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Tag: Disruptive Technology

How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

Posted on by Joanna Schull

There’s a well-worn saying in business that the only certainty is change, and these past few years have proven that to be true by exponential levels. Entire industries have found themselves faced with the need to plan and transform their businesses in the face of tremendous unknowns including COVID-19, rising inflation, and a troubled economy. Now, as we enter September of 2022, with the world still in flux, what does it mean to look ahead, and begin planning for the future?

Business transformation matters now more than ever and agility and forward-thinking scenario planning have never been more important.

Building a Roadmap for the Future in Times of Uncertainty

Taking steps to significantly shift—or transform—a company’s business can be either proactive or reactive. Ideally, it’s the former, but external events, whether created by competitors, shifts in customer needs, governmental regulations, or global events can cause the latter to be true. At a high level, the process for either is the same. Here’s the overview:

  • Begin with fact-based strategic planning, competitive research, and situational analysis to create the essential foundation of data about the status quo.
  • Next, based on this foundation of data, leaders need to identify and analyze potential future states for the business.
  • Based on this analysis, leadership aligns with the agreed future state and begins the work of determining the specific changes and sequencing that will be required.
  • Evaluate the brand and business—are they aligned with each other, or do they need to be recalibrated to make sure that the brand is supporting the new business direction?
  • Finally, it’s essential to keep employees informed as the process unfolds, not only so they are kept in the loop, but also as a source of feedback and information.

Let’s go into more detail on each step:

Set the Foundation

Successful transformations—or sometimes, evolutions—need to start with a clear-eyed understanding of both the current state of the business, as well as upcoming external forces that will have an impact. It’s good to approach this phase of the process with a structured set of internal and external research aimed at uncovering the business’s strengths and weaknesses, competitive threats, and unmet customer needs. In addition, it’s important to have a good understanding of known external impacts that can be anticipated—things such as regulatory changes and general business trends and market predictions.

Identify Your North Star

Armed with this foundational set of information, it’s now time for a business’s leadership team to identify potential paths forward. Oftentimes, these will exist along a continuum, starting with slight shifts to the existing business, then growing in ambition to encompass more ambitious pivots and expansions. Each potential direction is then analyzed to understand its implications: How will it impact revenue? Do we have the right talent to execute the direction? How will it change our customer base and competitive set? How does it impact our product roadmap? How will analysts and investors react? After assessing the options, the leadership team needs to discuss, align, and set a direction.

Create An Execution Plan

The next step is the planning phase: What changes need to be made in order to begin making the desired shifts? In what sequence do they need to occur? What are the potential ripple effects of those changes? It’s important to do this work in a cross-functional manner, giving all parts of the organization insights into the changes occurring. This helps to eliminate overlapping efforts and activities that could compete with or contradict each other, in addition to providing an integrated roadmap that ensures everyone knows how the change efforts fit together and combine to achieve the end result.

Align Your Brand

When making a shift, it’s essential to make sure that your brand is supporting and reinforcing your new business strategy. This starts with making sure that your brand positioning supports your chosen direction followed by your messaging and external expression of your brand: digital touchpoints (web, social, etc.), sales support materials, PR, AR, IR, and all external-facing communications. Don’t neglect the visual expression of your brand. Many companies, especially former startups entering their next phase of maturity, find that they have outgrown their previous look and feel and need to evolve into a more ‘mature’ level of design sensibility.

Bring People Along on the Journey

The most successful transformations are inclusive, and while it is important that leaders lead the process, it is equally important to involve perspectives and participation from across the organization. This includes involving different divisions, geographies, functions, and levels within the company as part of the planning process in order to get their input as plans are developed. This not only ensures that critical details aren’t overlooked but also builds engagement and buy-in to the process.

A Shared Understanding Speeds Execution

Ultimately, change is about disciplined execution and dedication to doing the work required to make change stick across multiple parts of the organization and ensuring that the people of the organization understand what the change is, how the business is going to adapt, and why it matters because organizations with a shared understanding about the reasons behind change are more likely to move forward with certainty, even in uncertain times.

Take a deep dive into our most recent B2B transformations: Coast, Snow Software, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies

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

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive and Transformational Technologies

Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, iOT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams?

As an agency, we work with many tech clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition.  And while many have worked tirelessly to build the best technology in their realm, they struggle with how to position and message their product or solution to their target audiences.

