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The Engine of Productivity: Wellness in the Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

How we define the workplace has changed radically over the last few years. Offices no longer represent the primary workplace, and remote and hybrid modes of working are becoming the norm rather than the exception. And this has greatly disrupted the way we work. The “office rhythm” is out the door when you’re zooming with people three time zones away one minute, taking a call from the car while you drive your kids to school the next, and collaborating with colleagues face-to-face once or twice a week. It’s hard to connect. Hard to disconnect. And it’s hard to orient yourself in a culture without the daily cues to keep you on track.

All of this leads to wellness issues. The stress of being connected all the time. Or the self-doubt that leads to quiet quitting behaviors. The physical toll of being rooted at your desk all day. The erosion of mentorship in the workplace, and the rise of coaching to fill the gap. HR professionals are on the front lines of a crisis, and they’re responding by paying more attention to wellness than ever before. Employee well-being has emerged as a major focus as organizations replace the free-lunch and foosball-driven ethos with programs aimed at helping people thrive personally so they can thrive professionally.

The data supports this trend: corporate wellness directly influences the emotional and physical health of employees and, by extension, the health of the entire organization. Companies that prioritize wellness not only see an uptick in morale but also in productivity and retention​​​. In fact, 83% of employees report that having a psychologically and emotionally healthy workplace correlates with a significant increase in productivity.​​

Crafting Cultures That Resonate with Employees’ Needs

Leaders in HR play a pivotal role in translating these programs into strategic elements of the company culture. The trend is clear: holistic wellness programs that address the full spectrum of well-being—mental, physical, emotional, and financial—help retain people and attract new talent. They make people more productive, as happier employees take fewer sick days, are more loyal, and bring a higher level of creativity and energy to their roles. And they add to your overall organizational resiliency, which is critical to navigating the ups and downs of today’s volatility.

How to make well-being a strategic element of your employer brand

1. Define a Wellness Philosophy: Have a candid conversation with leadership about why your organization values wellness, and how much you’re willing to invest in it. This is a crucial first step to getting your leadership team aligned on the value that wellness creates for the entire organization. You’ll need to address the holistic equation of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, and financial—and how each dimension drives employee performance and satisfaction.

2. Consistently communicate your POV on Wellness: Use every communication channel to consistently reinforce how wellness is woven into your corporate culture. Share stories that highlight the positive impacts of wellness initiatives on employees, strengthening the perception of your brand as caring and supportive.

3. Align Wellness with Strategic Goals: A key part of your wellness initiatives involves connecting the dots between employees’ well-being and the strategic objectives of the company. For example, link mental health programs like mindfulness sessions to innovation to demonstrate how they result in a more creative and productive workplace.

4. Showcase the Impact: Evidence that wellness works only deepens belief in it as a necessity. Share real-life examples of how wellness programs have improved workplace outcomes. Highlight case studies and testimonials from employees who have benefited from these programs. Create case studies that demonstrate improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better teamwork.

5. Lead with Wellness: When leaders actively participate in and advocate for wellness programs, it sends a powerful message that no matter where you sit in an organization, you’re still a person with the same needs for support. The more leaders participate and evangelize your wellness programs, the more they become a core part of the company ethos.

6. Offer personalized Wellness Options: There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to well-being. By offering personalized wellness options that can be tailored to individual needs, you underscore your commitment to supporting each employee uniquely. This flexibility makes the programs more effective and highlights your company’s dedication to its workforce.

7. Measure Success and Adapt: As your employees engage with wellness programs, their needs will change. You need to continuously assess and adapt your wellness initiatives to keep the offerings relevant, the energy fresh, and the impact high. By actively managing the portfolio of wellness offerings, you show your workforce that rather than checking a box, the organization is committed to making wellness a foundational element of your employer brand.

Thinking Beyond Wellness Programs

Wellness programs alone can feel like Band-Aids if they’re not connected to the employer brand—the internal expression of your mission, purpose, and values—that drives your organization. As employee well-being emerges as a dynamic force that shapes every aspect of workplace engagement and productivity, employees need to feel that it is part of your organizational DNA.

