CMO Archives - Emotive Brand

The Evolving Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on April 19, 2024November 4, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

No role in an organization has evolved more rapidly than the CMO’s. It used to be that owning branding, communications, and campaigns defined the job. Now, CMOs need to be experts on customers, marketing tools and advanced analytics,and business strategy. Brand management remains an essential duty, but in service of driving business growth. Most importantly, because a CMO’s work connects directly to sales, product development, IT, finance, and other parts of the organization, CMOs find themselves needing to play a growing role in aligning their organization around new ways of thinking and work that will help them engage customers more effectively.

For those in TL;DR mode, the quick takeaway is: CMOs are being stretched, so they might sometimes need a hug (but please ask first).

Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive look at some of the shifts that we’ve seen impacting how a CMO shows up:

From	To
Voice of the Brand	Voice of the Customer
Intuition & Instincts	Data & Technology
Brand Management	Brand Innovation
Strategy + Execution	Alignment

Voice of the Customer

The amount of information we have about customers is only increasing. How does a temperature between 70-75 degrees impact consumer behavior on Monday’s v Fridays? What is the correlation between a new Netflix series and GPU buying decisions? What invisible patterns in customers can data now make visible? More and more, it’s up to the CMO to develop the customer insights that shape how a business goes to market. And because so many groups touch the customers, from sales to product to finance to corporate strategy, the level of collaboration required to align on these insights requires a significant investment.

Data & Technology

The increase in customer data a business can capture also gives rise to new suites of tools and technologies that a CMO can use to mine for insights, optimize campaigns, and deliver experiences across channels. When almost every brand action can be quantified, decisions about how to go to market are becoming increasingly data-driven. As a result, the CMO is responsible for leading the digital transformation of the marketing organization which requires deep partnership with IT (among others) to develop the tooling and data models that align with the organization’s technology systems. While a CMO needs to rely on her or his instincts and intuition when it comes to decision making, increasingly they need to justify their strategies with that data that points to a certain direction. The more fluent a CMO becomes in technology, the easier it becomes to reconcile data-driven insights with gut instincts.

Brand Innovation

More than anyone in the organization, a CMO needs to connect the dots between a brand’s legacy and its future vision. As much as products need to innovate, brands must as well to remain relevant: messages need to resonate with how the world is changing, and their expression needs to drive differentiation. But in doing this, a brand must also feel familiar and to take advantage of the equity it’s built with audiences. As brand management becomes increasingly data-driven, brand innovation is also becoming more dependent on analyzing trends, creating new audience definitions and segmentations, and audiences, and delivering next-level experiences that are hyper personalized and hyper-relevant. And these insights provide fuel for both brand and product innovation. The CMO that can use data to drive innovation across the organization is one that will stick around.

Building Alignment

It’s not enough for a CMO to develop a winning marketing strategy and execute flawlessly. As organizations become increasingly customer-centric, a CMO needs to bring every function in the C-Suite into the conversation about how to drive growth. From gaining the full embrace of Chief Revenue Officer for their marketing strategies, to the creativity of the CTO as you make your strategies more data driven, to HR working to bring new talent to the table, to the head of Product working in partnership around how to claim new audience segments, and the CTO finding budget to drive the strategy forward, marketing has become increasingly a team sport.

It’s no wonder that CMO turnover is high, and those in their positions feel they’re continuously in the hot seat. While the complexity of marketing is growing and budgets are coming under increasing scrutiny, there’s never been a more exciting time to be leading a marketing organization. All the data organizations have been amassing and the tools ready to parse it can reveal truly amazing insights about customers and how to connect with them. But only if a CMO can enlist the organization in lending a hand in making this all happen. And this comes down to storytelling and building alignment.

We’ve worked with many organizations to craft what we call a Growth Manifesto—a narrative that shows how the thinking that goes into brand development can open up new possibilities across an organization—from how people think about innovation to the collaboration required to bring new ideas to life. We’ve seen that a Growth Manifesto serves as an incredibly effective tool for building that alignment that is essential to getting every part of an organization living a new brand promise. While CMOs will always own the brand, communications, and marketing lanes of a business, as their role evolves, we’re seeing how they also need to become experts at building alignment between the functions that marketing depends on.

If you have thoughts about the new challenges CMOs face today please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to address specific marketing challenges in your business, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

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

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

Posted on February 10, 2023October 14, 2024 by Jamey Aiken

How Do You Get Your Team Excited About an Uncertain Future?

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. 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 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.