Messaging for Disruptive and Transformational Technology is Hard

Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. Discussing features and benefits isn’t enough. In order to be truly disruptive, these companies need to change the perception of what is possible. Their messaging needs to articulate why potential customers should believe in their solution and how the technology will enable a different future. As such, B2B messaging needs to:

  • Articulate that there is a problem with the status quo of today
  • Ignite a shift in perception around about why customers should believe in a transformational way of thinking
  • Position the product or solution in a way that both rationally and emotionally articulates the value proposition directly to key target audiences
  • Clearly show audiences how your offering can transform their way of doing business

These are challenges we often see our clients having a hard time knowing how to integrate brand-level messages that center on the “why” piece of messaging the story. Instead, they lead with the “what” and “how.” When things are so complicated and are so transformational in nature, the messaging needs to be holistic in nature and incorporate the entire story – a story centered around the customer, not the technology itself. This departure from product takes courage.

Our role involves helping our clients make the complex simple. We find a way to unpack the technology and what it enables customers to do, and put it in more human terms. We make it easy for people to understand how the technology will help their business be more successful. Even the most innovative technology in the world will never see the light of day if people don’t understand know how or why to buy it.

The Role of B2B Messaging

To be successful today, tech companies have a lot to achieve. Selling product, influencing prospects, inspiring investors, building categories, building market share, and driving revenue. Marketing teams are on the hook to deliver meaningful and differentiated messaging platforms to help support sales and ensure the brand presents a unique offering. This means B2B brands need a strong narrative and compelling messaging in place to cut through the noise.

In our work with high-growth tech companies, we’ve seen first-hand how the role of messaging can drive change. Because of this experience, it has become more important than ever to get it right. There is a growing need to differentiate complicated technology products into easy to see “value” in the form of solutions that meet target audience needs.

Seems easy? Not so much. Much of our work is alongside CEOs who come from strong engineering backgrounds. They feel immense pride in the products they have worked so hard to engineer and develop. And naturally, they want messaging to lead with product. They see features and benefits as the only way forward.

However, we know this isn’t the only way. My background is in selling technology. I know first-hand what sales teams need to be successful, and I see the role of messaging as critical to the sales organization’s success. I have sold technology on three continents and bring this sales-led approach to every client engagement by adding a unique of understanding technology, how to position it, and how to create a brand narrative and messaging – messaging that addresses the big idea of why the technology matters while demonstrating how it solves a customer’s business problems.

That’s why, at Emotive Brand, we believe strong B2B messaging is about hitting the sweet spot between brand, sales, and marketing in a way that excites, resonates, and activates buyers.

Getting it Right

Getting messaging right is a real challenge. Most often, messaging is an output of a larger brand strategy. As such, it has to crystalize what you do, why you’re better, and what you can do that no one else can. It’s not easy to articulate these values to your target audiences in both rational and emotional ways that activate them to do something.

It’s old news that a lot of B2B messaging – especially within the tech world – sounds the same. But there is a larger problem at hand – a problem we’ve seen happening for a while now. A lot of messaging used by B2B companies isn’t aligned with what the customers or the businesses they are trying to reach really value. What companies are missing is the articulation of something more than features and benefits: true opportunity, values, and meaning.

Supporting Marketing and Sales

We’ve talked again and again about the role brand strategy plays in supporting and driving business strategy. So when the time comes in the brand strategy process to develop messaging, it needs to align and support two major functions within a company: Marketing and Sales.

It’s about driving two workflows within a company. Marketing needs B2B messaging to build out a go-to-market strategy and create sales enablement programs. Sales needs messaging to know how to talk to customers, position the product or solution, and close deals. If the messaging isn’t strong enough, marketing teams struggle to fill the funnel and convert leads. Sales has a hard time responding to RFPs and closing deals. In short, it’s detrimental to both teams’ success.

Smart B2B messaging can drive marketing and sales forward, positioning you to better reach and connect with the businesses who matter to your success. To do so, make it:

1. Customer-centric

A shift needs to happen from product-centric to customer-centric. This means increased focus on articulating the valuable, unique opportunities you can offer your target audiences. In the B2C world, it’s easy to focus on consumers.

