Communication Archives - Emotive Brand

Navigating Between Good and Bad Failure

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Chris Ames

Silicon Valley loves the idea of failure. In the world of tech startups, messing up is practically a religion. People wield that Samuel Beckett quote – try again, fail again, fail better – like it’s a Louisville Slugger.

As Adrian Daub writes, “People take jobs and lose them, and go on to a new job. People create products that no one likes, and go on to create another product. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, and go on to back other companies. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as a negative experience.”

But the thing is, not all types of failures are treated equal. A wholesale embrace of failure misses the point. From our point of view, there’s a big difference between good failure and bad failure.

Good Failure: Ideas and Experiments

As a brand strategy and design agency, we work in the business of ideas – and ideas fail all the time. That’s kind of the point. For us, failure is a necessary means of growth. We experiment with ideas, not always as perfect options, but to gauge, measure, provoke, challenge, and enlighten. Often, our favorite ideas don’t ring true right away for the client. But the bumpy road of hiccups, near-misses, and tangents only makes the end product that much stronger.

These types of errors – pushing a visual identity too far, leading with language that’s too bold – never feel like true failures, because they are all in greater service of the work. Each failure helps define the parameters a little more. It’s our job to push the imagination and expectations of a client. As it goes, you can always reign something in. The worst thing we could hear is, “This feels a little too safe.”

In brainstorms, in pitch meetings, and in workshops you need bad ideas to help shape what’s truly good. It’s almost like negative architecture or sculpture. Sometimes you build by taking away everything that doesn’t fit.

As Steve Portigal says in his great talk, “In design and in brainstorming, deliberately seeking out bad ideas is a powerful way to unlock creativity. Generating bad ideas can reveal our assumptions about the difference between bad and good, and often seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good ones.”

Establishing a culture where you feel free to fail is key. When you’re in generation mode, you need a loose enough space for jokes, puns, bad taglines, jingles, and wacky suggestions – because often the right idea is hiding just behind your strangest impulse. It’s the classic “no idea is a bad idea” maxim. Under the right conditions, it’s absolutely true.

Bad Failure: People and Processes

Where things fall apart is when people and processes fail: toxic cultures, breakdowns in communication, not looping in the right stakeholders, not operating with enough information about your target audience, your timeline, your budget. There is nothing charming or creative about a broken project schedule, unless your goal is to create stress. On paper, these are the easiest failures to avoid – and yet they are the most devastating.

When an idea fails, you head back to the drawing board. But as Dean Brenner points out, company-wide communication failures disrupt businesses on a fundamental level. It leads to a “lack of focus, failure of purpose, lack of innovation, drop in morale, and eventually, a loss of credibility.”

Contained Chaos

The best situation is when there is a clearly articulated and defined space for failure. Think of it as contained chaos, lightening in bottle. Here is the time for us to experiment and fail – and here is the system of consolidated feedback that will keep on us on track and aligned. How different would your ideation process be if instead of being asked to present one perfect PowerPoint presentation, your assignment was to come up with 10 experiments, knowing that you had adequate time to refine?

As author Michael Chabon says, “Because I believe in failure; only failure rings true. Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the finds; to learn from our mistakes.”

Here’s to good failure, bad ideas, and all the mistakes in-between.

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

Five Challenges Brands Must Overcome in 2019

Posted on November 13, 2018 by Chris Ames

As 2018 comes to a close, we at Emotive Brand can’t help but reflect on the trends and forces that defined the year. The Golden Age of subscription services continued to shine brightly, bringing personalized eureka moments to thousands of people. Politics seeped into everything, with brands either choosing to walk the line or pick a side. And our data, once seen as merely a byproduct of business, has continued to become the engine of business itself.

Looking ahead to 2019, we examine five challenges that brands are facing right now – and how to overcome them using a transformational business strategy.

1. Incremental change is fine – just not if you want to be a market leader

“Anything you can do, I can do better” is a mentality shared by many brands and vengeful siblings, but it misses a key point. Your biggest competitor is not another brand, it’s the category you’re in. There will always be another company offering a similar service. The way to differentiate is by fueling big idea innovation. The most innovative companies look for transformation everywhere: in new channels, communications, value propositions, and more delightful experiences. Airbnb is not a slightly more affordable hotel, it’s a thoughtful reconsideration of what it means to travel. Lyra is not a slightly better employee assistance program, it’s a smarter approach to emotional health.

