Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on December 1, 2022October 14, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work?

Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Posted on November 23, 2022November 1, 2024 by Emotive Brand

Challenger Creative

This post is the last in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read a general primer to challenger brands or a deep dive into B2B challengers right here.

Previously, we chatted about the power of adopting a challenger mindset, how to compete against your category, and what the B2B world can learn from B2C disruptors. In these examples, most of the strategies were internal. It was a question of knowing how to recognize the pressure for change, creating a shared vision, having the capacity to execute, and building out a realistic work plan.

But still, the question remains: what does this actually look like in the real world? Today, we’re going to dive into some examples of challenger brands that use design to disrupt. While there’s no one definition for challenger creative, you tend to know it when you see. Most recently, it’s an aesthetic that incorporates clean branding, catchy names displayed in modern fonts, bright pops of color, and sleek packaging. It’s unapologetically bold, playful, and unafraid to subvert the expectations of the form. It’s a design that knows how to transform positives into negatives and creates a lasting impression.

Thanks for the Warm-Up

Sometimes you’re fighting against the market, and sometimes you’re fighting against people’s perceptions. From a marketing and viewership point of view, the relationship between the Olympics and the Paralympics is a contentious one. As we all know, the Olympics airs first, and garners much more attention and ad-budget. So, how do you respond when everyone thinks of your offer as secondary?

With a bold commercial that repositions the Olympics as merely the “warm-up,” this commercial asserts that the Paralympics is where Super Humans do battle. Even the way the commercial starts—leading the viewer from the firework show to a tunnel underground—demonstrates that this is an alternate, grittier world we are entering. It sets the tone for the whole games. Anyone can run on two feet—come see a real show.

The Perks of Being a Couch Potato

In a world of Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Overstock, is there anything gutsier than trying to sell furniture online? Burrow, a sofa startup, is up to the challenge. Incorporating gorgeous photography, cheeky copy, and a deep understanding of millennial behavior, they have created a campaign that is capturing attention. Their tagline, “Good for Nothing,” is a perfect self-deprecating turn of phrase that speaks to their sense of humor and willingness to disrupt the status quo.

“‘Good for Nothing’ positions Burrow as the sofa brand that’s serious about leisure,” says Red Antler Co-founder and Strategy Chief Emily Heyward. “And the goal of our out-of-home campaign in New York is to remind everyone who’s rushing by and commuting in the busiest city in the world that it’s OK to go home tonight and do absolutely nothing. Hopefully on a comfortable Burrow sofa.”

Repairing the Male Ego

Challenging giant corporations is one thing, but using design to challenge stigma and vulnerability is another. Hims, a personal wellness brand, is fueled by one challenger belief—men are allowed to want to take care of themselves. The question is, does the market agree? Well, by March of 2018, Hims had already sold roughly $10 million in product and reached $200 million in valuation. (They only launched in November 2017.) So, that’s a big yes.

“These brands have an aesthetic that appeals to millennials,” said Allen Adamson, Brand Consultant and Co-founder of Metaforce. “It’s smart design without being ostentatious or too snooty. All these products are stylish, and they don’t necessarily pick up on the cues of the category. They pick up on the design language that surrounds young people today.”

Hims’ product line reads like a short list of things that should be difficult to market to those who are uncomfortable talking about it—hair loss, erectile dysfunction, skincare, and vitamins. Instead of shying away from stigma or taboos, they’ve turned it into a massive business opportunity.

Bird Is the Word

E-scooters are a controversial business, but don’t expect Bird’s founder, Travis VanderZaden, to back down from a challenge. Bird was named Inc’s business of the year, and with good reason. In 14 months, they have expanded to 120 cities and notched a $2 billion evaluation.

The design of Bird feels both professional and whimsical at the same time. The black and white look of the scooter is sleek and clean, but the animated landing video on their website looks like something out of Pixar, full of color and imagination. They seem to capture the childlike freedom of riding a scooter and the Uber-like vision of transforming how a city runs. Their design leaves them poised to take on anyone, whether that’s fellow e-scooter brands, ride-sharing, or even automobile makers.

“He told me the idea of adult scooters and explained how riders would just leave them on the sidewalk, and I was incredulous. I thought he was crazy,” says David Sacks, an early PayPal executive who invested in the company’s seed round. “Once I went to Santa Monica, I realized it was magical,” he says, after he scootered to his destination, without waiting for a cab or sitting in traffic. “I started thinking about how big this idea could become and realized that it’s transformational. You could have millions of these, and start displacing car trips for commuters—and eventually redesign cities.”

