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Top B2B Business Problems We are Asked to Solve

When you’re a brand strategy firm with a B2B technology focus, there’s no better place to be than the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. Silicon Valley has extended everywhere the bay waters touch the shore, so our location on the Oakland waterfront puts Emotive Brand at the epicenter of the action. Living and working in the middle of this incomparable start-up mecca, we’re surrounded by some of the greatest technology companies ever built, with leading VCs and amazing entrepreneurs as friends and neighbors.

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Meaningful Brands Are Led by Meaningful Leaders

The key to meaning is empathy: the ability to step outside one’s own life and see the world from another’s perspective. In both branding and leadership, the value of this ability cannot be underestimated. Both areas depend upon engaged followers. Engagement only comes when followers see leaders connect the dots between their personal needs and desires, the goals of the business, and the greater good.

Brands and leaders that are inward-focused and self-absorbed fail to connect with people who are increasingly attuned to the needs of humanity and the planet. This puts them in a precarious position. That’s because these people are increasingly applying these altruistic criteria to the products they buy, the brands they support, and the companies for which they choose to work.

The result for brands? More meaningful competitors steal your customers and profits. Your brand’s real and perceived value drop. Your brand’s ability to attract top talent diminishes.

The result for leaders? Those you hope to have as followers drift away. Your reputation for generating results suffers. You experience defections and cannot hire the people you need.

When people see that what’s lying behind your brand or leadership is an honest effort to use business in a positive way that will pay them emotional dividends and address their altruistic concerns, brands and leaders thrive. Of course, meaning is easier said than done, and must flow from a sincere and authentic base. It must be routed in the truth as nothing more readily violates the social contract than lies and deception.

You are born with empathy.

It’s there within you, waiting to be rediscovered.

Pull it to the surface, apply it to your business, brand and your leadership thinking, and discover the power of truthful and meaningful connections that positively change the way people think, feel and act.

Additional reading: Transforming business: the four faces of empathy 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Branding Agency.

Is Your Brand Holding Back Your Business?

There’s a price to pay when your brand simply languishes.

It’s the cost of lost opportunities.

Are you missing the opportunity to change the way people feel about your brand, and hence, what they can do to make your brand more successful.

By people, we mean customers, employees, partners, investors, communities, influencers, and so on…. Indeed, we mean all the people who are vital to your brand’s succcess.

It’s their decisions and actions that determine your fate. Continue reading “Is Your Brand Holding Back Your Business?”

Purpose-Driven Business

McKinsey’s Vision of Businesses as Problem Solvers

We recently came across an older and rather interesting article from McKinsey that speaks to the imperative of business to become increasingly purpose-driven. The article starts with the words, “Capitalism is under attack.” It then offers new definitions for prosperity, growth, government, and capitalism itself: a conscious capitalism. Then it goes on to explain what business needs to do:

“We believe that a reorientation toward seeing businesses as society’s problem solvers rather than simply as vehicles for creating shareholder returns would provide a better description of what businesses actually do. It could help executives better balance the interests of the multiple stakeholders they need to manage. It could also help shift incentives back toward long-term investment—after all, few complex human problems can be solved in one quarter.”

This is not to say that shareholders or other owners are unimportant. But providing them with a return that is competitive compared with the alternatives is a boundary condition for a successful business; it is not the purpose of a business. After all, having enough food is a boundary condition for life—but the purpose of life is more than just eating.”

“Some companies already think in these terms. Google, for example, defines its mission as “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—a statement about solving a problem for people. And it famously refuses to provide quarterly financial forecasts.”

Solving problems to improve the lives of people

The main thrust of the article is a shift in thinking toward a capitalist system populated with purpose-driven, problem-solving businesses. It then asks readers this question: “What problems do you solve?”

Once we understand that the solutions capitalism produces are what creates real prosperity in people’s lives, and that the rate at which we create solutions is true economic growth, then it becomes obvious that entrepreneurs and business leaders bear a major part of both the credit and the responsibility for creating societal prosperity. But standard measures of business’s contribution—profits, growth rates, and shareholder value—are poor proxies. Businesses contribute to society by creating and making available products and services that improve people’s lives in tangible ways, while simultaneously providing employment that enables people to afford the products and services of other businesses. It sounds basic, and it is, but our economic theories and metrics don’t frame things this way.”

Driven by new benchmarks of success

The purpose-driven form of capitalism the authors envision works through different approaches, values, and rewards.

“Today our culture celebrates money and wealth as the benchmarks of success. This has been reinforced by the prevailing theory. Suppose that instead we celebrated innovative solutions to human problems. Imagine being at a party and rather than being asked, “What do you do?”—code for how much money do you make and what status do you have—you were asked, “What problems do you solve?” Both capitalism and our society would be the better for it.”

Moving toward purpose-driven success

The first step is to step outside your immediate world and to see the meaningful outcomes your business generates beyond profit. Investigate the ways in which your business’s products, policies, and procedures improve individual and collective well-being. Start to imagine all the other ways your business could generate meaningful and gratifying outcomes for customers, employees, the society, and the environment.