2. Strategy is (and always will be) your strongest weapon

Before brands can delight or amaze, they first need to understand. Knowing what your customer needs, wants, expects, or desires should not only be the foundation from which your product is built, it should drive growth initiatives and resource allocation. For a great example of a brand capitalizing on customer insights, look at Wayfair. Buying furniture online is nearly frictionless – except knowing exactly how the piece will fit in your house. “View in Room 3D” is a brilliant use of augmented reality, allowing people to use their smartphones to precisely visualize how that sectional will look in their living room. The brand strategy informs and enables the business strategy.

3. There’s no real excuse for communication breakdowns anymore

Now more than ever, there’s a glut of communication tools to foster collaboration and eliminate silos within your team. It’s your responsibility to discover how your team works best, and then equip them with the right tools to win. Maybe it’s a matter of personality, and it requires facilitating a workshop to identify your preferred working style. Or perhaps it’s a matter of product, and something like Slack or LogMeIn will streamline your processes. Either way, your internal communications should be treated with the same urgency and gravity as your external ones.

4. Creating a consistent brand experience is worth the headache

Recently, our design team had the pleasure of visiting the Letterform Archive, a non-profit center for typography and lettering in San Francisco. In the archive, we flipped through Coca-Cola’s advertising manual from 1948 – and we couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy at the simplicity of the media sphere. Radio, newspaper, print. That’s it. Now, of course, we live in a hyper-fragmented landscape where a mixture of screens and devices vie for our attention. If you’re selling soda in 2018, you somehow need to have a mastery of Snapchat and smart refrigerators, in equal measure. This is a nightmare for brands as they attempt to optimize the customer experience. But you can’t afford to ignore a social media channel or device aspect ratio if you want to remain relevant. For guidance, look to Netflix. Regardless of device or account, user preferences are seamlessly remembered and transferred. At the end of the day, people don’t care about the medium. They just want results.

5. In this age, only emotive brands are remembered

Here in the office, there’s a certain Maya Angelou quote that gets said often.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In all your interactions for 2019, you should be asking yourself, how does this make our customers feel? Our partners? Our employees? The branding process can be obtuse. There’s jargon, terminology, workshops, and processes that everyone, especially those in the C-suite, might not be familiar with. But that’s the brilliant thing about emotion – it transcends language to hit you right in the heart. You may not know everything about your brand, but you know how you want it to make people feel. That emotional impact is your compass. Let it guide your decision making and it will undoubtedly lead you to a place of business and brand transformation.

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

Enduring Brand Lessons from the Worlds of Retail, Restaurants, and Other First Jobs

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Chris Ames

Is there anything as formative as our first jobs? It’s a magical time when the newfound autonomy of getting a paycheck is immediately countered by an ugly truth: making money is hard work. For many of us, first jobs start in the worlds of retail, restaurants, and other seemingly unglamorous customer service gigs. There are, by definition, entry-level positions, but don’t let that fool you. Any job that puts you in front of people — people with highly-specific desires, big expectations, and virtually no patience — requires a herculean amount of smarts and emotional intelligence.

There is a certain social stigma against customer service positions. We are taught to laugh off those early stints and seek out “real jobs.” The truth is, the early lessons from those first jobs can form the bedrock of great branding. You must embody consistency, differentiation, experience, and the simple fact that when you win someone’s heart, it’s not long until you win their wallet.

The following is a roundtable interview with the Emotive Brand team about their first jobs, and how those early experiences have informed how they approach branding today.

Saja Chodosh, Writer

For two years during the summer, I was a hostess at a pub in Salt Lake City. Naturally, I had to deal with a lot of drunk or impatient people. One of the first lessons you learn is: tone really matters. You can relay the same basic information — It’s going to be an hour-and-a-half wait — with drastically different tones and get drastically different results. It’s the difference between someone storming out or someone saying, “It’s cool, I’ll just get a drink at the bar.” As a writer for brands, tone in copywriting is super important. Just like at a pub, it’s going to affect how long people are willing to interact with you.

