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Tag: Digital

Strengthen Your Health Care Brand During Your Digital Transformation

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Room for Digital Transformation for Health Care Brands

You’ve probably had a friend tell you about her amazing physician. But did you ever hear anyone brag about their health insurer? Unlikely.

Overall, individuals are pretty happy about the quality of care. What they complain about is customer service. According to the Advisory Board, the top patient complaints include: communication (53%), long wait times (35%), medical practice staff (12%), and billing (2%).

Fortunately, powerful organizations—companies who see shortcomings in today’s system—recognize the room for improvement. The triumvirate of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase say they want to disrupt healthcare and we all eagerly await their solution.

Of course, the existing system operates at a disadvantage to the growing cohort of startups. These companies have no legacy technology baggage and are digital-first. Fitbit, Apple, and Omada Health offer individuals new ways to manage their overall fitness and health. Others focus on corporations and companies—the major healthcare payers – that watch the costs of care for their employees rise exponentially. For example, Collective Health helps self-insured companies manage their healthcare investment and support operations. Another, Lyra, helps companies and their employees connect directly to mental health providers.

Don’t Wait Around for Transformation, Start Strengthening Your Brand Now

Not all health care companies have the luxury of starting with an all digital approach. In fact, the biggest, most important players don’t. It’s why traditional healthcare providers, insurance companies, hospitals, and clinics are all in the midst of a digital transformation. This doesn’t mean, though, that they—or you—should wait until after a this transformation is complete before you start making changes to your brand.

Take the opportunity to strengthen your brand so your customers are still there when you make that transformation a reality. Here’s how.

1. Make the Process Feel Good

A great place to start when looking to build a better process is to think about how you want to make people feel. Maybe your customers now feel frustrated? Unconfident? Even anxious? How can you make them feel optimistic? Even calm and confident?

The midst of a transition is the perfect time to start thinking about this. Focus on building a more frictionless process and making quick changes across the board that make for a more positive experience.

Ask questions like: How can we make it easier for customers to access the information they need? How can we better understand how they can prevent illness? Get in touch with a doctor or nurse when they need? Or even pay a bill more quickly and easily? Can we communicate with less complicated, more human language? Can we better train our people to act with empathy and patience?

It’s these small changes that will help build the frictionless experience people now demand from the brands they pledge loyalty to. And making the experience feel good can sustain your brand and ensure you keep your customers while you’re in the midst of a digital transformation. They’ll be committed to you, and delighted when you do transform.

2. Behave Consistently

It’s great when a health care brand says they “care about their patients”. But when a customer calls and has to go through multitudes of layers just to get a terse answer to their question and can’t even understand the coverage they signed up for months before, the brand loses credibility.

So while you’re in this transition, ask yourself what promises you make your customers. Are you living up to those? How can you better behave at every touchpoint? How can you really act like you care?

People don’t want the health care brands they buy into to be unpredictable. And businesses in the middle of change tend to let all rules go to the wayside. Just because you’re in the middle of digital disruption, doesn’t mean you don’t need guidelines for the present. Behave in line with your core values and make sure your behavior at every touchpoint lives up to what you promise the people you want by your side when you do transform.

3. Employees – Activate Small Wins

As your company invests in cutting-edge technology, dedicates time and resources to innovation, and prepares itself for a digital transformation, it’s integral that employees know and understand what’s important right now.

Leaving employees behind for a future state that is yet to come is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. When you are clear and transparent with employees about what they should be focusing in on and why, they can activate small wins.

It’s easy to think that change comes in one fell swoop. But small, incremental changes can make worlds of difference—especially in struggling industries with low trust, low convenience, and low brand loyalty. Employees are the people who are going to build that trust, leverage that convenience, and help build loyalty. Look to them and communicate with them about what matters.

There’s Always Need for Improvement

Health care is ripe for disruption because people want something more. Whether it’s a frictionless experience, a more empathetic brand, or a clearer and easier way forward, you can start delivering people what they want while you’re in the midst of a digital transformation. Ask yourself what should happen while you wait. What can you do to make improvements today?

Consider how you can better behave, better connect, and better build meaning with the people most important to your business. And dedicate time, energy, and resources to making those changes. Small changes can bring big rewards. By focusing on what you can change now, you’ll be more ready for digital disruption later—with a better process, a better way of communication, a better strategy, and better people behind you.

If you need help creating and implementing strategic change, please reach out.

Other posts you may enjoy on the subject are Digital Health: A Future With Millennials, and Why Digital Health Brands Need a B2B2C Strategy

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.

***

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.

Negotiating the Competitive Social Media Landscape of 2017

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

A Changing Social Media Landscape

In November of 2007, brands and businesses were given the opportunity to have an official Facebook presence. The same day, Pages for companies launched and 100,000 companies joined the social conversation. Established brand names, new businesses, local companies – they all felt ready and fired-up about social media and the magical aura that surrounded its impact for businesses at the time.

