Brands That Move People Will Own the Market in 2025

Posted on August 6, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

In 2025, brands that truly move people will dominate. Forget focusing solely on features—lasting impact comes from emotional connections that inspire action and advocacy. You already know that standing out in a competitive market is crucial, but real leaders don’t just stand out—they make a lasting impact that resonates deeply with their audience.

Many brands miss the mark by focusing only on features and rational benefits, forgetting that emotional connection multiplies impact. If you’re aiming to lead with purpose and influence in 2025, the real differentiator is emotion.

Why Emotion is the Key to Driving Meaningful Impact

True market leaders know emotional connection isn’t optional—it’s a competitive edge that drives faster decisions, increases advocacy by 60%, and boosts lifetime value. Brands that stir emotions inspire loyalty, retention, and long-term relevance. These are the brands that don’t just compete—they inspire, influence, and lead.

At Emotive Brand, we know emotion is the strategic lever behind every major business outcome—speeding up decisions, improving retention, and building stronger customer loyalty. Without an emotional connection, your brand is just another option. With it, you become the only option.

A Brand Blueprint for Impact

Emotional connection may be the missing piece, but simply knowing that isn’t enough. The real question is, how do you harness the power of emotion to drive measurable outcomes? That’s where our Brand Blueprint comes in.

The Brand Blueprint isn’t a creative exercise—it’s a fast, actionable path to becoming a high-impact brand. Whether you’re looking to strengthen your position or expand into new markets, Emotive Brand’s Blueprint equips you with the tools to:

Create Emotional Connections that build lasting relationships and make your brand the top choice—not just for what you offer, but for how you make customers feel. These emotional bonds turn customers into loyal advocates, driving retention, increasing lifetime value, and fostering organic growth.
Amplify Your Brand’s Impact by leveraging emotional engagement as a competitive advantage. Brands that build strong emotional connections don’t just attract customers—they create experiences that deepen loyalty, speed decision-making, and fuel sustained growth, positioning your brand as a true market leader.
Align Strategy and Emotion across every touchpoint. From your messaging to customer interactions, our approach ensures your brand consistently delivers both the emotional and rational elements that build trust and credibility, creating a unified experience that resonates deeply and turns customers into lifelong brand advocates.
Sustain Your Leadership Position by embedding emotional connection into every phase of the customer journey. This fosters long-term trust and loyalty, transforming your brand into a market leader that customers believe in, follow, and champion.

Ready to Make an Unforgettable Impact in 2025?

Is your brand building emotional connections that inspire action, or stuck relying on outdated rational appeals?

Here’s the real question: Why do so many B2B brands still think emotion is just for B2C? The truth is, B2B buyers—whether at the C-suite or senior leadership level—face higher stakes. Their time, credibility, and even their jobs are on the line. Yet, most brands still focus on features, missing the emotional drivers that lead to real impact. The old rational playbook no longer works. If you’re not building emotional ties, you’re missing out on the most powerful lever for driving loyalty, advocacy, and long-term impact.

Let’s talk. Share your thoughts, and together, let’s reshape the future of B2B branding through the power of emotion.

How Do You Orient Your Team When Everything Seems Uncertain?

Posted on March 21, 2023July 14, 2025 by Jamey Aiken

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Shaky markets. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to business success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward.

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it. For companies to navigate wave after wave of uncertainty, you need a more responsive approach:

Understand how your employees are feeling right now.
Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation? The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

Address employees’ emotions with a clear story of how you plan to move forward.
While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future. All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment: corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. You must cut through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization.

Get employees focused on a future that they are empowered to create.
In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To move your business forward and ultimately grow in times of uncertainty, you need better ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And you need to equip them not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

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

Posted on April 26, 2021August 1, 2025 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.

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.

