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Tag: Culture

2016 San Francisco Branding Agency: A Year in Review

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Looking Back

As I look back on this year and reflect on the work we did, the shifts our agency made, the clients we encountered, and everything else in between, I can’t help but share some significant insights and lessons I learned working in a San Francisco brand agency.

Agile Strategy Meets Actual Reality

This year was about meeting clients wherever they were on their brand strategy journey and finding tangible ways to deliver impact to their business and brand. Luckily, we saw this coming. We developed new ways to adapt our more linear brand strategy methodology to the changing needs of business leaders over the past two years.

This year was about honing in on how to deliver the strategic thinking and creative opportunities at a high level on a shorter timeframe. Working in agile ways requires a completely different approach to strategy. So we adjusted our agency at every level from operationally scoping a project to delivering a statement of work (SOW) — fast. Our projects are specific. We work in sprints. We are more collaborative with leadership teams. And we are developing a strong reputation for leading this style of work with high-growth companies.

Investing in Employer Branding and Culture

This year we saw a big shift in both interest and funding for developing employer brands and improving employee engagement and culture. This is an exciting turn for us as an agency as we strongly believe your brand comes from the inside out. We had more inbound calls this year and worked on more employer brand projects than in the last few years combined.

Research by PWC points to CEO’s being concerned about not being able to recruit top talent. And we have seen this ourselves with some of our larger, global enterprise tech companies this year. Recruiting and keeping top talent requires an investment in brand. So we are excited to see employer branding become more of a part of marketing. This will enable a more integrated approach between corporate brands and employer brands. Music to our ears.

The CEO Makes All the Difference

At Emotive Brand, we work in the C-suite. It’s where strategy is developed and executed. It’s where purpose and vision are born. And it’s the only place you can actively drive meaningful change. But, not all CEOs are the same. Their needs and interests around the brand they support vary dramatically.

As a whole, the projects that we worked on that were the most successful stemmed from an actively engaged CEO: someone who understood the full value of brand strategy. Brand strategy projects that do not actively include the CEO as a driver of the project become less strategic and tend to lose momentum and focus.

Sales-led Brand Strategy Resonates

As an agency, we have a very sales-led approach to developing brand strategy. And we’ve started using it in how we market ourselves as an agency and how we develop brand strategy. Executives want to know that you care about driving their business forward in all areas – most especially increasing revenue and profit. When we work closely with the CRO or Head of Sales, we see the impact of our work on the business’ bottom line. We get inside of the sales organization to learn what’s working and what isn’t. What their prospects and clients are looking for. What messages resonate and don’t. It helps us hear what the brand is doing well and what it needs to do to better compete as voiced from the front line. And when we intimately understand the needs of the customers, we’re better positioned to craft a strategy that resonates at an emotional level.

What does that mean for Emotive Brand in 2017? A Return to Brand

I believe we will see a renewed focus and an increased investment in brand strategy across the board.

Businesses that thrive will be those that have a solid brand strategy in place to drive growth, differentiate, and enable more meaningful experiences. In order for marketers to be strategic and successful within their own organizations, they will need the brand to work harder for them than ever before. And in order to meet the needs of marketers, I imagine brand strategy will become even less traditional: more strategic, more purposeful, and more personalized in its approach.

At the same time, clients will have a new opportunity to lean into brand strategy with confidence knowing they don’t necessarily need to buy the whole enchilada. I think we will continue to see clients looking for specialized projects – ones that meet the immediate needs of the business.

What does that mean for us at Emotive Brand?  A continued commitment to be more flexible. We can no longer rely on a one size fits all solution to brand strategy. So we plan on doubling down on our time spent listening to client needs in order to craft the right solutions that meet those needs and create maximum impact. And we will be working even harder to develop the right processes and frameworks to do just that. Here’s to a strong 2017!

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand agency.

Purpose Drives Financial And Competitive Advantages – Deloitte

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-Driven Companies

Deloitte is the world’s largest audit, tax, and consulting firm. They have done extensive research on purpose-driven companies and the role of purpose in them. And according to their report, companies at which people agree there’s a “strong sense of purpose” perform significantly better than those that don’t.

Specifically, these purpose-driven companies have:

• Excellent financial performance
• Distinct and differentiated brands
• Strong workplace cultures
• Highly satisfied customers

Three Drivers to purpose-based performance improvements:

1. Create a Purposeful Culture

Invest in making your purpose a mainstream and actionable idea across your workplace. So work on aligning everyone to your purposeful ambition by making it relevant on an individual level. Show employees how they will benefit from helping make your purposeful ambition a reality.

2. Exude a Purposeful Presence

In order to succeed, ensure that every level of management and staff is included in the process of training and engagement around your purpose. So don’t only talk the talk, walk the talk. Make sure to acknowledge, celebrate, and reward the purposeful behaviors of individuals, teams, and departments. Shift your brand and marketing messages to better reflect your purposeful ambition.

3. Adopt More Purposeful Behavior

In order to change the way your brand and its people interact internally, and with the outside world, make sure every interaction reflects and amplifies your purposeful ambition. By examine processes, policies, and procedures and amending as needed purpose will drive your business.

People Connect to Purpose

Purpose isn’t simply a “nice to have” business attribute. Purpose-driven companies positively impact virtually every measure of success. Why? People connect to purpose and they change the way they think, feel, and act when they embrace a purpose that truly matters to them.

For additional reading on driving business through purpose, read Pathway To Sustained Growth

Check out some of the companies driven by purpose we have had the pleasure of doing work with.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Image Credit.

How I See Our Culture – David Ogilvy

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

I worked for Ogilvy and Mather for nine years. At the beginning of my time there, it was still a privately-held company – though within a few years of my tenure, it was absorbed (and changed forever) by WPP.

I came across this piece written by David Ogilvy (whom I had the pleasure of meeting once), about the culture of Ogilvy back in the day.

I think all leaders should use it as a culture check-list for their companies.

From The Unpublished David Ogilvy.

Here is how I see our culture.

A NICE PLACE TO WORK

Some of our people spend their entire working lives in our agency. We do our damnedest to make it a happy experience. I put this first, believing that superior service to our clients and profits for our stockholders depend on it.

We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble – with their jobs, with illness, with alcoholism, and so on.

We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training – perhaps more than any of our competitors.

Our system of management is singularly democratic.

We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.

We abhor ruthlessness.

We give our executives an extraordinary degree of freedom and independence. We like people with gentle manners.

We like people who are honest. Honest in argument, honest with clients, honest with suppliers, honest with the company – and above all, honest with consumers.

We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough.

We do not admire superficial people.

We despise office politicians, toadies, bullies and pompous asses.

We discourage paper warfare.

The way up the ladder is open to everybody. We are free from prejudice of any kind – religious prejudice, racial prejudice or sexual prejudice. We detest nepotism and every other form of favoritism.

In promoting people to top jobs, we are influenced as much by their character as anything else.

Like all companies with a strong culture, we have our heroes– the Old Guard who have woven our culture. By no means have all of them been members of top management.

Wise words, from a wise man. Creating meaningful workplaces and a strong culture is not an old concept, but it is getting harder and harder to achieve.

To read more about how Emotive Brand thinks about building more meaningful workplaces, download our paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

Business Success is All About Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

“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.

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