At Emotive Brand, we specialize in connecting business strategy to culture strategy to develop employer brands that are not just smart—they resonate emotionally. Making sure that employees experience wellness programs as part of a larger narrative around how you value people is essential to delivering the experiences that contribute to an organization being a great place to work.

If you have thoughts about the role wellness programs play in culture strategy, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to get your culture better aligned to your business strategy, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Infusing a Brand with Big Heart Begins with Big Thinking: How Small Design Cues Can Generate Great Big Feels

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

“We need to make our brand feel human. It needs to reflect our people and our customers. We need to tell a human, emotive story.”

 

This is how a lot of our conversations about brand design begin. If we were designing for packaged goods that sit on a shelf and give people a tangible representation of your brand, we’d have a well defined experience to address. But most of our work takes place behind the scenes in the B2B and tech space. There are no shelves or stores mediating the process, no physical objects or packaging. There’s sparse or no direct interaction with the end-user. And the technology itself is invisible which increases the challenge of crafting a bespoke visual identity that evokes emotion.

Curating a distinct visual style is table stakes when developing design systems. But we’ve seen that in B2B branding, sometimes the smaller, more nuanced design moves can transform a smart visual identity design into a deeply evocative brand that evokes just the right feelings. Because these design moves don’t hit people over the head, they may not fully register at first glance, but over time, they shape the response people have to a brand.

A sense of (e)motion

Motion elevates the game. While static logos aren’t going away, just about every brand needs to move in some way, shape or form—whether it’s a dynamic logo or a kinetic design system that pushes the limits. And it’s often the little moments that spark delight—the sudden blink of a circle, the anthropomorphic smile in a lowercase ‘e’, or a subtle twinkle of light to punctuate a moment in the story. It’s these moments that draw people deeper into the brand story in the same way that physical packaging might speak directly to a consumer with an elegant serif font or bespoke illustration.

Our recent work to rebrand Katapult—an AI platform behind the e-commerce scenes that gives customers a fair way to pay for their purchases online—was an opportunity for our team to bring all the heart, feeling and optimism of the customer to the forefront of the brand. Sure, the photography needed to capture the heart and goodness underlying the brand, but we had to go deeper. So we used their name as our launching-off point, or catapult, if you will. Rather than trying to force all of our storytelling into a logo symbol, we crafted a wordmark that evokes the feeling of the human hand signing for a bill of goods. That calligraphic sense of motion led our team to develop something more emotive than just a symbol—a brand feeling of being uplifted and elevated. This feeling—which came to be known as “The Bounce”—comes through at every turn, from the upward curve that literally bounces off-screen, guides storytelling in infographics, or connects images, words and ideas together. Ultimately, “The Bounce” became more than a visual component—it became a deeply felt personality trait of the brand—and something the client could really get behind as an emotive representative of the brand, something much greater than a traditional logo symbol.

Sonic branding

Just like the barrage of visuals that we experience every day, our world is filled with sounds (a lot of it noise). In addition to motion, sound has a similar capacity to evoke feelings and brings another dimension to what a brand—and more specifically, a logo—can do. Sonic branding adds a richness to the brand experience, often creating a more bespoke and lasting imprint on how you experience (and recall) a brand. The Disney+ logo that introduces their content is a good example of a small moment that adds a big feel to how you interact with their identity. Now, it may be that I’ve seen/heard their identity more times than I care to count while watching with my 7-year-old, but there’s no denying how seeing AND hearing that magical beam of light swoop over the wordmark makes a deeper impression. It puts viewers into a state of curiosity and preparation for what’s about to come on screen. The ability to generate that lean-in feeling is a mark of a truly successful logo experience.

Our recent rebrand project for Pindrop included a sonic dimension to the brand. Because Pindrop is a pioneer in the voice technology space, creating a sonic brand was a strategic imperative. It was exciting to work with our partners at MusicVergnuegen to craft an audio component that brought Pindrop’s invisible, future-forward technology to life with a sound of a safe unlocking. Similar to Disney+, it’s hard not to smile when their logo symbol transforms and resolves on an audio crescendo. It’s the little things that often make the most impact.