Business Growth: Steps to Success for the Mid-Market

Posted on September 26, 2018August 1, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download White Paper

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

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

Unrealized Business Value? Build It With Brand

Posted on June 26, 2018July 18, 2025 by Carol Emert

Unrealized Business Value

If you’re feeling thwarted by business value that’s falling short of its potential, the answer may well lie in your brand. It’s true that brand lives under marketing, not finance. But a sharp, well-aimed brand strategy can address critical business results from lagging market capitalization to margins.

At Emotive Brand, we believe that brand isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you behave, how you serve each of your audiences, and, fundamentally, what you believe. That means your brand strategy is a foundation you can use to build value holistically, across your organization.

Here are three ways brand can build measurable business value:

Market Capitalization

Apple shares were trading below $1 when Steve Jobs rejoined the company in 1997. Today Apple has the highest market cap of any enterprise, clocking in around $867 billion, or $187 per share. Its brand value is the highest too – $184 billion, according to Interbrand.

To put that into perspective, Apple’s brand value is worth more than the entire book value of Coco-Cola Co., according to this tally.

One of the first things Jobs did upon rejoining Apple was to redefine the Apple brand and articulate it to the world.

In a staff meeting revealing the Think Different campaign, when Jobs had been back at Apple just a few weeks, he gave a talk that brilliantly explains the value of putting brand first.

This might be the most inspiring explanation of the power of brand we’ve seen, so do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing. Here are some key points:

“To me, marketing is about belief…. [and] the things Apple believed at its core are the same things Apple really stands for today…. Apple’s about something more than [making boxes…. Our] core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better… And those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”

Jobs’ clarity about his brand and its audience of passionate individuals helped guide Apple’s innovation and success. Those in turn have helped create the mega-brand value and world-leading market capitalization that Apple enjoys today.

Margin

Apple is also sitting on some $267 billion in cash, according to its latest quarterly earnings report. That illustrates another way brand can help build business value: profitability.

The gross profit margin on the iPhone X is reportedly 64%, up a healthy 5 percentage points from the 59% margin on its immediate predecessor, the iPhone 8. Overall, Apple’s corporate gross profit stands at a whopping 38%.

Of course, many factors impact corporate margins. But it’s clear that Apple’s brand appeal heightens its ability not only to charge a premium, but to launch new products that its fans line up to buy.

Recruiting

Brand appeal has just as much power in recruiting as it does in sales – if not more. It’s not lost on any job hunter how much a gold-plated brand stands out on a resume.

Of course, hiring the right people is essential to the success of any business, but a strong brand also has a direct impact on costs.

LinkedIn reports that a strong employer brand yields 50% more qualified applicants and reduces both hiring time and costs by half. Three quarters of jobseekers say they consider the brand before applying.

A strong employer brand even correlates to a higher retention rate. That both saves recruiting and training costs and contributes to higher workforce productivity.

You can learn more by downloading our white paper, How Emotive Brands Drive Business Results.

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

Emotive Data: Designing Quantitative Research for Emotional Insight

Posted on February 13, 2018August 1, 2025 by Carol Emert

Emotive Brand may not seem like a green eyeshade kind of place. After all, we’re in the business of creating emotional connections between brands and people. You may ask, “Why use quantitative research at all? Isn’t qualitative better for emotional insight?”

In fact, we find quantitative research very rich – and extremely useful for building our clients’ brands and businesses. Qualitative insight is important too, but whenever we can, we start with quant. It helps us move the needle on both functional and emotional measures. It also provides a baseline from which to measure change.

We recently completed a major quant project for a client in the education space. Our client had run a successful business for decades, but revenue growth was stalling as its primary audience matured. Executives came to Emotive Brand for both brand strategy and a growth strategy to jumpstart the business.

Here are some of the techniques we used to get emotional insight from the quant.

Quant Should Test Hypotheses

Every quant vendor has a standard methodology, but cookie cutter survey instruments yield cookie cutter findings. You have to know your client’s business and brand inside and out so you can enter the project with a strong set of hypotheses to test. That means the agency needs to be deeply involved in questionnaire development.