Time to Face the Challenge

Now that we’ve covered strategy, mindset, and design, it’s time to adopt a challenger mindset for your own brand. Every year it gets harder and harder for brands to stand out from the pack. Meaning, there’s never been a better time to be bold, fired-up, and willing to take a risk to differentiate yourself.

To learn more about how your brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Igniting Growth and Pushing the Envelope for SaaS Brands

Posted on January 21, 2020October 27, 2024 by Joanna Schull

SaaS Brands

These days, it’s a SaaS world and we’re just living in it. From infrastructure and identity to platforms and productivity, Everything-as-a-Service continues to reign supreme. But what does it take to succeed and become one of the SaaS brands that can achieve the annual recurring revenue (ARR) required to drive predictable growth in an ever-crowding market?

According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud services are predicted to grow by 17% this year, from $227.8 billion in 2019 to $266.4 billion in 2020, with revenue forecasts for SaaS brands (cloud application services) expected to reach over $116 billion alone.

And while, as the SaaS market may seem mature after nearly two decades, according to a study by Synergy Research Group, it still only accounts for about 20-25% of total enterprise software spending, meaning there’s plenty of room for growth for both established players and new market entrants. There are challenges, but there are also plenty of opportunities to rise above the fray.

The Market Is Crowded and Continuing to Grow

According to a 2019 survey, data provided by Chiefmartech identified over 7,000 solutions in the marketing segment alone. This market saturation can lead to a lack of differentiation between SaaS brands and ‘buyer fatigue’ from an overwhelming number of choices and plans to consider. This is only likely to increase as investors continue to seek (and see) favorable returns on investments in the SaaS space, spawning multiple versions of even niche solutions.

Ease of Switching Can Lead to Churn

Another impact of the crowded marketplace and sheer volume of offerings is the ease of switching from one SaaS solution to another. SaaS brands, by the nature of the offering, are more scalable and easy to implement vs. traditional on-premise software solutions that require purchasing hardware, installation, and ongoing maintenance and management. Couple this with the fact that many SaaS offerings are nearly indistinguishable from each other and you’ll find the reason the average mid-sized organization is seeing 39% change in their SaaS stack from year to year.

The Target Audience Is…Everyone

Because SaaS has low barriers to adoption relative to traditional IT solutions, it’s increasingly common that the purchaser of a SaaS solution is not from within the IT organization, but is instead in another part of the business with a discretionary budget to spend. As a result, SaaS brands need to remember that their brand needs to be able to communicate beyond a strictly IT audience.

Expectations Are High

The consumerization of IT and what’s known as the ‘Amazon Effect’ continue to raise user expectations as they expect B2B and SaaS solutions to deliver the same level of customization, user experience, and ease of use as they experience from B2C companies and their daily consumer electronic experiences. As a result, SaaS solutions need to over-deliver on overall usability and the customer experience in order to attract and retain active users and preserve AAR.

To overcome these challenges, smart SaaS brands are adopting business and brand strategies and practices from the B2C world and adapting them to the B2B SaaS world.

1) Define the position you want to own in the market.

To stand out in a crowded market, SaaS brands must clearly define what position they want to hold in the market and in the minds of their target audiences. Being clear about how your SaaS offering is specifically differentiated from the rest of the competitive field is the starting point for driving preference.

2) Build a rational and emotional connection.

Like B2C brands, SaaS brands must communicate what the brand does, how it does it, and why the brand matters. At Emotive Brand, we think about this in terms of building a rational and emotional bond with customers—enabling people to know what you stand for, why your brand is different, and feel an emotional connection to your brand. The rational connection may drive initial purchase and adoption, but it’s the emotional connection that builds long-term preference and stickiness.

3) Invest in customer experience.

Create a customer experience that measures up to expectations set by leading B2C brands. This means paying attention to all touchpoints, from the sales process to product functionality and usability, to ensure that each and every interaction reinforces the connection with the product and the brand.

4) Differentiate with design.

Another way for SaaS brands to stand out is by investing in design. A distinctive and ownable visual identity can help differentiate from competitors and build recognition with purchasers and users. Of course, the focus on design needs to extend beyond branding and visual identity to include UX and product design to create an experience that keeps users engaged and utilization and renewal rates up.

