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Tag: Digital

The New Web: How Development Tools and Collaboration Enable New Design

Posted on by Jonathan Haggard

From 2007 until very recently, the web was infiltrated by the same design patterns. Everyone is familiar with this: a generic headline with a call to action, three icons below describing features, and a few full-width, black-tinted images with text on top.

When Sketch burst onto the scene in 2010, the web design discipline sped up, but the developer hand-off process was still tedious. Dimensions were specified using redlines, and the web was built with block and inline elements. Flash was dying, and there were no tools for designers to easily bring their more expressive designs to life. Mobile browsers were, for the first time, making a huge dent in the web’s traffic and the current desktop designs were failing.

Between 2007 and 2010, dominant patterns emerged and were swiftly distributed across the web, otherwise known as Web 2.0. Sites were designed as “mobile-first,” and the same design needed to grow to desktop. The result? A simplification of UI, a flattening of design expression, and designs that were nearly indistinguishable from each other.

Web Two Dot Oh No

In the same way that designers weren’t yet educated in development practices, developers were often blind to design decisions. Due to the time spent learning Web 2.0 development practices, developers would take redlines and build them to spec with little improvement on the design. In the early 2010s when web design patterns were so new, designers weren’t comfortable pushing the boundaries. It was impossible to find rules to break while still creating a successful design on multiple platforms.

Developers started building tools to educate designers on how they could use their new playground. Prototyping and animation toolsets started appearing, like Principle, Framer, and Invision, which gave designers tools to bring their work to life through animation and interaction. On the dev side, new technologies like flexbox, CSS transitions, Lottie, and most recently canvas libraries like three.js and p5.js gave developers tools to seamlessly bring those animated designs to fruition—instead of hacking designs together with jQuery. Additionally, tools like Zeplin sped up the transition between design and development, allowing both departments more time for creative expression.

As the crossover between design and development increased, the line between the two disciplines blurred and a design resurgence occurred. A new generation of designers emerged that were comfortable designing for the web with these new tools from day one. Graphic design became a key component to what was previously specified as interaction design, as designers could be more experimental with elements like layout, typography, and color. Web tutorials and resources like codepen.io, CSS-tricks, and DevTips let designers in on the new tech that was being developed for the web and how they could employ it in their designs.

Welcome to the New Web

This merging of graphic design, interaction design, and new development practices has created a New Web. This New Web is rooted in the principles of design and comes to life through the collaboration of contemporary development practices. In fact, a savvy designer can create a New Website using a tool like Webflow which incorporates design and development into one seamless tool.

The key to creating a New Website is to get developers in on the conversation as early as possible. Showing them the thinking behind a design, and being open to modifying as needed can be the difference between a static site or a great brand expression. The more frequent these conversations happen, the more opportunities there are for collaboration. On the other side of the coin, developers who are open to non-traditional designs and to learning new technologies can be the turning point in making a great site.

New Web can be as avante-garde as you can imagine. No forms are off-limits, as long as you spend the time designing a mobile experience that achieves the same goal as your desktop design. This allows for more specific and greater brand expression. A New Website creates a custom experience for a brand that stands out from the pack as memorable and clever. This also allows for cohesion between web, print, event, and motion in a brand system.


There is no excuse for an average-looking site today. For many companies, your website is your lifeblood. It’s the first point of contact, a funnel for sales, a magnet for attracting top talent, and a vehicle for radical creative expression. There have never been better resources for building than right now—and that’s because the people who spend their days making websites are the ones actually making the tools. Both designers and developers must continue pushing the boundaries to take the New Web into uncharted territories.

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

Customer Obsession: How to Put Them Center Stage

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

B2B Marketers, Want to Drive Higher Revenue Growth? Start Obsessing Over Customers Now.

By now, B2B marketers understand first-hand that better customer experience correlates to higher revenue growth. Forrester and others have reports and studies to prove it.  Leaders see it happening in real-time. Sure, the competition still matters. But businesses who are focused, and yes, obsessed, with their customers are finding more meaningful ways to differentiate, drive ROI, fuel digital innovation, and rethink how their business should really be doing business in the customer-led world of today.