Design needs to solve problems and deliver on the goals of the client but also has the great potential to unlock new ways of seeing, hearing and experiencing a brand. See (and hear) more of our work here and let us know if we can partner together to help solve your branding challenges.

Emotive Brand and Emotive Branding: Our Origin Story

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands for the Better

The idea of emotive branding—and the creation of our agency, Emotive Brand—flowed from our desire to make a positive difference in the way people and brands interacted with each other. These were our goals:

  • Bridge the gap between commerce and civility.
  • Create brands that people appreciate, respect, and actively seek out.
  • Help employees of brands feel better about their jobs.
  • Make partners and suppliers vie for the opportunity to work with our clients.
  • See communities welcome our clients’ brands with open arms.

As a result of all of this goodwill, our clients’ brands would thrive and prosper.

Realizing the Value of Meaning Something More

We came to those goals through two major realizations:

First, as consumers ourselves, we noticed that only a handful of brands really went out of their way to mean anything to us. When they did make a connection, wow, it was love! We’d go out of our way to interact and engage these brands. We even felt disappointed when we had to settle for something less. We’d get excited when other people started talking about these brands and chimed in with our most recent, “I can top that!” story. These brands had come to mean something to us because they had a clear reason for being and made us feel something good time and time again.

On the other hand, zillions of brands never really hit our emotional radar. These brands meant almost nothing to us–even though we’ve heard about them or even bought and used dozens of the brands regularly.  

A Problem in the “Brand Decks”

Second, as brand experts, we saw firsthand why so many brands fell flat–lackluster and bland–in the minds of customers. As designers, copywriters, and strategists, we work on virtually every aspect of communication from identity to websites to advertising to point-of-sale to employee recruitment and beyond. Behind each piece of work, there’s always a brief, and often attached to the brief is a two-hundred some page PDF titled “About the Brand.”

Reading through many of these so-called “brand decks,” we quickly recognized a problem. In fact, the “brand decks” were the problem.

Traditional brand thinking results from business people from branding agencies talking to business people within client organizations. The language they use is full of industry jargon, client-speak, and solely rational thinking. Everything is expounded upon, nothing is simplified, and little is made human. And after several rounds of review, the final documents show the scars of compromise.

And what do these documents lack? The brand’s meaning as defined by its reason for being (why it does what it does) and how the brand wants people to feel (how the brand connects emotionally with customers). Brand decks, on the whole, left out what matters most to us as consumers and businesses and what we admire most in the great brands out there.

So we asked the question: What if meaning was the entry point into brand thinking rather than an appendage at the end? And that, folks, is how Emotive Brand was born.

Learn more about our methodology emotive branding, how our approach challenges convention, and why emotive branding is a next generation brand strategy.

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

Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Download White Paper

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

Image by Alen Pavlovic

The Value of Outside Creativity on In-House Work

Posted on by Chris Ames

As an agency, we have the benefit of outside perspective on client work. Our distance allows us to see situations with a more objective lens. But what happens when we get too close to our own work or get caught in a creative slump? As Design Director Robert Saywitz tells us, sometimes the best solution to in-house problems is outside inspiration. We sat down to discuss how his background in illustration, graphic novels, and mixed-media informs his design thinking.

Tell us a bit about your artistic practices.

I do a little bit of everything: painting, drawing, ink, mixed-media works on paper, graphic novels, personal and commercial illustration. I work with many non-traditional and found materials, such as antique books, wooden crates, or music-related items like vinyl and cassettes. Part of my process is to breathe new life into discarded or antiquated things that often find themselves on the street or in second-hand shops. I not only try to find materials that will work as a blank canvas for a drawing or painting but I also look for specific materials that relate to the subject matter, and to my own sense of storytelling.