Working with our quant partner, we designed the questionnaire to include all the information needed to craft a growth strategy. We wanted to understand not only the brand and its competitors, but also the perceptions, attitudes, motivations, behaviors, and aspirations of each of five key target audiences toward the brand and the category.

We baked in other questions about the mechanics of the business to inform channel strategy and product development.

In the end, some of our hypotheses were right and some were wrong. But all of the findings were directly useful to helping us understand how to help our client grow.

Quant Should Elevate Emotional Insight

When we asked our target audiences why they engage in the category, their top answer was functional; they had to fulfill a professional requirement. But their second-highest answer was rife with emotion; it empowered them fulfill their highest career aspirations.

Guess what we did with the first data point? We ignored it. You can’t build an emotive brand on a functional requirement. But the aspirational nature of the category became central to our brand strategy.

Next, we asked our target audiences to rank the attributes of the client brand from high to low. Their top choices were all functional; the client was doing a good job delivering the basics.

A few notches down the list, they ranked the brand’s ability to enable the same career aspirations that were identified as important for the category. BINGO. Connecting the dots on what drives these audiences was a key emotional insight. It gave us a powerful territory in which to start positioning the brand.

Quant Connects the Dots on Growth Strategy

Finding these sorts of insights in quantitative analysis can be time consuming and eyeball wearing. But the fact is that it takes a human mind – specifically a human mind that is holding the hypotheses – to see meaningful connections.

It’s not a function that can be automated, at least not at this point.

One of the most important findings from our quant project was the identification of a new priority target audience. Looking at any one fact about this audience in isolation wouldn’t have bubbled it to the top as a priority. But looking across the data, we put together seven data points that, combined, told a compelling story of opportunity. Moving forward, this audience will be key to our client’s growth strategy.

That’s why we love quant. This one piece of research armed us with insights to help drive a new target strategy, brand strategy, primary and secondary messaging, as well as channel strategy and product development. Our client now has a baseline from which to measure the success of all of these efforts moving forward.

Done right, quantitative research can be great for the business and great for the brand.

For us, that’s something to get emotional about.

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

San Francisco Branding Agency Shares New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on January 4, 2018July 18, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

We promise to…

Deliver Business Results

Our clients hire us because they are looking to solve business problems. We know how to successfully enable growth by delivering positioning strategies that differentiate, brand campaigns that fulfill on marketing and sales goals, and deliver employer brand strategies that engage global employees around why the brand matters. Our work continues to drive business for our clients in a way that is transformative. We are focused on standing behind our work and delivering a strong ROI on every project.

Continue to Lead with Purpose

We stand behind the belief that purpose is at the core of any good brand. When purpose and brand are perfectly aligned – when what you do = what you say – you’re firing on all cylinders. We will continue to help unearth our client’s purpose so that their brands can flourish in 2016.

Evoke Emotions to Help Brands Connect with People

The feelings brands produce are not consequential, but essential. We will continue to explore how to peel away the layers – inside and outside a company– and arrive at the core of a brand’s emotional impact. This emotional understanding helps brands build powerful, meaningful, and vital connections with their audiences. Emotional impact is the greatest impact a business can make.

Drive Business, with Empathy Behind the Wheel

Empathy is the driver of any successful brand strategy. We work to shift perspectives, introduce a different lens, and examine a brand from every angle. Empathy is crucial to humanizing a company and helping build brands that understand the people crucial to their success.

Share What We Believe

We’ll continue to write and share our thoughts on the subjects that matter most to you by being aware of the content you most enjoy and share. It inspires us to inspire you. That is what being a thought leader is all about. We are committed to more, to better lead and inspire you.