As we enter 2017, social media – for many – feels like it has lost a bit of its magic. What were once feelings of excitement that surrounded the influx of platforms, mediums, businesses, brands, and users has now transformed to feelings of frustration and disillusion.

Why So Frustrated?

It’s no doubt that an overcrowded landscape is making it harder and harder for brands and businesses desperately trying to reach, connect, and engage with the right people at the right times – and in meaningful, memorable, and relevant ways.

2016 was called “The Reachpocalypse” for a reason. Before 2012, 16% of Page followers were set up to see a brand’s update. Now, Facebook has cut the reach of organic posts to about 2%. Instagram’s introduction of ads in 2015 (three years after Facebook’s purchase), also made it easy for organic posts to drop to the bottom of users’ feeds.

For users, it’s easy to feel lost in the multiple feeds of information – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, SnapChat, Medium… Skepticism has risen about privacy issues online, and many people have expressed annoyance about targeted ads, never ending emails, messages, and reminders that seem to pop up on every platform until you hit that buy button. 2016 has also raised some important concerns about the role social media plays in the political spheres, heightening the expectations people have of some of the top tech and media companies of today to assume a more aware role.

Social Media in 2017

In short, it’s been a rough year for social media. And on the surface, it might seem like the impact of social has become insignificant. However, quite the opposite. Interestingly, as companies’ ability to reach audiences organically has plunged, the power of social media in swaying purchase decisions has surged. A recent McKinsey study found that about a quarter of purchase decisions are influenced by a primary social recommendation – not insignificant by any account.

And although navigating the social media landscape has become more and more of a challenge, businesses and brands that want to survive in the competitive landscape today need to be social.

1. Pay to Play

For 80% of companies in 2017, paid advertising has become a basis of their social strategy. And although paying might be a sure way to reach more people, it’s not a sure-fire solution. First off, money doesn’t grow on trees. And although brands can pay as little as $5 for a Facebook ad, actually sustaining that ad throughout the year is a large and often unrealistic investment for many businesses today.

And a paid ad that isn’t targeted in the right way to the right people isn’t going to get the job done. Being smart and strategic and working in line with a strong brand is key here as much as anywhere. Using paid and organic advertising and finding the right balance takes planning, research, and some experimentation. It’s about figuring out specifically who you are trying to reach, the best way to reach that audience, and in what ways.

What many brands and businesses aren’t taking advantage of is the data behind social. Running a low-budget ad may not help you reach a large audience, but it can reveal a lot about who that audience is. Who’s clicking? Who’s engaging? In what ways? Not only posting, but looking at how that post fares and is important to thriving within shifting times.

And luckily, because a balance of organic and paid ads isn’t going to break the bank – there’s room to experiment, test, and research within it. For instance, social might be a great way to try out two new taglines and judge responses, or see what kind of pictures your audiences best engage with. Being able to absorb the kind of engagements that are happening digitally and adapt accordingly is the only way you can position your brand to play in a competitive, and often deathly landscape.

2. Leveraging Employee Loyalty

What the reachpocalypse of 2016 has taught us, if anything, is the real impact of employee engagement. As business Pages might have a harder and harder time reaching the people that they want to reach, employees that engage socially become more and more valuable to a brand. Employee advocacy holds a lot of weight. And when information is shared from an employee, many brands find it is more engaged with, more seen, more shared, and often times, more trusted.

Employees have an easier time coming across as human, personal, and honest. And authentically sharing employees reflects well on a brand. So in order to get employees on board, make sharing simple. Giving people the tools they need and letting them personalize posts to their liking can help. So can appointing a point person to help when people need it.

However, at the end of the day, employees’ social engagement hinges on strong employee loyalty. You can make things simple and easy, but what matters most is that employees feel excited and proud of the brand they work for, and want to share it. When this is true, positive feelings surrounding the brand come to life across social platforms.

3. Greater Challenge Demands Greater Innovation

Just because social media may be more of a challenge today than it was five years ago, doesn’t mean businesses should go running for the hills. We’ve talked before about how brands need to be digital brands today in order to survive. And social is a large part of the digital landscape today.

That means brands and businesses have to be strategic. The challenge social media presents to marketers today demands even greater innovation and creativity. It requires teamwork and strong collaboration. Brands and businesses have to think outside the box and utilize their resources, and their people in new and unique ways. Rely on your brand to help guide strategic decisions on social platforms – remembering how you want to make people feel, who you want to reach, and why you matter to those audiences.

New platforms can enter any moment. And the best ways of using already established platforms is always changing. For instance, when Instagram introduced stories, the whole game changed. Being flexible, adaptable, and able to move fast is also key. Staying ahead of the curve, being willing to experiment, and always striving to create new innovative solutions is the only way to tackle the challenge the social landscape presents today.

Stay social and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more insights, thoughts, and advice.

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

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’s lot 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.