better research coming out that supports the ideas of purpose-led business and the research supports our belief. When companies articulate and embrace a meaningful purpose or vision, their people naturally pay more attention to all the elements that drive sustainable growth. Brands that want genuine purpose to fuel innovation, culture, and business need to make sure they live authentically by it and communicate it clearly.

4. It’s all about disruption:

It’s clear that people are drawn to brands that are challenging the status quo, saying something new, and making a splash today. Whatever is it –disrupting a category, challenging the way we pay for things, changing the way we get healthcare, the retail experience – it’s all about disruption. Industries we’ve been most excited about are insurance, healthcare, wellness, and education because of this same reason. Brands that reimagine what is possible and deliver new ways of behaving will gain momentum over their competitors who remain stuck in the same thinking.

5. Digital health, on the rise:

There are many changes afoot in wellness and digital health. Last year, we saw more investing in this space and we imagine brands will need to start working harder to differentiate themselves in the next year. Right now, the future seems exciting and yet somewhat vague. This space will require digital health brands to clarify, differentiate, categorize, and tackle shifts head on. The digital health market is huge, and those brands that can figure out how clearly articulate why they matter and deliver on that promise could very well become Wall Street darlings.

6. Role of the CMO changed for good:

The role of the CMO is almost unrecognizable to five years ago. CMOs are now expected to deliver against P&L metrics, grow the top line, and drive the brand forward. Steering the brand in the driver’s seat means delivering on the brand promise. It also means ensuring all customer experiences are aligned to the brand purpose. It’s about understanding the customer journey and embracing customer experiences across all channels. So in order to compete, the CMOs of 2017 need to be brand focused, technically savvy, and data driven. They need to deliver better customer experiences and use insights to strategically deliver business growth.

7. All about brand experience:

Because expectations of brands are continually rising, smart brands are uber-focused on creating meaningful experiences. The real challenge is creating cohesive, connected experiences that resonate across platforms and at every touchpoint. These experiences drive engagement, build loyalty, and drive ROI. And brands need a clear strategy for succeeding in creating the right kind of experiences for the people they are trying to reach. Developing strategies to outline brand behavior has become more relevant for brands looking to deliver something people can count on – whether it’s B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.

As a San Francisco branding agency, we are excited to continue to help our clients develop the right brand strategies to transform brands in order to transform business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Using Values to Build Engagement and a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Fifth in a series.

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

The goal of employee engagement is to drive employee attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics in such a way as to improve their productivity, morale, satisfaction, and usefulness within the organization. However, many companies have struggled with converting their proclaimed values into compelling, work-changing experiences for their employees.

Often, the problems have been that the values are typically expressed with meaning-neutral (if not meaningless) corporate-speak, or that the values aren’t of a first-order nature. That is, they don’t touch on what truly constitutes the “good” for people inside and outside the organization.

Getting employees to live company values

As such, employees simply haven’t been able to internalize the values. If asked, they may be able to repeat the values verbatim, but their recitation will not be heartfelt. Furthermore, too often their conscious knowledge of the values does not lead to the desired changes in attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics.

There is a way businesses can get employees to live the company’s values. Ironically, it is by never using the word “values.” Rather, it is by bringing people to the company’s values through feelings.

This is a new way of engaging employees in corporate values. It doesn’t ask employees to buy into potentially bland statements crafted in corporate-speak. Instead, it prompts employees to think about how they want themselves, and others, to be left feeling by the business.

To make this work, the business determines a set of higher-order feelings based on their ambition. These feelings are selected based on their ability to help propel employees in their pursuit of the ambition and their ability to serve as an employee-friendly way of deploying values through employee engagement initiatives.

Engagement built around feelings

The business then engages its employees around these feelings, using them to shape, change, improve, and make more consistent, the employee’s attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics as it drives them forward toward the ambition.

For example, employees can be engaged in a process by which they explore how the business can better make them feel the selected feelings through changes and additions to the company policies and procedures.

At the same time, employees can affect change within by questioning how they, and the policies and procedures they control, can be changed or added to in order to make their superiors, peers, and reports more likely to feel the desired feelings.

By focusing on feelings rather than traditional value statements, a business instantly forges a fresh and new emotional connection with its employees. By using feelings as the platform by which it instills its values, businesses discover a better way to engage their employees and to get them to internalize both the business’ ambition (purpose) and its feelings (values).