Continue to Collaborate

The theory and practice of collaboration is how we’ve always worked. We know that the best ideas are the ones that result from a diversity of thought, generosity of spirit, and the courage required to bring new thinking to life. We know this is the kind of collaboration that transforms business. We promise this year will be no different.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Mistakes to Avoid When Preparing for a Branding Project

Posted on July 11, 2017July 24, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

All Signs Point to a Branding Project

There are a lot of common signs that indicate it may be the right time for a branding project. Maybe your business has experienced high grown and you are ready to reposition to prepare for your next round of funding. Or maybe it isn’t growing fast enough and you need to find a way to differentiate your brand to compete more strongly. Perhaps your competitive set has changed and with it, the industry has evolved opening a new category for you to shift into. With markets and categories shifting so quickly, many organizations are left feeling lost as to how to capitalize on those shifts and changes. A branding project can be a great way to re-energize perceptions about who you are, what you offer, and how you do it better than anyone else.

However, a branding project is no small undertaking. It requires commitment, dedication, and large-scale planning.

Before you launch into a branding project, consider these common mistakes.

1. Poor alignment around objectives and expectations:

If your business is considering investing in a branding project, it’s integral that you create alignment and clarity around the objectives of the project. Why is now the right time for an updated brand? What has changed? What can you expect as a result of this work and investment? And most importantly, how will you measure success?

Without clear objectives, time is wasted moving towards ambiguous goals. And time is of the essence. A rebrand won’t happen overnight. So plan ahead, anticipate the needs of the business, and determine what you need to be successful in the future is key.

2. Underestimating the power of planning:

Resource management is vital to the success of large scale projects like a rebrand. Too often organizations fail to see beyond the early planning stages and end up without the necessary resources to see a project through and beyond the launch. Don’t underestimate the time or financial and human resources that will be needed to do the job right. With an appropriate budget in place, a project of this scale then requires consistent planning, dedicated scheduling, and a team that is going to fuel the project forward.

A solid project plan is critical. Highlight major sales and marketing events to ensure you will have what you need when you need it. Block out Board Meetings and other critical business meetings. And if you have an upcoming conference and major events, block those too on a project plan. Meetings need to be nailed down. Clear timelines need to be established, people need to be held accountable, and strategies should be developed for keeping things on track. Once you allow a project to fall behind schedule, you’ve set the precedent that the project is not important and people will fail to treat it as a top priority. As soon as that happens, you start to waste those precious resources you worked so hard to put in place at the outset.

3. The wrong drivers:

Businesses often make the mistake of putting a team in place to manage a project like a re-brand without fully understanding the demands on their time. A project of this size can’t be something that your people do in their spare time or something that requires senior executives to sign-off on every single aspect before things can move forward. This means identifying and empowering someone internally and realigning their current responsibilities or consider bringing in an outside resource while designating a smaller internal team to help support this lead. And this internal team should not only represent marketing – sales, HR, and product teams can also be valuable drivers as long as the people you choose are clear on the strategic vision for the business.

Above all, make sure your project team is prepared and empowered to make smart, fast decisions. Getting hung up on small things and trying to please everyone is only going to stall the project and dilute its impact. It’s about making the agile, strategic decisions that position your business for success.

4. Thinking it’s all about the website:

A rebrand is not just about a new website. A project of this scale represents a much deeper, and extensive move in a different direction for your business that will impact all aspects of what you do and how you do it. The brand has to be embraced in the hearts and minds of the people who work for you and who embody what it means to do business with you. Any change has to start on the inside before you can expect it to be felt on the outside.

So yes, the website is an important touchpoint for the brand and often the first brand experience a prospect or customer might have with you, but your branding efforts can’t start and end there. Your new brand strategy must guide all of your marketing efforts, every interaction people have with your firm, as well as influence the way you do business.

5. Leaving people behind:

Change is difficult for people to digest. Most importantly, in order for change to work in your favor, you need to get people behind your new strategy. Pacing out how you introduce the new brand can make it more digestible to people. As well as help align everyone behind the direction your company or firm is taking.

In the end, people – no matter what role they play – want to know what a rebrand means to them. What changes should they expect and when? How do these shifts impact their own work? Daily and long term? What are the new expectations for them?

With shifting expectations, you need an infrastructure in place to internally manage performance. Figuring out how you are going to hold people accountable for shifting behavior is key.