As businesses continue to look for ways to streamline and simplify how they use and deploy technology to meet specific business needs, the SaaS market will continue to grow. The crowded market presents opportunities and challenges. Claiming a clear position in the market, building an irresistible brand that champions superior user experience, and differentiating with stellar design can help SaaS brands achieve the growth and recognition they need to succeed.

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

A 5-Step Action Plan for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Stephen Banbury

B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment 2.0

A former colleague of mine just started a job where she was required to stand up and deliver a sales presentation to the sales leadership team. That wouldn’t be unusual for a new salesperson – but she’s a marketer. And the experience of walking in the sales team’s shoes made her a better one.

B2B companies talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but talk will only get you so far. Companies need to take action to get their sales and marketing teams empathizing with each other, strategizing together, and working from the same playbook.

It’s a critical time for sales and marketing alignment. The benefits have never been greater. As technology and data transform business, new opportunities are emerging every day for the savviest B2B companies to boost lead quality, close more deals, strengthen their brands and improve their work culture through tighter teamwork.

So how to get from here from there? If you take the following action steps, you’re all but certain to enjoy stronger B2B revenue growth this year.

Action 1: Plan together

Most companies have already conducted their 2019 planning meetings, but if you haven’t, now is the time. And even if you have, you shouldn’t stop there. Before the holidays, be sure to put four quarterly sales and marketing planning meetings on your calendar for next year.

A lot of change can happen over the course of a year, so it’s important to have an in-depth planning session at least quarterly. This is a chance for B2B sales and marketing teams to sit together and review sales objectives for each time period. Then you can agree on how the strategic marketing plan can best support those objectives, from corporate and field events to high-value content.

Action 2: Walk in their shoes

Aligning goals and tactics is an important start, but for greater impact, marketing needs to truly understand the hurdles salespeople face every day.

Marketing tends sometimes to lean toward the aspirational, but sales enablement requires a more down-to-earth approach. It’s important that marketers attend regular sales team meetings – yes, every week — and hear firsthand what is working, what is not, what prospective customers truly care about, and what key questions marketing absolutely needs to answer.

As my friend’s experience above illustrates, having B2B marketers stand and deliver a sales presentation is a great way to enhance their understanding of how well their own slides work in practice, not just in theory. Actually telling the story is the best way to gauge how each piece connects with different audiences while identifying any gaps.

Sales, for its part, should appreciate that marketing is tasked with a longer-term, strategic role in growing the company, the brand, and its customer relationships.

Particularly as subscription-based SAAS becomes the dominant revenue model, topline growth is driven less by closing a few big deals and more by long-term nurturing that paves the way for customer loyalty and successful cross-selling and up-selling.

It takes mutual respect flowing both ways to fully leverage the strengths of both sales and marketing – so everyone can reap the benefits of these opportunities.

Action 3: Connect top to bottom

Sales and marketing alignment at the executive level is not enough. The entire organization, from the c-suite to operations to customer-facing field staff, should know each other and have regular conversations. If this isn’t happening, now is a good time to make those introductions.

Action 4: Pay for what you get

Typically sales teams are compensated based on meeting and exceeding revenue targets, while marketers aren’t – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Some B2B companies have started rewarding marketers for KPIs like deals influenced or deals sourced. Good CRM tools are making it possible to track the effectiveness of specific pieces of digital content, making detailed ROI measurement – and rewarding the content creators — more feasible.

Action 5: Lean heavily on your brand

As sales and marketing alignment gains steam, brand makes even more of a difference. It gives both sides a common understanding and shared language as they essentially co-create the B2B brand experience.

The most successful sales and marketing partnerships are aligned in their commitment from top to bottom – from their brand’s highest-level vision to its most tactical tools.

By nurturing mutual respect and leveraging the strengths of both the sales and marketing teams, your company will be set up for greater success in 2019 and beyond.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Brand Strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies. Learn more about our work with high-growth technology companies here.

5 Common Mistakes in Brand Design Today

Posted on June 12, 2018November 22, 2024 by Paulina McFarland

The Brand Design Journey

If you’re looking for a brand design or redesign, you’ll need more than a logo or a new website. Brand design is bigger than that. Designing a brand entails designing every moment and experience people have with your brand. It’s about every touchpoint, and these days nothing goes unnoticed. Brand design reflects how your brand looks and how it feels.