Kelly Peterson, Project Manager

Believe it or not, I was actually a papergirl. Every Wednesday, right around the corner from my middle school, I would plug in my iPod and run the streets. It was all about how you can be most efficient before it gets dark. It’s a lot like solving how to get the most out of people before a deadline. You had your regulars, the people who would plan to see me at the same time every week. They depended on that consistency – getting consistent value at the same time, no matter what. Plus, the emotional connection of being able to take time to chat with their neighborhood papergirl – despite my sunlight influenced deadline. As a project manager, consistency, efficiency, and people skills all factor in.

Shannon Caulfield, Project Manager

For better or worse, in Burlingame, I was known as the “frozen yogurt girl” because I worked so much. That job is where I really learned the importance of customer experience, and how a brand’s perception totally depends on their people. We took our Yelp reviews super seriously. If someone took a picture of a frozen yogurt that wasn’t perfectly swirled, we got in trouble. If you’re a company, you are producing thousands and thousands of customer experiences every day — but you have to remember, the customer only gets that one impression. When you don’t treat each experience with care, they could walk away with a bad taste.

Carol Emert, Strategy Director

One summer during college, I traveled around Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, writing for the “Let’s Go: Europe” travel guide. It was fun but pedantic work, researching transit schedules, hostels, and cheap eats. The big lesson I took from that time is that people love to tell their story. It may feel like an imposition, but when you show a genuine interest in someone else’s experience, most people delight in being able to talk about themselves and their interests — whether it’s their hometown in Norway or their relationship to a product or a brand. It’s not universally true, but when you want to hear someone’s story, it’s usually possible to find people who are happy to share. Today, as a consumer insights researcher and brand strategist, I am quite unapologetic about asking people to share their story.

Joanna Schull, Strategist

My first real job was working at Häagen-Dazs. As part of the training, you must learn to do everything. Whether you’re the manager or have only been there for a week, you need to know and be willing to do all the tasks. And that’s because, if you’re a customer, you don’t really know or care about the difference between who’s a manager and who’s not; you just want a great experience. No matter your place of employment, you should always be willing to do all aspects of the job. If you’re the CEO of an international coffee conglomerate, you should still know how to pull an espresso. At the end of the day, you need to know how to do the thing and live the brand. Everyone should understand the ins-and-outs of what makes the customer happy.

Also, when I was a lifeguard, I had to assert control over people who were considerably older than I was. I needed to find a way to convince adults to follow the rules, to follow my rules, and to keep people safe without being a jerk about it. It’s challenging to exercise authority when it’s questionable whether or not I should even have authority. In our line of work as consultants, we’re often working with people that are unbelievably successful, and the question becomes: how do you get them to trust you? How do you lead them through a process that might be uncomfortable? You need a mix of confidence and humility. Whether you’re leading a workshop or watching a pool, you’re not there to be the most important part of the engagement. You’re there to make sure things work seamlessly.

Keyoni Scott, Junior Designer

I’ve had a ton of jobs — pizza delivery, clothing stores, sandwich shops — but I learned something interesting about working at this deli in Yountville, a small town in Napa Country. You know, Napa has a certain association of being a very high-end, maybe even uppity place. There are the stereotypes of the fancy, wine-tasting people. I think it taught me the importance of ignoring assumptions, and really taking the time to truly know your audience. Regardless of stereotypes about a place, everyone is different and brings something unique to the table. Working in a deli, it’s a matter of being able to read people quickly. You should engage people on an emotional level, and get a real idea of what their life is like. Reading people goes a long way, creates stronger bonds, and ultimately, earns you more tips. Knowing when to joke with customers — or clients — goes a long way. Don’t make assumptions about your audience. Take the time to read them.