At Emotive, we believe that companies need more responsive tools to adapt to the future—whatever it holds. They need ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And they need to equip their organizations 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.

When you understand the emotional state of your organization, you can move forward. Faster.

How do your employees feel? 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.

We use the lens of brand to audit the emotional state of an organization and identify alignment opportunities that can reduce friction, create efficiency, and drive growth. Our approach recognizes that businesses are more than just a collection of employees working towards a common goal. They’re complex networks of people with myriad emotions, attitudes, and beliefs. When you actually know what’s animating people’s behavior—the critical emotional drivers—you can craft more resonant, engaging stories about what you’re all working toward.

Emotional understanding only makes a difference if your growth story is clear.

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. 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.

We’ve created a wonderfully simple approach to helping businesses fulfill their ambitions. When clients need to realize important outcomes, we work side-by-side with executive leaders to co-author a strategic narrative of how—and why—they want to grow. We call this a Growth Manifesto, and it serves as a powerful tool for cutting 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. It connects major initiatives—corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture—in a single, coherent narrative that aligns everyone behind the promise of the brand and the actions required to support it.

Your growth story can’t be separated from the quality of storytelling.

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 grow in times of uncertainty, you need to understand how your people are feeling. You need to address their emotions with a story of how you plan to grow. And you need to get them focused on a future that they are empowered to create. 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, 2021 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.

The Latest, Greatest Thing in Digital Is Print

Posted on March 7, 2020October 11, 2024 by Chris Ames

Print Is Dead, Long Live Print

Every year, we hear print is dead. And every year, it proves us dead wrong. The fact is, digital transformation has its upper limits. There are some analog experiences – like the genuine discovery and delight of wandering through a great bookstore – that technology is currently incapable of replicating. Between 2009 and 2015, what’s known as the Amazon-fueled “retail apocalypse,” independent bookstores grew by 35 percent.

Perhaps it’s the tenacity and resilience of print that has led many companies to start publishing their own magazines. Uber, Airbnb, Casper, Away, Dollar Shave Club, Lenovo, Redbull, and Amtrak all have their own physical publications. So, what’s driving this trend? And does it make sense for your brand to devote the time and energy it takes to create a magazine?

The Digital Dark Age

As permanent and omnipresent all of our technology feels, it’s worth remembering it can all vanish overnight. Last week, to little fanfare, Myspace announced that it lost 12 years of music – an estimated 53 million files – amid a data migration problem. As writer Damon Krukowski notes, some historians fear that we are in the midst of a digital dark age, “a period of history that will be largely blank due to lost information – like a giant broken link when the future tries to look back at our time.” Physical media, of course, has the benefit of being physical.

Beyond standing the test of time, magazines have been working out the same problems we’re dealing with now: establishing a brand identity, producing engaging copy, designing striking visuals, educating your audience, bringing in advertising dollars, and attracting new subscribers to mailing lists. These are transferable skills that could shape how you approach your blog, how you build your email list, and how you partner with advertisers. If you can get it right on the page, chances are you can get it right on the web.

Expanding the Potential and Personality of Your Brand

In many branding meetings, I’ve heard clients say something to the effect of, “We wish we could do this, but it falls slightly outside the parameters of our brand.” The real power of a magazine is the creative permission it has to push those boundaries. Mel, the magazine from Dollar Shave Club, isn’t about razor production. It talks about sex, relationships, health, money, work, and topics of masculinity that speaks to their target audience. In expanding the way their customers think about themselves, they are also transforming how people think about Dollar Shave Club and forming a stronger emotional connection that leads to greater brand loyalty and awareness.

For a brand, a magazine is like a free pass to explore the most aspirational outer limits of your category. Casper makes mattresses, but Woolly is about comfort and wellness. Redbull makes energy drinks, but The Red Bulletin tells stories of inspirational people and their achievements from around the world. The process of creating a magazine can meet some of the most underserved needs for a brand:

Having a safe space to experiment with your brand
The never-ending hunt for fresh content
The demand for crisp, authentic photography that isn’t stock
Having engaging customer stories to share on social channels
Creating emotional buy-in for employees to see the impact of their work
Building new channels for partners and advertisers
Expanding your audience

As Jen Rubio, President and Chief Brand Officer at Away says, the worst-case scenario for her magazine is that it becomes a “great travel blog.” The best case is that it becomes a “stand-alone media division that’s generating revenue, generating profit for the company.”