Coalesce all this goodness into a brand promise that captures the essence of those meaningful outcomes. Use that promise to focus, motivate, and energize your organization and brand strategy. Build success, profits, and shareholder support by solving important problems that improve well-being.

Download our white paper – Purpose Beyond Profit

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

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Is a Misunderstood Brand Holding Back Your Business?

 

There’s a price to pay when your brand simply languishes.

It’s the cost of lost opportunities.

First, you are missing the opportunity to change the way people feel about your brand, and hence, what they can do to make your brand more successful.

By people, we mean customers, employees, partners, investors, communities, influencers, and so on…. Indeed, we mean all the people who are vital to your brand’s succcess.

It’s their decisions and actions that determine your fate.

Continue reading “Is a Misunderstood Brand Holding Back Your Business?”

Business Success is All About Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” – Albert Einstein

A business’ fate is determined in large part by its culture. A business culture is the reality created by how people act, react, and interact with each other based on their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.

The most damaging business cultures are those in which aggression, neglect, and punishment leave employees feeling they have no reason to commit their energies and skills, share their ideas, or help the company advance.

Wanted: A culture that unites and connects employees

A culture built principally around rewards for individual or group performance pits individuals and teams against each other, often in ways that create class systems, in-fighting, and divisive loyalties. The winners in such cultures find meaning in their rewards. The rest are left wondering what the point is for them and their employer.

A passive, benign, and inert business culture leaves the business subject to the aggregate confusion that results when each individual employee’s quirks, tendencies, and potentially questionable morality and ethics are accommodated.

The most beneficial business cultures are those that unite employees around an ambition, make them feel emotionally connected, and surround them with people who share their ambition, feelings, and behavior.

4 factors in transforming your culture

By consistently and intentionally conveying a meaningful ambition and evoking a set of unique and positive emotions, businesses can transform the meaningful outcome of every aspect of the work experience:

  1. The physical environment – the aesthetics and functionality of the workplace;
  2. The policies and procedures – the actual rules of the company as well as the way in which employees experience them;
  3. The attitudes and behavior of fellow employees – the feelings evoked when dealing with superiors, peers, and reports;
  4. The moment of contact – the nature of company/employee and employee/outside world interactions.

A Meaningful Workplace culture is based on the way employees experience these factors – what meaning is conveyed and how they are left feeling.

This excerpt is the sixth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Photo credit.

Leadership at a Time When People Know as Much About Your Business as You Know About Them

Welcome to transparency, whether you like it or not.

This is the time when people have access to unprecedented amounts of information, including deep insights into what your company is up to.

And they are using this information to form opinions opinions that shape their attitudes toward your business; attitudes that drive their behavior with respect to your business.

Continue reading “Leadership at a Time When People Know as Much About Your Business as You Know About Them”

When Leadership Aligns, Good Things Happen

Alignment of thought, meaning, and purpose among a leadership team is the new secret sauce of successful businesses.

When your executive leadership team agree that, “we’re aligned around a true purpose, are living it in this way, and, are clear we want to do this because it truly matters,” the effect ripples through your organization.As leadership aligns in a more purposeful way, their direct reports have more direction, feel better about helping get the business where it needs to be, and believe their work truly matters.

In turn, they help direct the rest of the company so that everyone acts and behaves in ways that push the company closer and closer to attaining its vision.

Soon, other people vital to the company’s success (e.g. customers, prospects, partners, suppliers, investors, etc.) start to see and feel how the business is changing for the better. They begin to find that dealing with the company, and its people, is easier and more gratifying.

It all starts with people on your leadership team. As their leader, you have the opportunity to increase your company’s fortunes by aligning them around a thought, spirit, and purpose that will truly inspire, motivate, and empower them.

Emotive Brand is in the business of helping companies see their vision and what it takes to make it truly actionable – and in new ways through the power of emotive branding.

We help business leaders create brand strategies, messages, and engagement techniques that transform how every member of their leadership team works together, leads others, and brings more enthusiasm and shared purpose to their work.

As a result, everyone in your company can do their jobs more aligned to the same purposeful strategy. The results of leadership alignment around thought, spirit, and purpose can change the trajectory of the business, its culture, and personal well being of employees.

For more information on Emotive Branding, please download paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

10 Reasons Why Business Should Banish the Word “Brand”

Our rather controversial thoughts on “Brand”

1. It is meaningless

Ask five people in your company what the word “brand” means and you’ll get at least seven definitions. As such, the meaning of the word “brand” is completely diluted and lacking in concise meaning. That’s not helpful.

Continue reading “10 Reasons Why Business Should Banish the Word “Brand””

When People See Their “Best Selves” Reflected in Your Business

I recently had the opportunity to interview Gianpiero Petriglieri, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, Europe’s top business school.

Following our fruitful talk, I reflected on a thought from our interview.

We were talking about how people identify with leaders, when Professor Petriglieri said:

Continue reading “When People See Their “Best Selves” Reflected in Your Business”