Robert Saywitz, Senior Designer

Oh man, I’ve worked as a host, a busboy, an ice cream scooper. At an all-you-can-eat buffet, I was literally the muffin man. When I was going through art school, I worked part-time as a waiter. In general, working in the service industry not only teaches you how to engage with difficult people, it teaches you extreme empathy. It informs you how to be a considerate and normal person when you walk into a restaurant, and that there are two sides to every story. It’s a brutal, but necessary lesson to learn. I truly believe that every single person on this planet should work in the service industry, like a military draft. Because here’s the real lesson: it teaches you how not to be an asshole. Working in a restaurant is a lot like working at an agency. You’re dealing with all sorts of different job positions — writers, strategists, designers — with tight deadlines and many links in the chain. Things simply won’t get done if you’re not a well-oiled machine. You can have the world’s best menu — if the chef and waiters and hosts aren’t communicating well, no one is eating there.

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So, whether you’re entry-level or enterprise, serving up mixed drinks or massive deliverables, we hope you find something to take away and apply to your brand. To misquote Gertrude Stein, “A job is a job is a job.” No matter your position, there are tangible steps you can take to make people fall in love every time they interact with your brand. And if you have lessons you’ve learned from early jobs, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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

How to Bring in a Branding Agency (And Still Thrive as a Creative Director)

Posted on April 3, 2018 by Chris Ames

Agency or Enemy?

If you’re a Creative Director, chances are you’re some lovely mix of imagination, diplomacy, market knowledge, and damn good design sense. You bring focus to every project. You know how to communicate across disciplines and departments. After all, that’s why you were hired. So why in God’s name would you ever need to bring in an outside branding agency? And if by some cruel twist of fate you’re forced into this position, how do you avoid effectively hiring your replacement?

If You’re Reading This Creative Brief, We’re Already Behind Schedule

Here’s a common scenario. You’re the Creative Director of a small design team. You’ve been tasked with a top-to-bottom rebrand with aggressive deadlines and even more aggressive stakeholders. There’s so much day-to-day client work that your team is stretched super thin.

It’s normally here, somewhere in-between the third revision and the second missed deadline that a decision maker mandates we need fresh eyes. The team is apprehensive to bring in outsiders and start from square one, but no one has any real bandwidth to argue against it. By the time the outside agency is brought in, everyone is exhausted, the work is stalled, the printer is out of ink, and someone keeps stealing your phone charger. Who’s ready for a design kickoff?

An Extension, Not a Replacement

When it works well, an outside branding agency is a natural extension of your design team, not a replacement.

“Ideally, you get an external agency that’s smarter than you are,” says Robert Saywitz, Senior Designer at Emotive Brand. “You’re looking for a true collaborator and extension of the team. No one wants to be manhandled, and no one wants to hear just tell us what to do. They should have an informed perspective and deliver creative ideas beyond the obvious solutions. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just hire some freelancers?”

So, how do you set yourself up for success? It’s all about education.

The Outside Branding Agency Checklist

Rally as an internal team. First things first, by the time you hire an outside branding agency, chances are you’re battle worn. Take a breath, rally the troops, and view this as an opportunity to get back on track. We’re all on the same team and we’re fighting for the same thing.
Educate the agency. No one knows the intricacies, politics, obstacles, personalities, and past iterations better than you. The more you embed and educate your agency, the faster, better, and more invaluable they’ll become. No one will benefit from keeping them in the dark.
Educate the decision makers. Get your decision makers aligned, informed, and available. Nothing is more frustrating than uncollated, contradictory feedback. Everyone needs to have a say, but at the end of the day, there should be one voice making the final call.
Set expectations early. If you’re going to set design guardrails, do so in the very beginning. Everyone must have clear delineations of what to keep, what to kill, and what can be reimagined.
Realistic deadlines. This one speaks for itself, but unless you want your external team to get sucked into the same whirlwind of chaos, they need time to operate and produce amazing work. If the rebrand was due two weeks before the agency was even hired, it’s time to rethink the schedule.
Turn the Creative Director into the missing link. No one is better suited to the needs of the internal company than the Creative Director. They can work as a bridge between designers, marketing, and the C-suite.

“When you’re the link, you’re the best way to facilitate what’s happening,” continues Rob Saywitz. “You speak the same language, you know the process. You know where the silos are and have the best chance at breaking them down. No one wants to enter a room excited to pitch new ideas only to discover the direction was already decided in a private meeting.”