No Half-Measures

Critical to any print publication is the matter of distribution. Do you already have a model built into your offering? Airbnb, for instance, has a combination of physical locations with people that are seeking information about their surroundings. That’s a perfect fit. The key is locating a moment in your customer’s journey where they are hungry for more information – and finding out how to deliver it before they ask.

Remember, the only thing worse than not making a magazine is making a bad one. Don’t skimp out. This isn’t a way to repurpose old content or cloak ads as stories. This is a strategic asset for brands that are deeply curious about the world outside their product.

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

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The Role of Voice Technology for Brands

Posted on November 29, 2018 by Chris Ames

Voice Technology Is Older Than You Think

Voice is the newest technology platform on the block. And like all seemingly new things, it’s actually much older than you think. In the early 1960s, IBM introduced the Shoebox, an early effort at mastering voice recognition. This bulky little machine could recognize 16 words spoken into its microphone and convert those sounds into electrical impulses. Basically, it was a voice-operated calculator. Dressed in a tuxedo at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, developer William C. Dersch performed the miracle of turning your voice into a search engine.

Since those formative days, voice technology has advanced exponentially – and so has demand. By 2019, the voice recognition market will be worth $601 million. And by the end of 2022, voice commerce will be a $40 billion industry, while 55% of American homes will own at least one smart speaker.

Finding Our Voice

And while there is an undeniable demand for voice technology, it still feels like people and businesses are discovering the best way to tackle the vocal landscape. On this blog, we’ve written about how voice will alter the future of SEO, and it’s a great place to start if you’re new to the technology.

But beyond the nitty-gritty of formatting for mobile, creating rich snippets, and writing long-tail keywords that mirror natural speech, we’re interested in something bigger. How do you make your brand stick out in the world of voice? How do you provide unique experiences that fit the medium? And is there a role for voice in the world of B2B?

How to Stand Out in the Chorus

Something to consider right off the bat is how much more emotive a voice is than a block of text. As outlined in their article “To Read Emotions, Listen,” Psychology Today explains how an isolated voice may be the truest signal of a person’s inner experience. As opposed to visual cues, “the most reliable way to read someone may simply be to listen to their voice.” And it makes sense. How many arguments have you been in that started not because of what you said, but how you said it?

This same space of heightened emotion can be leveraged to create a stronger connection between brands and people. When crafting text for voice, brands should aim for something conversational, human, and warm. If you have a technical or lengthy offering, consider making an alternate script for voice that is more succinct and approachable.

As Ilker Koksal writes, “Voice shouldn’t just be about making a sale. It’s about being useful to your customers and being ready to help when they need you. Brands using Alexa and other voice-first experiences both create opportunities for customers to engage – and then help those customers become used to engaging on a regular basis, perhaps in a daily routine.”

Usefulness is where voice currently excels. Things like directions and recipes are thriving with voice search because it’s the perfect combination of needing an answer in a hands-free environment. The challenge for other brands is figuring out exactly how you can be useful.

Start with a persona and a question. In this customer journey, what search queries are your customers using early and late in the purchase process?
What content is helping them answer these queries or informing their opinion?
In a conversational way, what would these questions sound like through voice?
How could short-form audio content answer these questions succinctly?
Consider creating an “audio logo” or noise that’s instantly recognizable by ear, so customers have an aural way to know they are interacting with you.

How Can B2B Companies Sing Along?

When it comes to voice, the path for B2C companies is much clearer. In the U.S., Domino’s has already seen promising results since making its one-click Easy Orders option available through Alexa. Two months after launching, 20% of customers signed up for the service. I mean, what’s easier than saying, “Alexa, I want a pizza” and it magically arriving at your door?

Similarly, PayPal now supports transactions via Siri, allowing users to send and request money in 30 countries around the world with voice. As easy as saying, “Send $30 to my brother,” Siri pulls up a custom sheet with details of your transaction for authorization. Identifying opportunities for “one-click” interactions in your sales cycle is key, as voice search is all about immediacy.

Perhaps a more interesting use-case for B2B companies is that of Saint Louis University. Earlier this year, they announced they would be the first college or university in the country to put Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, prepped with university-specific information, in every student living space. So, all the questions a student might have – What’s happening on campus tonight? Where is the student center? When does the library open? – are easily accessed and organized in an interactive way.

Voice Lends Itself to Employer Brands

Think of how this technology could be used for an employer brand, or even onboarding a new employee. In one device or app, a business could have an interactive way to educate their staff on upcoming events, benefits, meetings, opportunities, or even storytelling from team members. Missed the last all-hands? Listen to a recording of the meeting. Curious about the vision of the company? Listen to the CEO explain the upcoming acquisition strategy. Looking to engage with the mental health benefits? Listen to stories from people who have taken advantage of the free therapy program.