But Customer Obsession Is Hard Work

Making the shift from being customer-aware to customer-led isn’t an easy one. Yes, businesses who are doing customer obsession right are agile, connected, and insights-driven. They value creativity and digital innovation – but there’s more to it than that.

Before you start obsessing, take a moment to consider these common customer obsession mistakes and how you might approach things differently.  

1. Reactive vs. Proactive

Many businesses equate customer obsession with reactivity – thinking that in order to meet shifting customer needs, the brand has to react to every customer move. But like trend-jumping, this barely ever works, and it’s always entirely exhausting. Chasing customers down every path is a lost cause without a clear understanding of where they are generally headed and why.

In Forrestor’s report, “The Operating Model for Customer Obsession,” over 50% of the companies Forrester surveyed lacked a customer experience program with a clear vision that was embedded into the entire organization. This is a problem.

To not only meet customer expectations, but anticipate customer moves and build more meaningful customer journeys (requirements of successful business today), businesses need a clear picture and vision of what they want their customer experience to look and feel like, as well as a strategic and organizational plan of how to make that a reality.

2. Digital vs. Digitally Strategic

Yes, customer obsession demands a smart and agile digital strategy. But simply being “digital” isn’t always the easy-fix it seems. Your customers want more digital? Add an app for that? There are over 1.5 million apps available on an Apple iPhone. People use the majority of their time on just about five of those. See how difficult it is to be the most meaningful and top of mind? Customers have to really care about the digital experiences you are offering and how they add value and meaning to their everyday.

At Emotive Brand, we call this your brand’s Emotional Impact – how you want to make your customers feel. And once your emotional impact is clear, you can start to build more meaningful and resonant digital experiences in line with your greater vision.

3. Resistant vs. Open

It’s easy to say you’re obsessed with your customers, but is your business actually prepared to change, shift, and flex with your customer needs? Customer obsession requires a leadership team that is open to change, not resistant to it.

And this doesn’t mean just one leader is on board – everyone has to be open to change. In fact, when some people are more resistant than others, we see silos deepen and frustrations peak. Putting customers first means everyone has to be willing to hit reset, let go of old ways, embrace creativity and innovation, and try new ways of approaching the customer experience together. So before you obsess, take the steps you need to make sure your entire leadership team is open and aligned. 

4. Siloed vs. Collaborative

Openness brings up the idea of collaboration. What many businesses we work with are seeing is that they aren’t properly organized to keep up with the customer journey today. Customers aren’t separating experiences like departments are. In fact, many businesses are so organizationally separated that no one is actually talking to each other.

Being customer-obsessed requires bringing everyone – marketing, sales, HR, the c-suite, design, product, etc. – to work together on shaping a better overall customer experience. The question “how can I be customer obsessed?” is not nearly as valuable as “how can we become customer obsessed together?” Brands asking the latter and embracing an ecosystem approach are the ones reaping the benefits.

Brand – The Heart of It All

At the heart of customer obsession lies your brand. Obsessing over your customers means obsessing over a brand that can exceed your customers’ every need. So what does your brand promise people? How do you deliver on that? And why should this matter to the people and businesses you want to do business with? Those are the questions we help you strategically answer. Reach out if you want to learn more about customer journey mapping or how to position your brand to better nail customer obsession today.

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

What Brands Need to Do Right to Nail Their Digital Strategy

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Experts #5: Michael Beavers

Continuing our Emotive Brand Experts series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

Michael Beavers is a Silicon Valley-based digital strategist who works with leading technology enterprises, consumer brands, and startups. A veteran from both sides of the client and agency relationship, he’s worked with Google, Yahoo!, Intel, and many others.

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How do you define digital strategy?

Digital strategy describes the intersection of business strategy, insights about the human beings who interact with your company, and the systems through which they do so – then translating those insights into design and engineering implications. Your brand is represented online through a wide variety of channels. But there’s a big difference between delivering a brand message and thoughtfully delivering services and information that make the claims of a brand true. The services you create through every interaction with your customer are how your brand is perceived against the claims or characteristics of your brand.

Where do you begin as a digital strategist?

Regardless of the size of a project, I begin with inquiries about everything I can about a company. What do they do? For whom? Why?