Partners in Crime

Outside branding agencies can be a phenomenal tool to bring in fresh perspectives, accelerate projects, and spot the glaring inefficiencies that you’re too close to see. But without a champion on the inside, there’s a very real possibility that their best intentions will be mistranslated, misheard, and only add to the cacophony. Agencies don’t replace Creative Directors — they are a vibrant new dictionary for the Creative Director to read, take inspiration from, and translate to the internal team.

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

Why Good Listening Matters in Business

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Listen Up

There are a lot of differing opinions about what good listening really means, let alone what it can do for your business. In one camp, good listening simply means not speaking over others when they are talking. While others think listening is about verbal acknowledgement. And there are those who wait until the speaker is done, then promptly repeat everything back to them. But are any of these really impactful, productive ways of listening?

Falling Short

This kind of one-dimensional listening falls short for many reasons. It isn’t what great listeners are actually doing – good listening is more than a one-way exchange. Saying “I understand” sometimes just isn’t enough. Especially in a world ripe with distractions. In fact, many argue that technological advances have made impactful listening increasingly rare.

Face-to-face conversations aren’t as common, and people’s levels of attention, engagement, and interaction have decreased because of constant emails, texts, and other device-produced distractions. Even when two people find themselves face-to-face, they are often not fully engaged.

But good listening – dynamic, thought-provoking, empathetic, free of distraction – is powerful. Giving energy to people, encouraging creativity, learning, innovation, problem solving, strengthening relationships, and helping people see things through a different lens is key to business today. Here’s why.

How We Listen

At Emotive Brand, our work requires effective listening. In order to get to the heart of our client’s business problems and help get leadership teams aligned around an impactful strategy, we need to be great listeners. It’s how we understand a business, its current situation, where it needs to go, and why. It’s also how we work effectively as a team to collaborate and create the most impactful strategy that will move our client’s businesses forward.

Here are some practices we’ve adapted that help foster good listening:

1. Asking questions:

Productive listening is about creating a two-way dialog. And this requires asking questions. Asking questions can generate new ways of thinking, foster creativity, challenge long-held assumptions, and fuel real, transformative change for businesses.

A lot of our work at EB is about asking questions – especially at the beginning stages. By listening, absorbing, and posing questions that move the conversation further, we move closer and closer to getting to the depth of business problems and creating solutions tailored for success.

2. Creating a supportive environment:

Productive listening hinges on creating an environment where both parties feel safe, especially when conversations are more complex. Making everyone involved feel safe and confident in voicing their individual opinions requires building trust and openness.

Listening becomes more productive the more you do it well. And often, the more someone feels listened to, the more they open up.

3. Making it collaborative, not competitive:

Listening should be part of a feedback flow not a competition about who’s right. It’s important to be willing to disagree as a listener, but it’s not about winning. It’s about coming to the best conclusion together through productive listening.

4. Putting away distractions:

Eye contact can go a long way. Sometimes, it’s necessary to put away cellphones and laptops in order to really be engaged during listening. The gesture itself makes a cue to people that you are fully present and really care about what they are saying.

5. Using nonverbal cues:

That being said, body language is key to successful listening. An open posture can indicate that you are open to listen and engage. On the flip side, cues like crossed arms or wandering eyes do not foster good listening.

6. Showing empathy:

Showing empathy is arguably the most important element of successful listening. It’s natural to disagree, but showing that you are trying to understand something from another person’s perspective can go a long way. You may even expand your own way of thinking. Seeing alternative paths and considering other opinions can foster innovation and creativity as well.

In our work at EB, we strive to get inside the minds and hearts of our clients and all of their integral audiences to really understand what’s going on. And showing empathy while we listen to these different perspectives is key to our success as brand strategists.

The Power of Listening in Business

Depending on the depth of the conversation at hand, different levels of listening engagement are needed in order to be productive. Good listeners know when to pull closer and also when to pull away. Sometimes, an affirmative nod is all that is needed. Other times, it’s more complicated. And knowing when to use these practices takes just that, practice.

Listening is a key part of how we do business, but it applies to every business – internally and externally. Good listening can lead to a more collaborative, productive, and inspired workplace. Businesses who listen to their outside audiences prove to be more successful because they understand their audiences, can adapt according to their shifting needs, and are constantly engaging to make the brand relationship stronger. Foster good listening skills to build a successful business and brand positioned to thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

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