The role of voice in brand is still being defined, but that’s the most exciting part. The immediacy and emotion of voice is yet another tool in our arsenal to transform the way people reach out to brands and the way brands respond back. To learn more about voice or our partnership with Voicify, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Marketing Strategy That Fuels Growth

Posted on April 10, 2018 by Carol Emert

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More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then?

Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them?

How can you identify the problem? And what can you do to nurture your target audience while giving your sales team the support they need to drive growth?

Marketing Strategy That Drives Growth

At Emotive Brand, we find that the diagnosis for this condition virtually always comes from the outside.

The area where insiders typically have the least insight is the hearts and minds of their target audiences, which are so easily obscured behind the company’s own view of where its value lies. Companies often also find it challenging to stay on top of new developments in communications when their core competencies lie elsewhere.

Cue your agency. It’s the agency’s job to:

Understand your brand, products, and services in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of the people who can make it grow.
Use customer, marketplace, brand, and contextual insights to define strategic shifts that will win them over.
Create the right message and present it creatively to get their attention and rekindle the connection.
Identify existing and emerging channels that will best support your message and resonate with your audiences.
Tie it all together in a marketing strategy that drives growth.

Rebooting Advertising and Marketing Strategy

We’ve been working with a Silicon Valley client whose technology is so smart it inspires us. This company has been in business 15 years. It has a crack product that’s unique in the market. The product should be selling itself.

But there’s a problem: the company has under-marketed both its brand and its product. Its sales are lackluster. We identified five primary marketing challenges:

Marketplace perceptions hadn’t kept up with the company, so potential customers had outdated ideas that needed to be overcome before they would even pay attention.
Its advertising and marketing communications were telling an old story that didn’t communicate the product differentiators and reinforced outdated perceptions.
Its communications style was out of date and disconnected from both the brand truths and its audiences.
The client was spending ad dollars against a broad target rather than an audience aligned to its sales target, wasting precious marketing dollars.

We dug into this project to understand the marketplace, the product, and the brand through the eyes of our client’s target audiences. And we transformed its marketing strategy with some fundamental shifts.

Aligning Marketing Strategy with Sales

First, we used creative and surprising ways to talk about the product in advertising. Solidly rooted in meaningful customer insights and up-to-date product truths, the creative is doing a great job at grabbing the attention of sales prospects. Fresh and resonant messaging and design are replacing apathy with interest and engagement.

We also employed account-based marketing (ABM), replacing the client’s broad advertising strategy with a personalized approach. We’re targeting the sales team’s hottest prospects, in the places where they are most likely to engage.

This more resonant, tailored messaging is reinvigorating the company’s sales as well as its brand, making it relevant again and helping nurture prospects who might have ignored a more general message.

If you need fresh ideas for connecting with your sales prospects instead of merely reaching them, Emotive Brand would like to connect with you.

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

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How CMOs Can Control Their Brand Message in the Age of Digital Sprawl

Posted on February 21, 2018 by Chris Ames

The New CMO

What does a CMO do? Just a few years ago, that was an easy question to answer. You focused on building a brand. You managed your channels: press, radio, a TV spot, maybe even an outdoor installation if you were feeling ambitious. Like a conductor, you could orchestrate your brand message with Mozart-like precision. Marketing, itself, was a pure sport, clearly defined.

Flash forward to today, and the blurred lines between technology, marketing, and sales are harder to discern than ever. Fluency in digital transformation has gone from a specialty to a requirement. CMOs need to be able to speak social media, big data, analytics, machine learning, voice technology, and a myriad of other mediums that were just invented halfway through this sentence.

Should you zero in on customer experience? Are you basically a CIO now? And with the mass proliferation of channels — website, blogs, newsletters, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. — how can you possibly control your message when it is at the fingertips of consumers?

If You Love Something, Set It Free

It may seem like now more than ever, CMOs are terrified of losing control of their brand message. The truth is, they lost it a long time ago — and that’s actually a good thing. Because with the right brand behavior and understanding of the customer experience, CMOs can get consumers to do their job for them.

When was the last time you bought something based on an “About” page or press-release boilerplate? Chances are you read product reviews, consulted your community on Facebook, or clicked a targeted ad while scrolling through Instagram. Social media has led to the commodification of trust, turning an opinion into a competitive advantage. Just look at Yelp.