Keep it Going

So you’ve decided on a rebrand. You’ve allocated time and resources. You’ve assigned a team. You’ve created a strategy and strategic materials. You’ve rolled the new brand out internally and externally with success. But the branding project isn’t over.

In fact, you’ve just started. Launching a brand is one thing, but maintaining it and keeping it doing its job is another. Make sure you are dedicated to building on your brand strategy overtime if you want your brand to do the work it needs to moving forward.

When you commit to the cost of a branding project, you must also commit to investing in your new brand in the long-term.

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

Good Leadership Character Leads to Good Brand Character

Posted on June 12, 2017July 16, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Tough time call for strong leaders

As recognition sets in that the COVID-19 crisis will not be short-lived, companies must respond appropriately by communicating in ways that are empathetic and relevant, contextually aware, human and sensitive. Leaders, brand stewards, and their teams must be extremely focused, keep up with the new normal of uncertainty, and have the ability to rapidly re-evaluate what their company stands for, how it communicates, and why this matters now more than ever.

Leadership Character

An excellent post at IMD.org speaks to two attributes that the writers, Professors Stewart Black and Allen Morrison, believe are necessary for leaders of global organizations today: emotional connections and integrity.

I think this advice is great for any business leader, not only those operating at the “global” level. Here’s the section on emotional connections that talks about being sincerely interested in others, genuinely listening to others, and understanding different viewpoints.

Emotional connections

Global leaders need to establish personal, empathetic relationships with people from all backgrounds inside their company, and in the broader community. Doing this requires three distinct abilities: sincere interest in other people, a heightened ability to listen, and a strong capacity for understanding different viewpoints.

Sincere interest in others

Our research found that effective global leaders actually like people – all kinds of people. They enjoy talking with people and being around them. They care about people and want in some way to make their lives better. All of these attributes help them to form better business relationships, which are a critical part of doing business in many countries. “International customers buy a relationship, not equipment,” David Janke, Vice President of Business Development at Evans & Sutherland, told us. “We’re not selling equipment: we’re selling somebody’s career, because she’s got her neck on the line. She is buying something and making a large investment,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, everybody points the finger at her, so she wants to deal with a company and people…that she trusts.”

Genuinely listening to people

Being interested in people is not the same as genuinely listening to them. As one executive recently told us, “It can be too easy when you are in a leadership position to do all the talking.” Yet, for others to feel understood, leaders must excel at picking up verbal and non-verbal communications. They must also overcome the “everyone thinks the same” assumption, which suggests a superficial understanding of the aspirations, interests, and feelings of other people.

Understanding different viewpoints

Understanding people requires leaders to relate personally to the lives of their employees, customers, and others who are relevant to the business. It means understanding context and, more specifically, how to provide appropriate leadership within it. For example, how a 40-year-old American expatriate manager delegates to a 35-year-old Japanese subordinate with a U.S. MBA should differ significantly from her delegation to a 55-year-old Japanese subordinate with no U.S. experience. To succeed, the American manager should pay much greater deference to the 55-year-old Japanese subordinate.

Effective Leadership

Establishing emotional connections is an essential part of effective global leadership, but this is not the same as “going native.” Leaders who are interested in people, who are excellent listeners, and who are familiar with local conditions and traditions do not have to become like the people they are with. While they need to keep an open mind, they should never forget who they are or what they represent.

When leaders have character, their behavior influences people throughout the organization. This impacts on every aspect of the business, including the way its brand behaves. When the organizational culture is built around character, a new way of being emerges that is far more appealing to people, both inside and outside the business.

To sum up: When you bring empathy to your leadership style, you win. When your leadership style makes your brand more empathetic, everyone wins.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

How to Make a Business and Brand Transformation Successful

Posted on May 2, 2017July 28, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Emotive Brand hinges itself on the power of business transformation through brand strategy, and brand strategist, Jo Schull adds a honed strategic mind to our team. By working directly with clients to help understand the true essence of their business, she uncovers the necessary internal and external strategies needed to transform the potential of their brand into a reality. In this interview, Jo offers her thoughts and expertise on how to make a brand and business transformation successful.