This means colors, graphic language, typeface, photography, and your logo. In the end, brand design is what brings the brand to life. It’s what makes your brand recognizable and powerful to the people that matter to your business. Because developing your brand design is no easy task, it’s easy for businesses and the people behind them to fall into common design traps. So before your brand engages in design work, consider these five common mistakes, why they are problematic, and how to avoid them.

1. Designing for tomorrow and not today

In a world where digital innovation and advancement is critical to a brand’s survival, brands need to be designed for new technology. Fluidity and flexibility is key here. The digital landscape requires adaptability. And in order to maintain brand relevance, brands need to anticipate how they will compete in the future market. Stagnant brands simply don’t create powerful brand experiences. Every touchpoint and interaction counts. Designers who want to design a powerful brand with a strong emotional impact, one that will stay relevant over time, and drive business in a sustainable way need to design with the future of the brand in mind. This means taking an adaptable, dynamic, digital, experiential, and always forward thinking approach that aligns with the brand’s vision and aspirations.

2. Playing lookalike

Differentiation in branding is of great importance. Yet many brands take the safe route. And as a result, brands end up looking similar to competitors or adapting to the short-lived design trends of the month. Even though design is supposed to help brands stand out, the design landscape continues to be filled with brands that quite honestly, look and feel the same. And sameness doesn’t move a business forward. Designing a brand requires taking risks. It takes courage. You have to be bold. And we know it’s not always easy. Challenge yourself and your clients to design brands that aren’t afraid to say something different.

3. Forgetting about guidelines

Your agency or company could build the most prolific visual identity, pick the perfect colors, or create a logo that could change the entire game. But the fact is, a brand can’t come to life if the visual identity isn’t rolled out correctly. Businesses often overlook the importance of brand guidelines because they aren’t easy to create. No one wants to create or read a manual. However, people need a roadmap for keeping the brand consistent and powerful. Brand guidelines give businesses the tools people need to bring the brand to life, keeping it clear, consistent, and recognizable. Brands without brand guidelines often end up inconsistent, valueless, and unable to grow. If you want to make the brand rollout a success, you need guidelines.

4. Overcomplicating it

Simplicity and clarity is key for brand design. Complicated brand design ends up diluting the brand’s overall emotional impact and making the brand less recognizable to the people who matter to its success. However, it’s important that when straying away from overcomplicated you make sure you understand your audience and don’t dumb it down for them. Simple doesn’t mean banging your audiences across the head. Working as a team and eliciting feedback at multiple points of the process can help move the design towards clarity and simplicity.

5. Ignoring Strategy

Tying strategy with design is one of the most important things a brand can do. Use strategy as a guiding map for how the brand should come to life visually. Even though strategists and designers often have different toolboxes, marrying the two skillsets and ways of thinking can help build a more impactful, purposeful brand. Often times, clients want design that has nothing to do with the strategy that’s been developed. Make sure you explain the impact that strategically informed design can create, and demonstrate the power of strategically informed design. By bringing design and strategy together, your brand becomes more valuable and impactful.

Brand Design for Maximum Impact

Design a brand that engages your target audience and generates demand. One that will be able to adapt to digital advances, increased customer experiences, and heed off competition. Use your visual identity to help your brand stand out and highlight what makes you stand out. Keep it simple. Use your strategy to lead you in, and don’t forget to create the guidelines the brand needs for a successful rollout. If you avoid these five mistakes, the brand will be more powerful to its audiences, and more able to move business forward. The brand design will support the brand as it grows and prospers in a competitive design landscape.

Read another post from our design team: Brand Identity: What’s Your Type?

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

Brand Differentiation: Where Do You Even Start?

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Tracy Lloyd

Brand Differentiation

In B2B marketing, creating brand differentiation is a critical output of all marketers whether you are managing a B2B or B2C brand.

When your brand is truly and meaningfully differentiated, it works as a magnet to attract new customers and employees, as a glue that keeps people loyal, and as a warm glow that means people always come back for more. So how do you differentiate your brand?

The problem for most brands is that they have yet to find a distinct place in the whirlwind of modern commerce. These brands are being buffeted by the winds of change and the waves of disruption. Every day they go further astray, lost in the vast “Sea of Commodity”.