For example, as part of my series, Music Was My First Love, I used antique, leather book covers as canvases for ink drawings of jazz musician and composer, Ornette Coleman. The triptych shows him at three stages in his life – a rising star, at the height of his powers, and as an aging legend. The deterioration of the materials adds much more to the story than any ink wash or layered background I could have tried to create by hand. This was also a nod to the process and how we convey and gather information – reading about art and music – as well as my own love of the physical book. At my heart, though, I’m a drawer. It all goes back to pencil and paper.

Outside creativity on in-house work

How does that sensibility feed into your practice for client work?

I never start on the computer. You have pens, paper, scissors, drafting boards, and oh, a computer as well. It’s just one piece in a massive toolkit to tell a story. I’ve always viewed myself as a visual storyteller. Whether it’s a singular poster or a super complex brand system. For me, I’m always searching for that layered story. Too much focus on any one instrument, like the computer, tends to dilute the experience. The computer is an amazing tool, but it’s not an idea generator. You can have happy accidents, but you can’t let the tools dictate the idea. I didn’t get into design until later in life. I came to it from an art background – and I think my sideways path in has made a big difference in how I approach work.

You mentioned the idea of posters. You often start projects by designing a poster, even if it won’t necessarily live in this format. What does this process illuminate for you?

The poster, for me, is a perfect object. It’s that blank slate, open canvas, anything-can-happen object. Whether it’s a logo or complete brand identity, I tend to think in terms of the poster. If you can figure out what the big idea is in a single frame, then you have the spark that allows you to expand the idea into an entire campaign. Solving the poster is like this secret puzzle that will inevitably answer questions that come up later in the process.

Initially, it was album covers and film posters that sparked my love for design and it was people like Saul Bass, who you felt could capture the entire mood of a two-hour movie in a 2-D plane. There’s something magical about starting from a simple rectangle and trying to tell a story in multiple parts. Again, for me it goes back to the pencil and paper – the sheet of paper is essentially that blank poster frame where the problem needs to be solved in a clear and compelling way. That’s how I approached the poster for Knucklehead, which is another example of letting the idea (not the computer) drive the design. My watercolor and ink illustrations with collaged magazine clippings captured the emotional quality and narrative of the film more than traditional photography could have hoped to achieve.

Outside creativity on in-house work

How much of your client work is inspired by these other worlds?

I think you can see it in almost everything I do. If there is ever an opportunity to bring in something that feels hand-drawn, organic, or illustrated, I think it adds warmth and empathy. My gut instinct is the pencil, not the mouse – and that line of thinking will always filter in. The art of making something is nuanced and gestural. I love when you can feel the hand of the creator a little bit. Especially in the digital age, when things can feel a little too slick, too polished, too clean. Obviously, every project has its own parameters, but at the end of the day, everything is human and you need that component. Even if it’s just a starting point that gets digitally refined later, the emotional core will bubble up.

For example, the identity I created for Normandie – a new restaurant in Portland, Oregon – began as an actual linoleum block print before getting tediously refined on the computer. The only way to create a bespoke, block-printed logo was to make it by hand.

Outside creativity on in-house work

Outside creativity on in-house workHow can say, a B2B tech company, get out of their comfort zone and let outside creativity bolster their offering?

It sounds cliché, but inspiration is everywhere – you just have to be willing to see it. A lot of that is just getting outside and looking for answers in unexpected places: the museum, the used bookstore, public gardens, architecture, travel guides, novels, even the design of old appliances. You’d be surprised how many times the work of someone in a completely different field can inspire or solve the problem you’re working on. It can be as simple as watching a really good documentary series, like Abstract, which showcases the work of designers in different fields at the top of their game.

A very tangible lesson is to set up Google Alerts under research categories you’re interested in. I have one set up for “book arts.” Every day, I get four or five unique articles sent to me from places I would never think to look, like a local paper in Des Moines, Iowa. You need to be open to everything serving as a potential source of inspiration, whether it’s going on a trip to the post office or wandering into an estate sale. The beauty of the iPhone is you always have a way to capture that random spark.