The mistake a lot of B2B companies are making today is thinking that the businesses they are trying to reach are only making rational business decisions. And while B2B does require a high level of rationale, it’s important to remember that there’s also a lot of emotions at stake for B2B buyers. Many businesses today feel that they have an important to role to play. They are mindful of cost, aware of how things are going to play together, and passionate about finding the right solutions fit to their business.

2. Research-led

In our client work, the tightest and most meaningful messaging we’ve developed for clients has involved some level of research – both quantitative and qualitative.

There’s a lot of value in talking to people one-on-one. It gives our team the ability, as a third party, to gain direct access to customers, prospects, and even lost deals to understand the audience’s needs first-hand. This level of empathy enables B2B messaging that can truly connect with people – with their rational needs on the right emotional dimensions. That’s why getting to the heart of their motivations, pain points, and needs is critical and can be the difference between thriving and failing.

3. Top-down

Like many strategic elements, messaging has to start at the top. This means the leadership teams must be involved. Moving messaging beyond features and benefits is a process, and key leaders have to buy into a more customer-centric approach or it will never be fully embraced. 

Once top execs are on board, they can work to align the sales and marketing teams at the highest level. This reinforces the messaging systems you’ve built by ensuring that people are talking about your business in ways that align with it across people and platforms.

The sales force is then equipped to utilize the B2B messaging in powerful, dynamic ways. They become more willing to provide feedback to marketing about what is and isn’t working. The collaboration between these two groups makes both the messaging stronger and the impact of the brand stronger. Driving ROI and sales.

B2B Messaging as a Driver of Business

Messaging can drive brand awareness, equity, and buying decisions by bringing your value proposition to life for your key audiences. With strong B2B messaging in place, your business can then develop a powerful corporate narrative that brings all aspects of the business, brand, and vision together.

In B2B, messaging can be a vital solution in humanizing your brand and business. It can make it easier for your sales and marketing team to connect with your future clients in important ways that will fuel your business forward. The transition from solely rational to a blend of both emotional and rational can be a challenge. When you take the lead and embrace the process of identifying what really matters to your audiences beyond just the functional elements of your product, sales will take off, marketing will start to pay-off, and your business will be positioned to stand out and thrive.

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

Disruptive Technology: Paving Cow Paths or Breaking New Ground?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

What is disruptive? Is it the company that reinvents a category, or the one that creates an entirely new category? In the case of cities, London’s road system was based on paving ancient pathways, while Washington D.C.’s grid was laid out in advance of breaking ground. Both are great cities today, but their structures came from entirely different ways of thinking.

The same is true of companies and brands.

Innovation is swirling around the financial sector today with companies reinventing ways to buy, sell, get paid, lend or borrow money, and finance companies. But for the most part, they are bringing their new thinking and technology to incrementally improve existing mechanisms. Even virtual currency is a new take on an old idea.

The practice of medicine is as old as civilization, but ongoing innovations in pharmaceuticals, medical technology, and data mining are enabling new predictive insights and treatment options that did not exist before.

Cloud services that leverage the connective tissue of the Internet are replacing old-school paper and obsolete digital records in every industry, speeding the availability and quality of information. Is this disruptive enough to stand out?

How can you stand out?

Of the roughly 6.3 million patents filed in the U.S. between 1999 and 2013 (2,481,795 granted), 53% were in computer technology, digital communication, telecommunications, semiconductors, electrical machinery, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, biotechnology, and measurement sectors.

But 47% were in a category called “other.” So innovation is everywhere.

With that many innovations pouring out each year, how can a company differentiate its technology enough to stand out? Brand strategy can help.

Brand strategy and branding can help

Brand strategy is a process that helps business people identify what’s important about a new technology, product, or service. Why it matters, who stands to benefit from it, and who might stand in its way.

Brand strategy, especially emotive branding techniques, also defines how to communicate the most important facts about a new concept to people in a way that connects on a deeper, more emotionally meaningful level. It helps companies scale and grow product lines, penetrate new markets, and spread globally.

No matter what you’re inventing or reinventing, brand strategy can put it into a meaningful context that people can understand and identify with. It works for incremental advances in existing categories – paving the cow paths – and for brand new ideas that don’t fit into a conventional category.