And what do they find, if they actively seek out a point of brand differentiation that is based only on what they do and how they do it? Often, they don’t find an inch of difference between what they do and what their competitors do. They find themselves speaking the same language as everyone else. They use the same visual language. And realize that they market themselves in a carbon copy fashion.

Start with “Why”

The modern answer to the brand differentiation quandary lies in the question, “Why?”. As Simon Sinek puts it,

“People don’t buy ‘what’ you do, they buy ‘why’ you do it”.

This is increasingly true and with little wonder. Think for a moment how difficult it is from your brand’s perspective. Now, think about how difficult it is from your customer’s perspective.

All of us are inundated with marketing hype and claims. Not only in your category, but in every aspect of our lives. Our natural response is to turn off as much of the noise as we can. We do this by applying filters. Brands work as filters when they help us latch onto something important and meaningful. Once that connection is made, we can then forget about the rest.

But if your widgets are the same as the next guy’s, it’s going to take something truly significant to become the most trusted and respected widget seller.

How do you define your “Why”?

The answer is to explore and define your brand’s “why”. Deep in what you do and how you do it, lies a number of truths about your intentions and outcomes. These positive character attributes can fuel the thinking that will lead your brand toward meaningful (and profitable) differentiation.

By giving your brand a “North Star” to aim for, you elevate the spirit, ambition, and drive of your brand and everyone connected to it. A purposeful brand promise is the best way to forge your brand’s North Star. When well crafted, and built through the principles of empathy, purpose and feelings, a promise allows everyone vital to the brand’s success to see the ideal it sets as their own and enables them to be an active part of it.

When this brand promise is translated into new forms of behavior, both for the brand as an entity, and for the people in the workplace, amazing and differentiated things start to happen. In the effort to fulfill on the brand’s promise, a new mood and spirit drives business relationships, product development, marketing campaigns, customer service, etc.

Senior management makes more aligned and purposeful decisions.
Managers create more productive and gratifying work situations.
Product designers stretch their skills and imagination.
Marketing teams build consistent brand experiences and stronger messaging.
Customer service teams work with greater empathy and compassion.

All these changes push your brand in the direction of its brand promise. As a result, your brand, business, and culture will thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy this post on Storytelling for Demand Generation

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Feel the “Good Burn” of a Strategy that Surprises

Posted on June 13, 2017 by Carol Emert

Get out of Your Comfort Zone

How do you feel about the brand strategies your agency is producing?

Good?

Comfortable?

If that’s the case, those strategies may not be doing as much for you as they can. Staying in your comfort zone strategically is about as impactful as staying in your comfort zone at the gym. If excellence is your aim, you’ll only get there by feeling the burn.

Of course, a bad strategy will make you uncomfortable too. So how do you know when a strategy is pushing your brand uncomfortably toward excellence?

Here Are Three Components of a Feel-The-Burn Strategy:

1. Information that Surprises

Every company has its own well-socialized story about who it is and what it’s about. Your branding agency needs to respect your story, but also needs to look outside — to broader trends in culture, technology and business; to your competitors; to your customers. It may go looking places you never expected.

At Emotive Brand, we recently discovered that a client’s key rival had withdrawn from an important segment of its market – essentially removing the client’s last direct competitor. As a result, we were able to push the bounds of its positioning and define our client as truly unique – something the client had neither known nor expected.

That’s what you call a good burn – and it comes from the agency being in the marketplace, pushing beyond the obvious and digging for the nuggets that truly differentiate.

2. Insights That Uncover New Opportunities

Information is great, but insights can be even more effective at differentiating your brand.

It’s your agency’s job to understand not just your customers’ obvious needs, but also the unmet needs they haven’t yet articulated.

A well-honed insight-finding instinct can both identify emerging opportunities and position you in a unique way to take advantage of them.

Such insights will inevitably be a surprise, and that may send you out of your comfort zone. Emerging opportunities naturally feel riskier than the tried-and-true. But they also provide an opportunity for greater reward. And that makes them a good burn.

3. Storytelling That Propels You Into Orbit

The factual story that your agency unearths is one thing; how it’s told is another chance for you to either push the bounds or settle for the merely comfortable.

Brand storytelling goes beyond the facts. It should convey the very energy and vitality of your organization. You should be able to feel the truth of it in your heart and your gut. It should make everyone around you feel proud and inspired. Your most valued employees should read it and start auto-deleting headhunter In-mails without a second thought.