Beyond the digital, I think it’s incredibly important to start a physical inspiration folder. Put one in your design department and start to collect objects that intrigue or inspire. It doesn’t have to make sense right away. The internet tends to feed on itself, and there’s something liberating in having your designers get bold new ideas from the world around them. My personal studio is full of seemingly random artifacts: old instruction manuals, maps, magazine clippings, keys, matchbooks, old manual typewriters, compasses, ticket stubs. Design is all around us and you never know what object will unlock or inspire. I recently submitted to The Sketchbook Project, which is a crowd-funded sketchbook museum and community space. My submission was all about tiny maps, and its creation was a direct result of the process of maintaining this archive of physical inspiration.

How do you manage your creative and professional lives? Do you view them as at-odds or supporting one another?

A big internal obstacle for most working creatives is separating your two lives – the creative and the professional – because they don’t fit in. You feel like your day job is taking away from your art, or vice versa. I’ve struggled with that.

To be honest, coming to Emotive Brand is the first place where I truly feel those two lives are intermeshed. There’s no shame to keep one hidden. In fact, we’re encouraged to share and inspire others. In all the jobs I’ve worked, it’s never been that way, and it does a huge disservice to the employee, the agency, and even the client. When you build a culture of expression, the ideas just get better and feed off one another. It’s liberating and opens up all these other doors. I’ve always bifurcated my creative lives, but I don’t have to do that here. At a previous job, I would have my work included in a group show at a gallery and not tell anyone. Here, I feel totally enabled to let my outside creativity influence and improve everything else I do.

Check out all of Robert’s work on his website here.

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

Cover Image by Robert Saywitz: Chinatown (detail), watercolor and graphite on paper, 5 x 7 inches

Emotive Brand Co-Founder on Evolving a Business and the Challenge of Change

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

A little over nine years ago, Bella Banbury and I started Emotive Brand on a bit of a whim. Now, almost 10 years later, we have 20 people in our company. We’re recognized as a top agency in the strategy and branding world. CEOs of companies seek us out to achieve transformative shifts in their business. People hire us because they’ve been reading our content for years. Agencies around the world cite our content as smart and forward thinking. We didn’t expect all of this. We just started our agency and that was that.

The cobbler’s children DO have shoes

As we reach our double-digits, we’re turning the tables. It’s time for us to do some reflection and strategy work of our own. So we’re putting ourselves through the very methodology we use with our clients and we’re eager to see what shakes out. Our agency has become the client.

The first feeling I had was, “Holy shit. This is tough!” It’s hard to face the realities of change and the future. It’s hard to decide what you want, where you want to be, and how you will get there. I have more empathy for our clients right now than I ever have.

Along this journey, I’ll be sharing some thoughts with you. We’ll no doubt glean new insights about ourselves, but also learn things that we want our clients to know, too. Here’s where I’m at 2 months in.

Change is hard

Until someone asks you to question some fundamental things about your business, you don’t know what ‘hard’ really means. I get it now. The rational brain wants to analyze. Look at the numbers. Understand the trends. For me, this is the easy part. The numbers don’t lie and it’s important to take the time to really understand what they are saying. So I naturally thought this was the end. I was ready to start making the change.

But even when the facts tell a very clear story, your emotions can stand in the way of change. Yes, I am talking about fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s easy to focus on the rational needs for change. I didn’t realize the major role emotions play in any change process. It’s human nature. If I felt this way, our clients for sure must feel the same way.

We talk a lot about empathy at Emotive Brand. This process we are undergoing is opening my eyes to what it takes to have the courage to initiate changes in your business. I see now that we also need to help our clients get through the emotional hurdles to change. We need to give them the time and the emotional support they need to evolve their business and themselves.

Being agile is not as easy as it appears

Our clients’ timelines are shrinking. They need their projects completed faster than seems reasonable. So we’ve adapted. We’ve created a methodology that is agile. We work in sprints. We’ve realized we can develop strategy and branding at a pace we never thought possible – and still deliver smart work. But, what is always interesting, is that when we hear our clients say “fast”, intentions don’t always equal reality. Working quickly isn’t just a challenge for us, it’s really difficult for our clients too. They struggle to meet their own high-pressured deadlines. In the end, it’s difficult for some of them to keep pace with our agency and our ability to move quickly.