I like to sit down with various stakeholders and examine what they do, why they do it, what digital things they depend on: websites, digital campaigns, ads, enterprise software, emails, everything. I also try to understand the company’s mix of enterprise software and IT environments that enable all of these tactics.

Often the digital goals expressed by my client need to be shaped further or altered beyond their original form. Then I shape both into something everyone can agree to before we put our goals and assumptions to the real test with customers.

How have you seen digital strategy change over time?

Gosh, what hasn’t changed? Devices are constantly changing, and not just the way we code for them. Technology is a scaffold for human behavior. What’s interesting is that human behavior changes that scaffolding, but the opposite is also true. Companies have a responsibility to make claims about their brands, back them up with great human and technology-enabled interactions that should never manipulate customers, but respect and shape how they behave with your company.

The early days of the commercial Internet were about experimentation and the organizational stuff companies have to offer. There was a middle phase where a lot of companies take a more manipulative view of consumers, which everyone sees through. I’m encouraged, however, as I see more companies view themselves as complimenting who they are and what’s great about themselves through software and services delivered through UIs across all devices. Everyone is now a software company, and some are acting like it.

What are some common missteps you see in the field?

Most of the time when a company is funding a web project with a marketing team, they think too narrowly about the user experience and what web teams rely on to inform that experience. Take any website from any global brand. Is it enough to organize the company’s information logically and push a beautiful design to production as quickly as possible? Maybe…but probably not.

What’s logical to internal stakeholders is the result of years of living inside of a company’s culture, its operations, and its organization. If that’s the basis of your user experience, you may simply be exposing your org chart and dysfunction. That’s not good enough.

A great strategy reflects the company’s goals and challenges but leans heavily on insights about customers and their worlds and contexts under which they experience your company. From a digital perspective, that’s what “brand” is.

The best way to inform your brand is through studying customers and users with minimized bias. When web teams at companies understand the value of research, the differences in customer satisfaction and brand perception is significant.

My very favorite question during strategy formation is, “How do we know?”

How do you discover that? Through personas?

Oftentimes, yes. Personas can be very helpful, but there are bad anti-personas out there, chiefly from marketers understanding personas to be assumptive bio-sketches of who they imagine their customers to be.

Personas were originally an advent for software design. But they’re useful for marketing and messaging, so it is common to place a “target segmentation” lens on personas for messaging. This has deleterious effects on how qualitative research is funded and how protocols get designed. Those outputs are rarely suitable for designing great digital experiences.

When informed with real observed data, personas are powerful informers of a digital experience. You can convey messaging in any number of ways, but above everything, you must give people something to do that is in line with their tasks and contexts.

This is the difference between marketing with digital “stuff” and marketing software or UI-led service delivery, which make brand claims real.

It is important for brands to update the axiom of customers always being right: the customer is always right to do what they do, so we should understand what it is that would help them believe in us as a company.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years?

I think the biggest change is unfolding before our eyes today in our national politics; specifically, the interdependencies of social media, ad networks, monetizing news content, and foreign operatives exploiting things that we all depend on to stay informed and go through our days.

The distribution of content and opinion through news and personal social channels has never been this intertwined. Because makers of the commercial could not foresee foreign interference, the Gutenberg press of our age has gone awry.

It breaks my heart to see but I’m also encouraged by what I see in the design and engineering community. Discussions about signaling meaning and trust, design and engineering ethics, and consumer awareness of security have never been greater. So that’s the new current situation and context for all digital strategy.

A company trying to sell more stuff to the right people has to understand how to be authentic. It must align its values to those of its customers, and make it real through trustworthy commercial interface products.

Brands must also now deal with the proliferation of the marketing technology stack. It encompasses everything: hosting, content automation, marketing automation, CRM suites, analytics, social media, and case management.

The implication is that marketers have a lot more to manage now. The complexity and scale of marketing has increased exponentially, and customers interacting with your digital experiences bring heightened skepticism and service expectation. Staying on top of those skills is really challenging. That’s why it’s often helpful to have expert outsiders, people willing to gently bust the silos and mixed contexts that hinder great customer experience.

What advice would you give to fellow digital strategists?

The best advice I can give is to stay curious and have fun with this stuff. Try to dig into as many tactics for understanding as you can but don’t over-index on any one skill. It will be different tomorrow anyway. Be at least categorically familiar with various web technologies, marketing automation, analytics, and how to read and interpret how they report insights you can use to form your strategy.