And, yes, sometimes it’s uncomfortable to feel your feet lift off the ground and move toward a higher plane. A more predictable word choice, a more pedestrian idea might be easier. But just like at the gym, there will be a rich payoff for feeling the good burn of a truly elevating brand story.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.

Why Investing in Brand Enables Growth for Professional Services

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Professional service companies, categorized as mid-market, might be looking towards 2017 with a bit of trepidation. According to the National Center for the Middle Market 3Q 2016 Indicator, business growth has been identified as a top challenge for these firms. And mid-market or not, business growth is a real challenge for every sector of professional services in today’s hyper-competitive economy.

The Role of Brand in Professional Services

Even when personal brands are strong, as they often are for professional services, an overarching brand is necessary. Your brand is your firm’s most valuable asset. It sets the tone for the behavior of your employees and, most importantly, shapes how customers perceive your business. Consequently, your brand has a strong, direct impact on business growth.

And although it may seem obvious to invest in your brand to drive business growth, creating a solid case for doing so can be a real challenge. If the business is doing well, or even just good enough, people may perceive that any change will confuse customers or diminish the equity your business has established. It’s the common “why fix something that’s not broken?” thinking.

However, if a firm fails to continue to evolve its brand, it risks becoming outdated and irrelevant. The speed of change in today’s market is constant. And professional service businesses need a brand that is perceived as current if they want to attract top clients.

The other common misperception about the value of investing in your brand is that branding is a cost center rather than revenue driver. In fact, a 2015 Economist study indicated that 68% of business owners view marketing as a cost center. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Invest in Your Brand for Clear Returns

Here are 5 reasons why investing in your brand will positively impact your bottom line now as well as down the line:

1. Differentiation

With so many businesses offering similar services at comparable price points, firms start to blend together and have a hard time standing out from the crowd. Well-defined brands that tell a unique narrative and look different from competitors are able to draw attention. A tagline and a logo simply isn’t enough, though. In order to truly make an impact, you need to consider every brand experience and touchpoint.

2. Price

A strong brand commands a premium price. It allows you to justify your worth and create demand. Investing in professional services is a risk and, as a result, can be an emotionally charged decision. Customers will be willing to pay more for your service if they believe the risk is low.

3. Business Development

A steady stream of leads is vital to survival for professional services. Expanding the number of prospects improves the chances of conversion. A strong brand creates awareness across channels and keeps customers knocking at your door – helping you close deals and build confidence inside and outside the organization.

4. Alignment

In order to grow, professional service firm need to be aligned around the brand promise and story in order to create brand ambassadors with employees. The people inside your business are your strongest asset.

5. Endurance

Tough times are inevitable. But a brand with an established emotional connection with its customers and prospects is prepared to weather the storm. In the unfortunate event that your business suffers from reputational damage, a strong brand can help carry the business to the other side with its head held high. And as your industry goes through a period of flux, an investment in your brand now will increase the potential to grow today and into the future, leaving your competitors fall behind.

Thriving companies understand the power of their brands both internally and externally. And as pressure mounts on marketers to deliver growth and prove their ROI, investment in your brand is critical to the success of your firm. Invest in your brand to position your firm for growth.

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

The Value of a Sales-Led Brand Strategy For High-Growth Companies

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

A Sales Perspective

Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, shares how her sales background informs her work today, and offers insights on the true value of bringing sales to the strategy table.

Tell us about your sales background.

I have an interesting background that has led me to the agency world, and on to brand strategy. Initially, I got my start in non-profit fundraising and development. A start-up CEO bought an expensive table from me to attend a gala event I was hosting. Throughout the sales process of getting that deal done, he said to me that I was in the wrong job, and thought I should be in sales … at his company. And so I did. And from there, I sold technology for many years—some emerging technologies, other enterprise solutions—in the states and living as an expat overseas.

How does your background shape your approach?

Everyone brings their past experiences and jobs with them. My background happens to be in sales. And I bring that knowledge into our approach at Emotive Brand.

Because I know how to sell and understand what it takes to be successful in sales, I focus a lot of my time there. It helps me back into brand strategy. With a sales mindset, I can reach a full understanding of how to position and sell technology to the enterprise. In fact, I’ve realized I can’t really brand something until I know how to sell it. I need to grasp what’s working and what’s not from the perspective of the sales team.