So it was pretty funny when, during our first sprint on our own internal project, we ourselves got in the way of delivering on our own “agile” project. The second lesson learned: moving fast is hard. More than twice, we put our own strategy project on hold to focus on our clients’ strategy projects. It begs the question: “How do we help our clients do their job, meet their own business deadlines, and move their strategy project forward?”

We’ve created a process to help our clients understand the time they need to devote to work with us, from meetings and workshops, to rounds of review and circulating deliverables internally for approval. When we develop a project plan, we always ask our clients about major events in their world that may impact our work together. We know we can enable clients to move at the speed they want. It just takes time – devoted time. Wish we had taken our own advice on this one. Without a solid project plan in place, almost everything can stop it in its tracks.

Building alignment is personal

We know firsthand change is hard. And moving fast is not always easy. But how do we manage these speed bumps and, at the same time, align a leadership team around the difficult shifts that transformation requires? Iteration. Putting the cycles in. We’ll go backward and forward as much as is needed to build consensus. We work to ensure everyone feels that their voices were heard to reach agreement and, ultimately, alignment.

How? We’ve developed frameworks that surface up gaps in alignment and facilitate discussions to hammer things out. This allows us to appeal to individual personalities and ensure people are truly honest with their feelings and opinions. We’ve excelled at doing this with our clients. In fact, we’ve built our reputation and agency on this activity.

But, again, it was much harder to do for ourselves. While tools and frameworks help facilitate available options and reinforce smart strategy, they don’t take into account the human side. People process things differently and at different speeds. They require different ways to evaluate options and opportunities. Sometimes their role in the organization can create blind spots. And people in different roles can easily view things through a siloed lens.

Only when we acknowledge these lenses and map personal roles back up the organization’s overall needs can we facilitate the group and reach full alignment. Without the alignment of a leadership team, there’s nothing. No moving forward. No change. And no successful transformation.

Strategy and branding moving forward

As we look to evolve our own agency, I’ll keep you updated on our progress. I’ll share what I learn and how that affects the experience, tools, and processes we use in the future with our clients. What we do for our clients is hard work. But now we know firsthand what the struggles our clients endure feel like. And I’m trying to use this experience to do better, be better, and deliver better on behalf of our clients.

Stay tuned.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and branding agency.

Laser-Focused Branding and the Sales Learning Curve

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Not For the Masses

Every company wants to climb the Sales Learning Curve — a model for establishing and ramping up a sales force and increasing sales yield — faster. But few focus on branding as a way to accomplish that. In fact, a laser-focused brand is a critical driver of your sales reps’ ramp-up and revenue growth. It sounds risky to create a brand and launch a product based on the needs of a very defined group. But it might just be a better approach to branding and marketing.

The Laser-Focused Branding of PubMatic

Take the company, PubMatic. Before contacting Emotive Brand, PubMatic had spent years trying to serve everyone in the ad-tech ecosystem. We helped them see that laser focus on a specific kind of customer would help them both create a stronger, more compelling brand, and clarify their business strategy. PubMatic chose to double down on publishers: this group struggled more than any other to keep up with ever-evolving digital advertising technology and to stay relevant. So we developed an Emotive Brand strategy for PubMatic that repositioned PubMatic away from ad-tech and to a marketing automation platform designed for publishers. While this approach intentionally left some potential customers on the sidelines, it’s paid off. PubMatic has had quarter over quarter revenue growth ever since they narrowed their focus.