Know yourself. Are you a T-shaped professional and embrace your natural curiosities? Are you comfortable exposing your areas of ignorance to understand them better?

Do you think in both short and long-term frames? You may already be a great digital strategist, even if you don’t have an engineering or design background.

Spend time figuring out those worlds. Designers and engineers are ultimately the people who you serve through your strategy. Your communication should be an organized vessel of clear insights and objectives. Their work is what makes the brand real for customers. They need your help.

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

Co-Founders On Brand Strategy Today

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Co-founders, Bella Banbury and Tracy Lloyd, weigh in on what matters in brand strategy today.

It’s important to remember that, in the end, the age-old question is always the same. Client needs all come down to “How do we differentiate our brand?” It’s just the way people ask the question and the way we answer the question that evolves. Here’s what we’ve been seeing more specifically in the market:

1.Heightened attention around data security:

Since 2016 was all about using data, now it’s all about safely storing and accessing that data. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 50% of business ethics violations will be related to data. There are lots of questions and doubts about how brands are collecting information and keeping it safe. People are distrustful and worried about privacy issues. Smart brands are focused on security and smart storage. And those brands that can keep data safe, and their users even safer, are winning.

2. Even greater demand for trust:

Companies with a culture of trust have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of three, and high-trust companies are more than 2½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations than lower-trust companies. Nothing is as important as trust for any brand looking to make an impact moving forward. In 2016, we saw a lot of brands lose people’s trust, both internally and externally, in banking, in technology, in the automobile industry, and in the food industry. So this year a lot of brands are working on building and keeping trust this coming year. And this effort always comes back to brand strategy – helping brands make promises that they can keep to both build and keep the trust earned. That’s what we do.

3. Purpose divides:

The conversation around purpose-led business continues. There is more and better research coming out that supports the ideas of purpose-led business and the research supports our belief. When companies articulate and embrace a meaningful purpose or vision, their people naturally pay more attention to all the elements that drive sustainable growth. Brands that want genuine purpose to fuel innovation, culture, and business need to make sure they live authentically by it and communicate it clearly.

4. It’s all about disruption:

It’s clear that people are drawn to brands that are challenging the status quo, saying something new, and making a splash today. Whatever is it –disrupting a category, challenging the way we pay for things, changing the way we get healthcare, the retail experience – it’s all about disruption. Industries we’ve been most excited about are insurance, healthcare, wellness, and education because of this same reason. Brands that reimagine what is possible and deliver new ways of behaving will gain momentum over their competitors who remain stuck in the same thinking.

5. Digital health, on the rise:

There are many changes afoot in wellness and digital health. Last year, we saw more investing in this space and we imagine brands will need to start working harder to differentiate themselves in the next year. Right now, the future seems exciting and yet somewhat vague. This space will require digital health brands to clarify, differentiate, categorize, and tackle shifts head on. The digital health market is huge, and those brands that can figure out how clearly articulate why they matter and deliver on that promise could very well become Wall Street darlings.

6. Role of the CMO changed for good:

The role of the CMO is almost unrecognizable to five years ago. CMOs are now expected to deliver against P&L metrics, grow the top line, and drive the brand forward. Steering the brand in the driver’s seat means delivering on the brand promise. It also means ensuring all customer experiences are aligned to the brand purpose. It’s about understanding the customer journey and embracing customer experiences across all channels. So in order to compete, the CMOs of 2017 need to be brand focused, technically savvy, and data driven. They need to deliver better customer experiences and use insights to strategically deliver business growth.

7. All about brand experience:

Because expectations of brands are continually rising, smart brands are uber-focused on creating meaningful experiences. The real challenge is creating cohesive, connected experiences that resonate across platforms and at every touchpoint. These experiences drive engagement, build loyalty, and drive ROI. And brands need a clear strategy for succeeding in creating the right kind of experiences for the people they are trying to reach. Developing strategies to outline brand behavior has become more relevant for brands looking to deliver something people can count on – whether it’s B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.

As a San Francisco branding agency, we are excited to continue to help our clients develop the right brand strategies to transform brands in order to transform business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.