Competition Archives - Emotive Brand

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Tracy Lloyd

What Got You Here

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences – prospects, customers, and recruits – who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business – inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team, but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy – making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and may even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture

For many high-growth companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate for tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing

Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many high-growth company will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning

Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience

Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For high-growth companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what are they looking to solve, and how can you create messaging to speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why

It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition

In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition – inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Corporate Narrative

Investing in developing a corporate narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your corporate narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets

Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically lead redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

Brand Growth in a Saturated, Competitive Market: Yes, It’s Possible

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Shannon Caulfield

Brand Growth Despite Growing Competition

Brands saturate our world. They are all looking to innovate faster, compete harder, and disrupt bigger. Why? Competition is tough – from both emerging and established brands. This forces companies to always be on their toes.

But competition isn’t always a bad thing.

Competition is what gives brands the motivation to do better and be better. If your market is crowded, it doesn’t mean your employees must work 18-hour days or that you have to outspend on advertising. Instead, what you really need to do is work smarter.

Here are some ways you can grow your brand even when you’re not the only player on the field.

Growing Awareness in a New Category: Make Competitors Your Allies

It might sound destructive, but partnering with competitors can actually benefit your brand – if you do it right. This is an especially good tactic when you compete in a new category. And you’ll likely find willing partners. In fact, 74% of companies are open to supporting opponents as a means for building brand or category awareness. Take kombucha, the drink of choice for Silicon Valley and hipsters everywhere. During the category’s early stages, the awareness rate was only 20%. Companies such as Health-Ade and KeVita went to tea festivals together and handed out samples of their products to spark buzz around the fermented drink. They came together with a shared mission of raising awareness and realized they could make a bigger impact together than separately. In turn, each brand was able to grow over time as the category grew into one of high demand.

Growing into New Segments and Channels: Take a Leap into Something New

If you aren’t ready to join forces with the competition, a co-branding partnership may be the perfect way to step out of your category’s predefined box. American Express and Foursquare, both players in the payments industry, leveraged each other’s reach to solve a unique motivation. American Express used Foursquare’s platform to offer discounts to their cardholders, reach a younger, tech-centric audience, and expand their merchant network. Foursquare leveraged the Amex partnership to push more users to shop via their phones, increasing user traffic. This cooperation gave each brand the data to reach new market segments, expand into new channels and, ultimately, elevated each brand’s position.

Growing Brand Loyalty: More Rewards, More Brand Love

Financial success does not equate to long-term loyalty. The modern-day consumer demands that brands deliver personalized experiences. Loyalty programs, in particular, connect brands with consumers and gives them a reason to stay. When AAA entered the market, for example, their primary value was emergency assistance. While this offering has been well received in the market, AAA established an even greater reason for their users to continue using the platform by offering third-party discounts and rewards. That value goes well-beyond a jump start.

Think Creatively to Grow

If you feel the only way you can compete is with expensive ads and promotions, think again. It takes a little creativity and effort to try unconventional tactics but, we promise, it will be worth it. And we’re happy to help.

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

The Art of Swift, Smart Decision Making in Business

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Too Many Choices

Business leaders can be gun-shy about making decisions – big and small, important and minute –when it comes to both their business and their brand.

The abundance of scenarios about the unknown can easily feel overwhelming. But effective leadership hinges on effective decision making. And it’s impossible to choose a direction when you’re trying to please everyone and do everything.

To Compete, You Have to Decide

At the end of the day, there’s no room or time for slow decision making in today’s competitive, fast-paced landscape. In fact, businesses and brands in every industry are struggling to become more agile and move fast enough to gain and maintain competitive edge.

And this kind of agility requires quick, streamlined, confident, decision making. Trying to make a decision with too many stakeholders involved will only stall your business from moving forward. This ‘hurry up and wait’ mentality can be crippling to how your business progresses.

So how do you create an environment that fosters quick, informed decision making?

Because of the accelerated pace of business today, businesses need a strategy for decision making. The most important thing is to make a decision and stick to it.

Being afraid to put a stake in the ground is only going to hold back your brand and create frustrated, confused costumers, employers, and investors. Bottle-necks are antithetical to brand growth. In the end, following through and rallying everyone around the direction you select is what matters most.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way. It doesn’t exist. There are always going to be alternatives to the biggest and smallest decisions you are tasked with making. But the most meaningful, and powerful choice is a direction you actually follow. And if you have a good team and a good product to back you up, you can build your brand and business in whatever direction you choose.

The best leaders are comfortable making decisions using established, agreed-upon practices and then align the subsequent brand and business paths accordingly.

That’s why a solid brand promise is key. With it as your North Star, everything from your brand’s position to its look and feel will have a clear path to guide your decision making. With your promise well articulated and shared, you are better positioned to empower employees to make their own decisions in line with the direction of the business. Giving employees this power gets rid of the bottleneck that often accompanies the decision making process (or lack thereof!).

Flexibility and Focus

Effective decision making requires a balance of flexibility and focus – honing the prize, and leaving room to shift along the way, within degrees of reason. It is not possible to please everyone or predict exactly what the future will bring. So choose a direction and go with it. You can always readjust the brand. Being a smart, swift decision maker and empowering others within your organization to do the same can ready your business and brand for whatever lays ahead.