Embrace the Sprawl

Instead of fighting the digital sprawl, CMOs should focus on making their brand strong enough to speak for itself. Make your brand a clear, well-defined, differentiated tool for people to use. The truth is, you’ll never be able to fully control consumers. But if you present your brand unequivocally as a hammer, chances are people are going to start driving home nails. Your brand should:

Behave in a manner that people expect, driven by a core-defined positioning which is reinforced throughout all messaging.
Have a purpose (beyond profit) that people can rally behind.
Avoid trying to be everything to everyone.
Be differentiated. We don’t have to tell you how crowded the marketplace is. Don’t just add blockchain to your name and hope for the best.

Consumers are smarter and more educated than ever, meaning they are at least halfway through the buying cycle before they even contact you. (If they ever contact you.) The key then for CMOs is creating a consistent and high-quality experience across this wide network of mediums. You may not be able to control online communities, but you can engage them, earn trust, and turn them into your biggest advocates.

Above All Else, Brand Drives Reputation

That may seem tricky, but it’s no less daunting than trying to create a blanketed ad in this day and age. Brands and their robust marketing teams spend billions of dollars every year rocketing researched, workshopped, and thoroughly-tested ads straight into the void. In 2014, Google reported that a staggering 56.1 percent of all digital ads go unseen. There’s just no such thing as one-size-fits-all anymore. CMOs simply have too much information at their disposal to not meet customers where they are.

So, needless to say, CMOs have a lot on their plate. They have to wrangle data, sift through technology, create relevant content, understand an ever-shifting customer experience, and influence the influencers. But having more gadgets on the tool belt is not a bad thing. In giving up some control, CMOs have the ability to gain exponential growth. As long as you can endure the memes, down-votes, and battles in the comment sections, the digital sprawl can be your best friend.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm based in San Francisco.

Machine Learning Is the New, New Thing. But Can It Help CMOs Build Brands?

Posted on October 23, 2017 by Carol Emert

Can big data build brands better?

A few years ago, Big Data promised to radically transform the marketing landscape. CMOs were warned to master it or watch their brands get left behind. Artificial intelligence was the next new, new thing. Now the hot property is machine learning, the data-crunching tool that can find patterns in big data and make them actionable.

Each of these innovations is truly transformative — and each has limitations. As machine learning gathers steam, let’s look at what it means for brands. Which challenges can machine learning tackle which still depend on human intelligence?

What is machine learning?

Simply put, machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that uses high-powered algorithms to find patterns in huge datasets. By tracking the (mostly digital) behaviors of thousands or millions of anonymized individuals, machine learning can become predictive. For example, it can identify high net worth individuals and “rewind the tape” of their behaviors as they were climbing the ladder to financial success. It can then identify others who appear to be on the same ladder so marketers can start nurturing their loyalty on the way up.

CRM platforms are using machine learning to understand the messages that drive engagement, then tailor content to people with statistical similarities. They’re replacing guesswork with statistically sound, automated methods.

So there are exciting ways that machine learning can help CMOs make their marketing organizations work smarter. But what can’t it do?

Don’t leave the human part out of the data part

There are four areas directly impacting brands where we think human intelligence – not machine intelligence — is absolutely required. They are: empathy and other emotions, creativity, insight, and aspiration.

Without these four things, you wouldn’t have a brand; you’d have an incorporated collection of business processes. It will be years, if ever, that a machine can substitute for these functions. Here’s why:

Emotions and empathy

The value of your brand is directly tied to what it means to people – functionally, but also emotionally. Building your brand requires an understanding of how it makes people feel and then a strategy for optimizing that emotional bond. This requires the ability to empathize with your audiences, to feel what they feel.

No machine can empathize with the feelings people have toward your brand. And no machine can develop strategies for optimizing those feelings. Machines can be smart — but they can’t feel.

Creativity

It’s true that software can be used for some limited creative functions. The Associated Press uses a form of artificial intelligence called natural language processing to write quarterly earnings reports, for example. But this only works for content that is templated, with known variables swapping in and out of a rote structure.

Brands by definition are completely unique. Every brand should have a distinctive voice, look and point of view that, combined, create a unique brand experience. Every brand touchpoint should deliver a consistent story. And only a human being can create and curate content that consistently tells and emotes the story of a brand.

Insight

Insight is a human skill that relates to both empathy and creativity. It’s a way of taking information and emotional understanding and evolving them into something greater than the sum of their parts. A machine can compute a fact like 1+1=2. It can’t compute an insight in which 1+1, as interpreted by the human gut, heart and brain, can sometimes magically equal 3.

