Business Growth Archives

B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on January 14, 2021October 27, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading, this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors; and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Emotive branding isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and sets you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1. Business audiences wake up as humans – From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2. B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves – Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, 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’s not as difficult as you think.

3. Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands – In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4. B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments – B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5. There’s proof in the pudding – All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Business Growth Strategies for a Brand Turnaround

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Tracy Lloyd

Business Growth Won’t Last Forever

Business growth should never be taken for granted. Even when things look promising, your business could still be at risk for falling into a slump, or worse, taking a dive. It’s impossible to deny that the market is volatile and unpredictable. Competition is abundant, and all businesses lose market share at some point.

When revenue hits a speed bump, it’s common for leaders to anxiously ride it out. But when business growth really slows down, denial isn’t going to get you out of the rut. Leadership may react with a mad scramble to redirect the sinking ship: new products, new markets, or new acquisitions can transpire overnight. But if these changes occur in a C-suite silo, there’s a high probability your employees and core customers will feel left in the dark. And employees with varying ideas about the future and customers, who no longer feel connected to your business, can easily derail a growth strategy.

Misalignment only leaves more opportunity for your competitors to encroach on even more of your space. And when that happens, employee morale can sink deeper, recruiting becomes more challenging, and share prices may plummet as investors abandon ship. At this point your options are clear: execute a thoughtful, agile turnaround strategy or risk becoming obsolete.

Bringing Your Brand Along for the Ride

Some of the most common approaches to a turnaround strategy include increasing growth through new market penetration, tapping into new markets, pursuing alternate sales channels, developing new products, or expanding your customer base. Regardless of which avenue you follow, transforming your business without preparing your brand to adapt alongside it can jeopardize your plans for growth.

Consider the recent news of Tesla Motor’s offer to acquire SolarCity. With Tesla shares dropping 16% over the last year, Tesla turned to the acquisition as a business growth strategy. They could no longer afford to burn through the $2.2 billion dollars of the last 4 quarters. The acquisition was an obvious attempt to turn around Tesla’s business. The problem was that Tesla took the leap into solar energy without fully considering the consequences of the brand, and more specifically the people the brand matters to. And shares have plummeted even further since the deal’s announcement. What’s the cause? Apparently, investors aren’t on board with the idea of buying solar panels. Tesla misunderstood its target audience and will now have to backtrack to renew brand loyalty. Although this example shows long-term vision, business growth without a parallel brand strategy may have insurmountable long-term consequences for Tesla and SolarCity.

Map Brand to Business

Aligning your brand to your business as it undergoes a transformation is the best way to create a roadmap that is tailored for business growth. The vision for the business needs to guide all business decisions. By bringing your brand and business together, you’ll ensure that your business stays true to who you are, what you do, and why you matter. As you position your business to grow, respecting the underlying vision of the company will ensure that the growth is in line with what the brand stands for.

Brand strategy will address your key target audiences, your value proposition, your positioning, your narrative, and your go-to-market strategy. With these elements adjusted to reflect the business transformation, your brand will be prepared to roll out a strategic marketing plan. To really change the tide of business growth, the strategy needs to incorporate long-term goals with a short-term action plan. It needs to be measurable, too. Identify the key indicators of business growth and hold the business accountable as it transforms. A turnaround that shows improvement to employee engagement, brand perception, NPS, and customer loyalty will ultimately affect sales. And increasing top line revenue increases market share and for some, stock price.

It’s All About Execution

But that’s just the plan. Executing the brand strategy as the business shifts requires agility in the changing market. Too often, companies take a year to develop a strategy and by the time they’re ready to implement it, the market has shifted. Testing and iterating in real time will allow your business and brand to adapt quickly so that it remains relevant. It’s critical to develop a flexible strategy with participation from your sales and marketing team. They will provide necessary, immediate feedback from the people on the front line of your business. Their buy-in and shared responsibility creates alignment from the top-down. As the business turnaround happens, the sales and marketing teams drive the messaging to make sure your target audience is on board, too.

Achieving Sustainable Growth

Growth strategies are never achieved without a brand that is strong enough to weather the tides of change. Whether you’re looking to grow through market penetration, market development, alternative channels, product development, or expanding your customer base, your brand needs to lead the way. And change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. An agile, measurable approach that stays true to the long-term vision is key to turning around your company’s trajectory. Grow your brand and grow your business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

Thoughts on Creating a Strategic Narrative: Interview with Strategist Sara Gaviser Leslie

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Chris Ames

At Emotive Brand, we’re blessed with an incredibly diverse pool of talented individuals. Our team comes from the management consulting world, branding agencies, technology industry, advertising and everything in between. Each of these viewpoints brings something new to the table. In this post, Sara Gaviser Leslie discusses how her background as an analyst makes her a better writer and the importance of creating a strategic narrative for brands.

You’re a bestselling author, executive communications consultant, strategist, analyst, and storyteller all wrapped up in one. Can you walk us through that journey?

I started at a small consulting firm, where I’d go to companies and help them develop their business. It was right of college, and though I didn’t exactly love the work, I loved going to companies. Being able to observe different environments and see why people do what they do was fascinating.

I did that for a couple years before working with a venture fund in Tel Aviv. It was a busy time in the country when the technology center was exploding, and tons of businesses were based in little apartments and garages. Again, I loved discovering what people we’re doing and the energy of those early stages.