Laser-Focused Branding and Getting to the Heart of It

The job of sales and marketing is to show how your products solve customers’ pain. As the PubMatic case shows, while a product may be relevant to many potential customers, narrowing your focus to beachhead customers — those accounts where the product-market fit is strongest — may be the best way to boost your brand. (Sequoia Capital, by the way, has a great piece on how companies create “sales ready products” and dives into beachhead customers in greater depth.) If you can’t get the attention of beachhead customers, you’ll struggle to gain traction and sales will come slowly. In cybersecurity, for instance, financial institutions are often early adopters of new technology. If a security company chose to laser focus its brand just on this group, it would likely uncover a list of common objections and learn which features matter — or don’t — to most financial services companies. Beachhead customers might not care about the same things as your wider customer base, but when you double down on the capabilities and features that really matter to them, you can increase the rate at which you climb the Sales Learning Curve.

Just naming beachhead customers or industry, of course, isn’t enough. You’ve got to have an intimate understanding of who they are and what matters to them. Our Customer Journey Mapping process is about deep customer research. We help companies understand the role a product and brand plays in individuals’ lives and then optimize the brand around this customer experience. The result is a brand that holds meaning in people’s lives.

Sales Comes Into the Picture

Brand strategy and positioning 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 answer these questions every day. This is why our brand strategy work, if possible, always includes involving a company’s sales team. We don’t like to take Sales out of the field unnecessarily, but we try to leverage enough people so that the resulting brand strategy benefits from their front-line experiences. And once we have a new positioning and messaging, we often conduct training sessions with sales teams.

It’s easy to want to deliver everything that any of your potential customers desire. But when you target a well-defined customer group’s needs, you have to decide what your brand will support — and what it won’t. Laser-focused branding helps you more quickly pinpoint what matters most to customers which, in turn, strengthens your brand.

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 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.

Companies with a Culture of Health Outperform

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

A Culture of Health Can Fuel Your Business

At Emotive Brand, we understand first-hand that a culture of health leads to a high performing brand and business. As a result, we embed eating healthy, living an active and safe lifestyle, and proactively managing levels of stress and overall wellness into the way we do business. It’s who we are. And we know this impacts our workplace environment, our brand, and our business.

Why’s that? In the end, healthy, safe, energized people are more able to do their work. In fact, studies indicate that companies that focus on the well-being and safety of their employees yield greater value for their investors. So the stakes are high. Health is not a company benefit. The health of your employees has a high impact on performance, productivity and overall workplace happiness. And by fueling a culture of health, you can better position your brand and business to thrive.

Cultures of Health, Gaining Traction

More and more organizations are coming around to the importance of building a culture of health, and this focus is becoming increasingly crucial for recruiting talent, retaining employees, and making sure employees are equipped and ready to help your brand and business succeed. It’s no question that people’s workplace expectations have heightened. Now, more than ever, people want to work for companies who value their health, reinforce healthy lifestyle choices, and encourage and support their personal goals and objectives.

People are increasingly worried about high stress levels, unhealthy diets, inactive lifestyles, and are demanding more support, flexibility, and rewards for healthy living. As a result, many businesses are placing heightened attention to employee wellness programs and increased focus on improving employee health, reducing stress, and increasing happiness and meaning within the workplace.

A Culture of Athletes Demands Even More

Here at Emotive Brand we’d consider ourselves more than just a culture of health. With so many talented, dedicated, and inspiring athletes on our team, our culture of health must also be a culture tailored to athletes.

Everyone has experienced a busy day that lead to an unhealthy meal. Or a long stressful week that resulted in sleep-deprivation, making it nearly impossible to get out of bed for a workout in the morning. Work often gets in the way of exercise.

But imagine training for triathlons like our co-founder Bella Banbury, or scheduling long runs leading up to the SF marathon like senior designer Wayne Tang, or lengthy swims in the bay like Strategy Director Taylor Standlee. Many of our employees were college athletes and continue to compete in athletic events throughout the Bay Area and beyond. And these athletic performances are demanding. Which means we also need a culture of flexibility to make a culture of athletes work.

Helping a Culture of Athletes Thrive

Health and wellness means different things to different people. We might not be Olympians, but we are a culture of athletes. So how do we support our athletic culture at Emotive Brand and leverage it to help our brand and business thrive?