Brand articulation is built on unique insights about how a brand relates to its target audiences, its competition and its cultural context. No machine can come close.

Aspiration

Every brand means something today and should aspire to mean more tomorrow. Aspirations and new ideas for achieving them aren’t facts that can be predicted by a machine. They’re the product of human emotions and human intelligence, dissatisfaction with the status quo, and yearning to achieve more.

At Emotive Brand, we’re excited at the new efficiencies machine learning can bring to CMOs and their marketing organizations. And we’re gratified to continue using our collective empathy, creativity, insights and aspirations to help our clients build great brands.

Have a peak at a few client case studies to see how we’ve helped CMOs build brands and use big data.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm working with leaders of high-growth companies to help build stronger brands.

Today’s CMO: What It Takes to Drive Growth

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

We work with CMOs every day, developing strategy and positioning businesses to enable growth and build brand strength from within their organizations. We have seen a role shift for CMOs over the past few years and have deep empathy for these leaders as they look to keep pace with an ever changing set of skills – more complex and more digital by the day.

Because we have a front row seat of today’s CMO, we see more and more of our clients responsible for delivering both top line revenue and profit. CMOs are not only expected to keep pace with the changing digital landscape, but also deliver the insights that ensure they are maximizing that landscape for growth and impact. At the same time, CEOs must maintain a deep understanding of the shifting customer experience and continually deliver superior service. In short, today’s role of CMO is not an easy gig.

So what does it take to drive growth as a CMO?

Some of the most successful CMO’s who have driven growth within their organizations adapt a growth mindset to begin with. By working closely with their c-suite counterparts, they develop the right brand strategy to support business goals and objectives. They are relentless in nailing the right positioning and messaging to target the right target audiences. These tools then inform GTM strategies and sales enablement programs.

Through our work, we’ve seen a few tactics from CMOs who t successfully drive growth for their organizations. To really make an impact:

Get in the driver’s seat:

96% of CMOs today recognize the importance of disruptive growth when looking to drive revenue. And because you act as the brand guardians of your organization, you are best positioned to drive such growth. Your deep understanding of the people the brand is trying to reach (customers, prospects, and the wider market), and your authority over the data to prove it, puts you in the perfect position.

So leverage your knowledge of what customers want to build a strategy. A good CMO has the extensive persona research and access to customer behavior data to build a strategy around a targeted audience. And you wouldn’t have been hired for the job if you didn’t have the skills, tools, and knowledge needed to step up and own growth. By leveraging your closeness and deep knowledge of the brand you can identify growth opportunities and navigate these opportunities – growing reach, engagement, and loyalty by focusing on the right people at the right time.

Dedicate more time and budget to disruptive initiatives:

Many CMOs worry that their marketing budget may be at risk if they aren’t not delivering the needed results to move their business forward. Driving into growth mode often means stepping away from traditional initiatives and toward disruptive initiatives. And this means getting key people on board. Building a business case for these disruptive initiatives is a challenge and taking this risk in an informed manner requires a deep understanding of the brand – who it needs to reach and how. But when driven by a deep and thorough understanding of your brand, dedicating marketing budget to growth initiatives is bound to pay off for your business.

Align with the CEO and C-Suite to move faster:

In today’s world, it’s all about moving fast and efficiently. If you don’t move fast enough, you will simply fall behind the competition. So it’s important that you align the goals and objectives of your job with other goals and objectives in the c-suite. Getting backing from the CEO, and the C-Suite all aligned and rallied behind growth initiatives can ensure that you can work efficiently to get your organization kicked into growth gear and keep a sustained growth pace moving forward.

Be a culture warrior:

As CMO, aspiring to be a ‘culture warrior’ is one of the best things you can do for your role and your business. Invest in your people. Behave with empathy, lead with purpose, and focus on strengthening connections within your organizations. CMOs should be the drivers of widening perspectives, breaking down silos, taking risks, and fueling productive change and groundbreaking innovation. These are the things that drive growth. Research has found that 67% of CMO’s who act as ‘culture warrior’ will exceed top-line targets by more than 10%, and 50% of ‘culture warriors’ will exceed targets by 25% or more.

Assuming accountability and leveraging your unique, deep knowledge of your business, your brand and the industry, will all help position your business for growth.

Co-Founders On Brand Strategy Today

Posted on October 28, 2016 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’s lot 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.