I got involved in finance and public equities in San Francisco. In managing portfolios for institutions, you start to become very good at selling the story of the company. You learn the difference between what makes a good company vs. a good stock. You get to go behind the curtain and see how they work.

Seeing so many different environments in a short amount of time, I just started asking tons of questions — Why are some successful? What makes a great management team? How do they make money? What contributes to their successes?

How does being an analyst help you be a better writer and strategist?

It was at Stanford that I started to connect these different fields in my head. It all comes down to how to structure a great story. I remember seeing a colleague who was supposed to give a 30-minute presentation and she had this 280-slide deck she wanted to run through. As an analyst, so much of your job is trying to figure out what’s happening in this big market and then distill that down in a way that resonates with an audience. It needs to be clear and memorable. Storytelling is the same thing.

For me, it boils down to three things:

Who is your audience?
What do they believe?
What do you want them to believe?

Once you have that, you can start to create a strategic narrative.

What do you think the corporate strategic narrative today needs to address?

The big thing we always need to address is: Why should we care? It sounds simple but it’s easy to forget. You get so focused on your own company and messaging that you forget to create that emotional connection with the audience. People won’t buy if they’re not listening, and they won’t listen if they don’t care.

What are the most common problems businesses have in telling their story?

When beginning to develop a strategic narrative, I’d say the biggest problem is trying to appeal to everyone as opposed to saying, “This is a specific market we’re going after.” Don’t try to do everything, try to build out a small market. That type of thinking poses a risk that companies don’t want to take. There’s so much sameness out there: people have their brand and they think they are living the brand and that’s enough.

I believe in questioning assumptions. For instance, when State Street Global Advisors commissioned the “Fearless Girl” statue in front of the “Charging Bull” statue on Wall Street. That’s an amazing example of showing who you are that takes a risk.

Is there such a thing as story overload? Do even practical, utilitarian products need to tell a story?

We don’t have to know the full story behind everything, you only need to see the top of the iceberg. When you see a billboard for a product, you’re not seeing the internal messaging exercise, the brainstorming, the revisions, the creative tension — you just see the top. Every brand doesn’t need to have an exhaustive narrative, just some flavor or manifestation of their story to cut through the noise. Every company needs to have something they agree on, some reason for being. Your core values are your story.

Given your varied past, what’s your future look like?

I’m constantly reinventing myself — that’s what makes life interesting to me. I have a background in speechwriting. Once I needed to write a 20-minute eulogy for a partner to deliver about his late colleague. The process was fascinating and I enjoyed getting to know this person, what they cared about, the stories they told. In a way, It’s tied to everything else I’ve done as an analyst and storyteller. I love the process of capturing someone’s personality and sharing that in a meaningful way.

To learn more about developing a corporate strategic narrative, visit our client case studies.

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

Why Lack of Internal Alignment May Be Holding Back Your Business

Posted on October 25, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

When Internal Alignment Is Holding Back Your Business

The sky’s the limit. The future is full of opportunities. Until internal alignment becomes a dark cloud that prevents your business aspirations from being realized.

What happens when the brand is ready to grow and thrive, but there is no internal alignment from leadership about where the business is going? Nothing. The brand is paralyzed by competing visions and nothing happens. And a lack of decision making due to misaligned leadership is a problem that will hold up your business.

Strategy Without Alignment

A brand strategy is hard work and involves a tremendous amount of collaboration. When it’s clear that your brand needs to make a change in order to stay competitive and relevant, a brand strategy will articulate the shifts needed to grow and thrive. A brand narrative will clearly explain where the brand is going – what makes it different and special now and in the future – and gives your brand the launching pad to get there.

But if your leadership team doesn’t share the same vision for the business trajectory, it’s impossible for the brand to embark on the journey of transformation. Oftentimes, it’s not until businesses engage in developing a brand strategy that they uncover the depth of the misalignment. Before any progress can be made for the brand, the business needs internal alignment.

Focusing On Alignment

When you need to create momentum around your brand, internal alignment is the clear answer. The challenge arises, however, when leaders in your organization aren’t willing to share their honest vision for the brand. Sometimes leaders hold on to their vision as a form of intellectual capital – if the vision furthers their personal agenda for success it might be strategic to pursue it in a silo. Or other times, the vision is only shared with a select few as a power play to keep others at bay. Or general poor communication creates lack of trust and therefore reticence towards an open and honest dialogue about the future of the brand. Regardless of why leaders aren’t sharing a common aspiration for the business, overcoming the misalignment for the betterment of the brand’s future is critical.

Leaders Unite

Leaders must have clarity around the brand’s purpose in order to focus on making any strategic shifts. There must be agreement from all the key stakeholders in an organization about what the brand stands for and how that maps to the business. Since getting alignment involves teamwork and breaking down silos, a third party can be extremely useful.

Path to Purpose

At Emotive Brand, we’ve been on the front lines working with disconnected leadership and know all too well the challenge of articulating a clear brand strategy if there are competing views about the business plan. We developed Path to Purpose as way to bring executives together in a collaborative workshop series that aims to identify, articulate, and align leadership around the purpose of the company. By doing so, we help create internal alignment around the business strategy and map the brand strategy to it.

Our workshop paves the way for a corporate purpose statement and identifies the shifts your business should consider making in order to live its purpose more authentically. When you’re ready to push your brand beyond its stagnant state and truly reach its potential, you need a brand strategy with a strong purpose statement. If developing a brand purpose seems like an insurmountable obstacle due to a misaligned leadership group, consider Path to Purpose as the key to unlock your brand’s potential.