People are always talking about business transformation – what does that mean?

Business transformation can mean different things to different people. Some leaders see business transformations as bold, quick moves meant to shake things up. Others look at business transformation as the start of a change – a process that starts with purpose, strategy, and vision, and then takes shape through a series of changes to the business.

When or why should businesses attempt a transformation?

Many businesses wait too late to ‘transform’ themselves. They wait until they’re in trouble. They wait until competitors have encroached on their territory, until employee morale is low, until recruiting is difficult, until share prices are down. They wait for when the business is stuck in a downturn. These are all certainly good and necessary reasons to attempt a business transformation, but smart businesses are always looking ahead. These leaders know that the best transformations anticipate and head off crises.

What’s an example of that?

Smart businesses are constantly thinking about what’s next. They ask themselves: what’s the next phase of their evolution? For some, it might be about a product expansion or moving into other markets. For others, it might be about refining their customer experience: how can their offering become the best and most beloved brand for their core customers? In the end, it all comes down to honing in on the business’s purpose — understanding and communicating clearly why you exist as a business. From this, the business can be intentional about its future, who you serve, and why you want to serve them.

What are the essential components of a successful transformation?

The business must have executive-level participation and ownership. The leaders of the company have to be an essential part of the process. They set strategy, make business and brand decisions, and are responsible for the company’s overall performance. They lead the change.
The process must be inclusive. All cultures are different. Some are top-down, and others are more inclusive and democratic. The most successful transformations are those that feel authentic. And the best way to achieve authenticity is by including many voices in the process. As much as it’s important that leaders lead the process, it is equally important that the process involves perspectives and participation from across the organization. This includes different divisions, different geographies, different functions, and different levels within the organization. Many top-down transformations have failed because leaders did not understand the day-to-day realities of the business.
The transformation must be true to your brand and business. There’s nothing worse than attempting a brand and business transformation that is misaligned with your brand or business position. Your employees will be the first to see the disconnect and your customers won’t be far behind.

How do you work with leadership teams to create alignment during a business transformation?

We start by getting the leadership team clear on three things:

1) Why does your company exist in the first place?

2) What’s the next big problem you can solve for your customers?

3) Where are the biggest threats and opportunities?

Ideally, leadership teams are aligned on these questions. But occasionally, they are not. Either way, it’s important that when going into any sort of transformation that leadership teams are aligned about these questions. A transformation will get them on the same page about why they exist, what they are trying to do, and where the next opportunities lie.

How do you rally employees?

When we talk about rallying employees, there’s no one right way to do it.

You may ask: Is this a course correction, or a 180° shift? What’s the state of employee morale? Will this come as a shock or has the leadership of your company been transparent and brought employees along the journey? How large is the company? There are always many factors at play, but here are some guiding principles.

Inspire: To many people, ‘rally’ implies large events where leadership teams unveil big visions and strategies to employees. Those events have their purpose – especially in large companies where leaders need to reach hundreds or thousands of employees at once – but a one-time event isn’t enough to create sustainable change.
Demonstrate: What’s equally important, if not more crucial, are the actions of the leadership team every day following those large inspirational events. Employees need to see evidence of change – both progress toward goals and examples of new ways of working.
Involve: If employees have been involved in the process, they’ll already have a stake in the transformation. They’ll understand the reasons for change and will believe in the vision for the future.
Reinforce: Examine internal systems such as messaging, reviews, rewards, and recognition to make sure they’re supporting and reinforcing the change you want to make, especially when dealing with culture change. Nothing erodes employee trust more quickly than policies and procedures that are at odds with a company’s stated values and beliefs.
Communicate: Keep the new strategic direction top of mind. Build it into employee communications and presentations. Bring it into areas where employees will see it. Highlight a section of the strategy and focus on it for a month or a quarter. But whatever you do, don’t let your new strategy languish in a drawer.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.