Did you miss the first four parts of this series?

Read Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees, Getting Employees to Respond Positively, Why Workplaces Aren’t Meaningful Now, and The Meaningful Workplace: It Takes New Ways of Thinking, and Acting.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

“Ambition” is the new “purpose.” Workplaces become meaningfully relevant when employees see the point of what they and their employers are out to do: the company’s “why”, it’s reason for being, it’s meaningful ambition. When presented in a credible, inclusive and authentic way, the company’s meaningful ambition is respected, admired and embraced by employees because it aligns to their personal values and answers their desire for meaning.

Continue reading “Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace”

Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We often come back to the Fast Company blog post by Seth Kahan, a change specialist and author of, “Getting Innovation Right”, published in 2013. Many of our clients are looking for help creating a brand strategy and developing corporate values that will help create a culture of innovation.

Seth presents three practical secrets for the innovative leader. We were particularly struck by his second secret:

Secret #2. Articulate the Way Forward

People rely on their leaders to craft a vision of the future that makes sense and can guide their everyday decisions. Most of the leaders I have met improvise this activity and many do it badly. And yet articulating a rousing vision of the future isn’t difficult. It can be your secret super-power, if you just master these three tactics:

Continue reading “Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate”

Emotional Design Principles Build Meaningful Brand Interactions

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

Emotional Design

We recently came across an older, but interesting article about the use of emotion in design.

The piece takes us through the premises of two books on website user interface design, “Emotional Design” by Don Norman, and “Designing for Emotion” by Aaron Walter.

We were drawn to this recap of Norman’s 3-level approach to creative design:

  1. The visceral level – the appearance of a design
  2. The behavioral level – how the product works
  3. The reflective level – the long-term impact of the design

Continue reading “Emotional Design Principles Build Meaningful Brand Interactions”

B2B Brands Desperately Need Ways to Differentiate Themselves

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The pressing need for differentiation in B2B

“Features easily blur into other features. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings.”

It is natural for people engineering teams, product teams and product marketing teams to see their B2B product or service as something special, unique, and important.

Unfortunately, this makes it all the more difficult for them to see it clearly in the competitive context.

All too often, what separates one B2B offering from the next is marginal.

This leaves B2B brand owners in a most vulnerable position.

So, what can a B2B brand do to differentiate its presence in the marketplace it serves?

The first step is to acknowledge that the world has moved on in ways that offer new opportunities.

Even in B2B, people buy from people. It’s personal. It’s emotional. And those that forget that will miss out one of the easiest ways to differentiate their rand. The people who decide to buy your product, work for your company, partner with you, supply you, invest in you, or allow you into their community, are driven by different values and aspirations.

They want to do things that matter.

They want to deal with businesses that help them feel that their decisions and actions matter beyond themselves.

The questions to ask

The question for B2B brand owners is, “What are you already doing – and what else could you start doing – to make the experience of dealing with your business feel more authentic to your brand, gratifying, and meaningful to people?”

What hidden meaning is operating below the radar that could serve as the basis of a more meaningful brand?

What is the promise that you are making that resonates with people both rationally and emotionally?

The answers to these questions is purpose. Why you built the company or product in the first place. It is what drove you to start a company. It is what you use to recruit the people that believe what you believe.

Purpose

A purpose that inspires everyone in your business to work with greater satisfaction, to deal with customers in ways that make them feel special, and to think of ways to make your business ever more successful.

So, a purpose that makes people not only get the difference you offer, but feel it too.

With a meaningful purpose, and a new way of bringing that to life, your B2B brand is suddenly operating from a new position among the fray.

There’s a feeling about your business that draws people to it, engages them in it, and keeps them loyal to it.

Short of re-inventing the category in which you operate through unique technology or processes (that increasingly elusive dream), learning how to matter is the best differentiator for B2B brands to become stronger today, and better fit for the future.

In our paper, “Five Reasons Why B2B Brands Should Become Meaningfully Emotive,” we talk about the pressing need for differentiation in the B2B space:

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Meaningful Workplace – Getting Employees to Respond Positively

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

Meaningful Workplaces are built by companies that aim to produce a more meaningful outcome from, and for, their people.

Continue reading “Meaningful Workplace – Getting Employees to Respond Positively”