1. Encourage and reward all athletic endeavors:

In order to truly promote a culture of health, support and honor athletic endeavors of all kinds. Athletes never have the same goals. Even if a competitive swimmer is working to run his or her first 5k, it is worth celebrating. People who feel supported and encouraged are more likely to reach their goals – both personal and professional. Encouraging athletic endeavors means building a culture that supports people to overcome challenges, improve skills, and even learn new. It helps create an environment of high achieving, motivated, goal-orientated, coachable, and collaborative people who will help your brand thrive. So make note of these achievements at meetings, congratulate people in person, and celebrate big wins.

2. Translate athletic skills to work:

For us, there are so many parallels between athletics and brand strategy. And considering the connections between the two and working on translating our strengths from one to the others helps us be more on top of our game, more competitive, and more successful – in the office and outside it. A culture of athletes will reflect and show the brand’s drive, dedication, adaptability, and ability to work collaboratively. And when fostered, these characteristics fuel the energy of the brand, its communications, and even how it’s perceived externally.

3. Be flexible, adaptable, and support individual needs:

Like every brand needs a customized path to transformation, every athlete takes an individualized track to success. When supporting employee’s goals, it’s important to build a workplace that can be flexible and adaptable to each individual. Give each person the tools they need to thrive and in turn, help move your business forward. Employees who feel like their workplace cares about their personal needs, goals, and objectives are more likely to be more satisfied, work harder, and fuel your brand towards success.

Keep Your Brand in Mind

What your brand stands for has to align with how your brand behaves. For us, as a competitive, collaborative, dedicated, growth and goal orientated company, building and encouraging culture of athletes is important to the way we do business and live our brand. But every business requires different strengths, and every brand requires different behaviors to bring it to life. Think about how to build a culture that fosters specific brand behavior. And make sure these behaviors are in line with your purpose, goals, and objectives.

Every touch-point of your brand reflects your brand’s performance. So take this thinking further by applying it to every aspect of your business and every way your brand interacts with people – inside and outside the business. Promoting a culture of athletes, if it’s genuine and authentic, will set up your people to perform in a way that reinforces their natural interests and instincts. And by staying true to what you stand for, your brand be authentically positioned to thrive.

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

Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Sixth in a series on workplace culture

“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” – Albert Einstein

A business’ fate is determined in large part by its culture. A business culture is the reality created by how people act, react, and interact with each other based on their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.

The most damaging business cultures are those in which aggression, neglect, and punishment leave employees feeling they have no reason to commit their energies and skills, share their ideas, or help the company advance.

Wanted: a culture that unites and connects employees

A culture built principally around rewards for individual or group performance pits individuals and teams against each other, often in ways that create class systems, in-fighting, and divisive loyalties. The winners in such cultures find meaning in their rewards. The rest are left wondering what the point is for them and their employer.

A passive, benign, and inert business culture leaves the business subject to the aggregate confusion that results when each individual employee’s quirks, tendencies, and potentially questionable morality and ethics are accommodated.

The most beneficial business cultures are those that unite employees around an ambition, make them feel emotionally connected, and surround them with people who share their ambition, feelings, and behavior.

4 factors in transforming your workplace culture

By consistently and intentionally conveying a meaningful ambition and evoking a set of unique and positive emotions, businesses can transform the meaningful outcome of every aspect of the work experience:

  1. The physical environment – the aesthetics and functionality of the workplace;
  2. The policies and procedures – the actual rules of the company as well as the way in which employees experience them;
  3. The attitudes and behavior of fellow employees – the feelings evoked when dealing with superiors, peers, and reports;
  4. The moment of contact – the nature of company/employee and employee/outside world interactions.

A Meaningful Workplace culture is based on the way employees experience these factors – what meaning is conveyed and how they are left feeling.

Did you miss the first five parts of this series?

Read Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees, Getting Employees to Respond Positively, Why Workplaces Aren’t Meaningful Now, The Meaningful Workplace: It Takes New Ways of Thinking, and Acting, and Using Values to Build Engagement and a Meaningful Workplace.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.