Since the sales team is closest to customers, they have a strong understanding of what customers need to buy. They are naturally driven to be successful. And they want everything at their disposal to be successful. They are the people I want to spend time with so I can witness first-hand what is going on. Understanding what will help them helps fuel our own team and our work. It is also a good reality check for me to balance what I hear from other parts of the organization directly for myself, and to witness the realities of what it is like for the sales team who is out on the front line.

Other people might come from different angles, but I think that this particular angle is something that is distinct to the way we work at Emotive Brand. I think it differentiates the way we approach strategy.

So sales teams are involved in your brand strategy process?

Yes. I like to involve them in a few, key places in our process. Early on, I like to go on sales calls and listen in whenever possible. It helps me get grounded in what’s going on. I listen to their pitch – how they address objections and how they position the technology. I pay attention to tone of voice. I look for signs that indicate that the customer understands. I want to know the exact point at which a no transforms to a yes, and then pinpoint why.

Later on, I like to involve sales when we begin work on prioritizing target audiences and then again when we are developing the value proposition(s) and messaging. At the end of the day, so many aspects of brand strategy have value by being vetted by sales – positioning, messaging, defining categories, and go-to-market strategies. I gather huge insights from the sales team – insights, I might not be able to get anywhere else. It’s my job to ladder back these findings and connect all the dots, and from there build the most impactful strategy possible.

It is obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. It’s not as obvious to work with the sales organization. But, for us, it works. Bringing sales to the table creates alignment, and breeds a better, stronger, smarter end product.

What kind of clients are your skills in sales of particular value to?

We work with a lot of high-growth startups that are going to market with products and services that are new, and often times inconceivable to most people today. They’ve built and engineered products that are ahead of the marketplace. This requires hard work from the brand in order to cut through the clutter. Our clients need help clearly articulating their true value to customers. Often times the market needs help understanding the brand’s value proposition and our clients need these tools to help their marketing and sales teams execute successfully. They need to quickly penetrate the market and sometimes even create a new market when one doesn’t exist. We have done our very best work for companies who have complex B2B technology, are beginning to sell into the enterprise, and who need to create new value for old thinking.

Where does brand strategy come in to play?

Brand strategy is about solving business problems. It’s as simple as that. All of our clients come to us with a business problem and we create a strategy to solve it. Most often the problems we are solving are about growth, differentiation, and creating a strong value proposition. Our clients almost always have a solid understanding of the features and benefits their product offers, but leading with that is not working. They may not know it at the time, but this is where the brand needs to step in and help them better tell their story.

For us, it always starts with defining why a brand matters at the highest level. We make it easier for a target audience to understand a technology and its role. From there, it’s all about creating the corporate narrative. Nailing the category, the positioning, and creating a strong value proposition and messaging to appeal to your top buying personas.

Brand strategy answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams need to understand the answers to these questions in order to be successful.

Knowing how to sell makes it easier for me to think about the end user buying our clients technology and how to best support a sales team with the tools they need to go to battle and more easily articulate this new way of doing business. We arm them with the tools that more easily helps them do what they do well — close deals.

Are there any challenges involved in bringing sales to the table?

Taking sales people out of the field is hard. So it’s important that we use them strategically and not waste their time. We don’t need everyone in sales involved in the process, but we make sure to include enough people so the strategy can benefit from their front-line experiences. They are very good at helping us gauge reality.

What’s the bottom-line payoff of bringing sales thinking to brand strategy?

There is so much exciting stuff going on in technology right now. For our clients’ customers, it’s hard to keep up to date and understand who’s going to bring the right value to their business. Brand strategy can help position a business to thrive – creating the right tools to go to market, and helping customers more clearly understand why a business matters and how it’s different. Using my sales background is a way for us to get to the heart of why the brand truly matters so we can create the right brand strategy.

This understanding helps create a value framework, situate the brand and its people for success, and ready a business to scale. Our work is about creating a brand that truly connects with people rationally and emotionally. A strategy doesn’t have real value unless it actually helps a brand reach the people who matter most to its business in meaningful ways.Bringing a sales mindset to the strategic table makes for a more impactful strategy. That’s the bottom line.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

Purpose Drives Financial And Competitive Advantages – Deloitte

Posted on July 14, 2016 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.

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