See how we’ve helped many disruptive technologies launch, grow, and thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

 

Why the Best Brands Act Like Tech Companies

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Everyone’s in Tech

Today, it’s not a question of tech vs. non-tech. At the end of the day, every company is a technology company.  This means it’s time to throw away preconceived notions about what tech companies are, what they do, or where they do it. Technology companies don’t only thrive in Silicon Valley. Technology companies aren’t all as big as Google. In fact, you don’t even need to sell technology to be a technology company.

It’s not always about the product. It’s about how you do business, how you compete, and how you offer the most meaningful value to customers. It’s about embracing opportunity and fueling business with disruptive innovation.  And today, this all comes down to tech.

There’s a reason why innovation is at an all-time high, disruptive technologies are more disruptive than ever, and new competitors constantly emerge, enter, and shift the ever-expanding landscape of technology. And companies that don’t act like technology companies are lagging behind. And at the end of the day, in today’s increasingly digitized and hybridized world, everyone needs to act like a tech company in order to compete.

Embracing The Best Qualities of Tech Companies

Ignoring what’s happening at the top tech companies of today is only going to hurt your business. Across the board, all businesses have to work to stand out, gain and keep competitive edge, offer new value to competitors, and agilely compete in and against shifting markets. There’s a lot to learn from the way successful tech companies are approaching their business and their brand. So let’s take some plays from their rulebooks.

Following Suit

Brands that follow the rules of the best tech companies are finding success. So embrace it and own it. Here’s how:

1. Constantly test, learn, and adapt:

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways to understand, reach, and connect with the people important to their success. For many top tech companies this means constant research and testing. But it never stops there. Integrating these findings and insights, learning from them, and tailoring the business and brand towards successful solutions is a constant task. Because customer expectations are evolving at rapid pace, being able to keep up with current needs and adapt accordingly is key to staying competitive in any market today.

2. Be agile and flexible:

Many brands need a new, more agile approach to address the changing dynamics of market and businesses and stay ahead of the competitive curve. Agility is the new norm. Flexibility is a requirement, and fast is the new normal pace, especially in times of growth. People want brands that can anticipate their needs: built for them, catered to the ways they want to connect with and experience the world, and able to move fast with (or often times, ahead of) their shifting desires.

3. Innovate, never imitate:

The top technology companies of today aren’t successful because they accepted the status quo or followed along the path of competitors. Asking questions, challenging long-held assumptions, and focusing on innovation can fuel real, transformative change for businesses. Curiosity, a focus on learning, and collaboration are one of the best ways your brand can power innovation. Look for problem solvers, big thinkers, and people unafraid to ask questions to help build a brand that is more innovative. Innovative brands today stand out and constantly move forward with momentum.

4. Identify needs and create meaningful value:

Top tech companies aren’t at the top simply because of their product or service alone. It’s about how they communicate their value proposition. There are endless businesses that are great at creating new products and services. However, most of these businesses struggle because they are unable to craft a value proposition for their offering that stands out from their competitors. These are the business that quickly fall off and lose competitive edge. This is because products don’t have real value unless the value is fully realized by customers themselves. These means winning brands understand customer needs and know how to communicate their value in a meaningful, impactful, and persuasive way.

5. Look toward the future:

Brand relevance relies on looking towards the future. Top tech companies understand that success today does not guarantee success tomorrow. They build their business for the future and map their brand towards these goals, objectives, and greater visions. Brands that aren’t designed for the future simply cannot compete in an ever-evolving digital landscape. In order to stay relevant, stay forward-thinking.

Maximum Impact

There’s a reason why the best brands are not only embracing technology but acting like tech companies. See how you can apply some of the top practices of thriving tech companies today to the way you approach your business and your brand, no matter what industry you sell in. By moving faster, with agility, and more dynamically, we believe you will be able to offer more meaningful value to the people who matter to your brand – making your brand more impactful and your business more competitive and positioned for success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Startup brands stop leading with features and benefits!

If only more startup brands understood the value of brand strategy and how it could lead them away from leading with features and benefits vs. why the brand matters.

Convincing minds by capturing hearts: the new brand-building approach.

What comes first? The rational decision to take the next step on the path to purchase, or the emotional trigger that gets them started on that path? Aren’t we humans cool? We pride ourselves on our cognitive skills, our ability to weigh pros and cons, and our decision-making power. After all, these factors separate us from other life forms.

We also prefer to emphasize our thoughts because we are able to talk about them, explain them, and defend them. Continue reading “Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate”