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Tag: Emotive Branding

If You Want a Meaningful Brand, Make a Meaningful Impact

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Being a Meaningful Brand

The data is in, and to be a meaningful brand, you must make meaningful impact. It is inescapable. The most powerful and profitable brands – regardless of sector – are brands that enhance well-being and enrich peoples’ lives.

The Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham University recently published “The V-Positive Report,” which ranks brands according to how they affect consumers along seven dimensions of human needs and wants. The dimensions of the study span from basic physical function to the capacity for building relationships. The most “V-positive” brand in 2015 was Google, and every member of the top 10 were household names –brands you would recognize as leaders. According to the researchers at Fordham, these are great brands, in part, because they enrich lives and add meaning to lives.

Another data point suggests why failing to be meaningful and emotive is so dangerous for brands. Havas’ “Meaningful Brands Survey 2017,” which sampled 1,500 global brands, more than 300,000 people, 33 countries and 15 different industry sectors, found that a mere 20% of the brands people interact with have a positive impact on their lives. This means that the vast majority of brands could disappear entirely and most people wouldn’t even notice.

So what does this mean for companies and brands?

It’s simple to say and harder to execute, but for a brand to be truly meaningful, it must, in the language of academics, have a “positive impact on societal well-being.” In the language of Emotive Brand, a brand must exude meaning and elicit emotion from its core.

A truly meaningful brand must enhance the vibrancy and vitality of what we feel in our day-to-day lives. It must have an impact that transcends product attributes, price, or performance. It must make people feel. It must make people feel something positive.

The key is understanding exactly how your brand can help people and communities become and feel smarter, healthier, stronger, safer, and or more connected.

According to Martin Seligman, one of the leading lights of the positive psychology movement, positive emotions are directly linked to a person’s sense of significance, social engagement, interest, and purpose in life. Seligman’s research proves that positive emotions have a demonstrable effect on nearly all areas of a person’s life. Brands that generate positive emotions among consumers will be rewarded in all the normal ways, such as growth in market share and in shareholder value, while positively contributing to society as a whole. In short, more positivity generates more good.

Finding and evoking this kind of emotional resonance is our mission at Emotive Brand. We help our clients discover the real essence of their brand promise and emotional impact. We help companies lead with purpose and empathy and believe that empathetic brands are more adept at recognizing and connecting with the values, interests, hopes, and dreams of their customers, prospects, employees, and partners – brands that naturally inhabit Seligman’s “sweet spot of emotional resonance.”

To us, data and findings from Fordham and Havas demonstrate what Emotive Brand has always known: for a brand to be meaningful and successful, it must positively impact people’s lives. If your brand can do that, it will improve your business performance, build your company’s fortunes, and enrich your customers’ lives.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design consultancy

Doing Good Feels Good – Is Your Brand on Board?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Action for Happiness is a movement for positive social change. We’re bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone. This video from Action for Happiness spurred some thinking on brands and what people are looking for today.

Let’s start by defining “happy”.

It can be superficial – like what you feel as you watch a TV ad that makes you laugh or brings a tear to your eye.

It can be profound – as in what you feel when you know that what you’re doing is doing good for others.

We’ve written before about brands that push  short-lasting, superficial feelings through advertising, and then drop the ball when it comes to delivering their product or service (any banks or airlines come to mind?).

This “emotional” approach backfires because the negative feelings far outweigh – and last far longer – than the positive bump created by something that makes us laugh or come close to crying.

People tend to feel used and abused when their feelings are exploited this way.

On the other hand, an “emotive” approach to branding is built around working to make people feel good, positive, and happy because what they’re doing is good for others – and through that, good for themselves.

Emotive branding works to a simple formula: Why + Emotions = Meaning

Emotive branding focuses a brand on its purpose.

Purpose-led brands define, and then live by, their “why”.

It’s a “why” that propels the brand forward because it is personally relevant to the people vital to the brand’s success – employees, customer, prospect, partners, etc.

Purpose-led brands also consistently evoke specific positive feelings.

They work hard to make people feel “good” and “happy” about being associated with the brand.

They do this by injecting every brand interaction with actions and messages that “why” and reinforce the good feelings the brand seeks to own.

Emotive branding is a response to the change in values

People are moving on.

They are looking beyond the “me” to the “we”.

They are seeking more meaning in their personal lives, in the brand they choose to support, and the companies they work for.

This dramatically changes how they evaluate what they buy, whom they buy from, and where they choose to work.

Whether you manage a B2C or a B2B brand, these changes are important considerations as you think about how your brand will thrive over time.

Brands and businesses that seek to more meaningfully and emotionally connect with people must know the answer to the following two questions.

  1. Why does your brand matter?
  2. How does your brand want to make people feel?

For additional information on transforming your brand, please download our white paper.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Can Your Brand Tell An Employer Brand Story Like This?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We’re willing to bet that more C-suite bottoms sit on Herman Miller chairs than any other brand chair.

We’ll also go as far as to bet that a majority of those well-seated C-suiters would have a hard time telling an employer brand story as compelling and meaningful as Herman Miller’s.

As they say in their videos, Herman Miller is more a company you work with, than one you work for.

You may say, we just don’t have such a great story to tell.

And we would say, “You don’t? Really?”

We think you probably do more good than you’re aware of, because until now you haven’t really had to give much thought to your employer brand.

But now other brands – particularly your competitors – are starting to not only think about the meaning of their workplace, they are busy making it the focus of what their company is all about.

As result, your competitors are both keeping their current employees (so you can’t easily snatch them), and they’re attracting the available pool of top talent in your industry (so you have to settle for second best).

All this positive action prompts their employees to work with greater vigor, collaboration and gratification.

As such, they are seeing their businesses improve, simply because they have established a new “give and take” between their brands and the people vital to their success.

They have found the meaningful truths of their employer brand in what they do as a business and a community of living, breathing and caring people.

They have brought these truths to the forefront and adapted their way of being to reflect and reinforce these truths in a new employer brand strategy.

They have gone further as well, building a new employer brand promise, new initiatives, alliances and policies that magnify these truths both within and outside the workplace.

This is just the kind of employer brand story your brand needs to start telling, start living, and embodying each and every day.

It’s the kind of brand story we uncover for our clients through our brand strategy methodolgoy called emotive branding.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency helping brands develop corporate brand strategy and employer brand strategy.

The Next Wave of Brand Strategy

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

The role of brand strategy

What makes your brand unique? How does it stand out in your category? What “significance” gets people flocking to your brand? What “stickiness” keeps people coming back to your brand?

We wouldn’t be surprised if these questions keep you awake at night. After all, it’s clearly getting harder for brands to differentiate themselves. Categories are becoming commoditized as competitors mimic each other in both products and communications. Brand advantages based on innovation are short-lived as others rapidly copy technology, benefits, and promises.

Add to these challenges the myopic view that prevails within most enterprises. Within a company there tends to be beliefs that the world revolves around their brand, that their brand is truly unique, and that to make obvious and superficial claims is sufficient.

What’s a brand owner to do?

The first step is to move beyond the obvious and traditional modes of branding, and to embrace the new wave of branding that is based on deep, emotional, and differentiating brand connections.

This means stepping out of your usual and familiar approach to brand strategy. It means putting human needs at the center of your brand’s universe. It means shifting from promoting your outputs, to embodying the meaningful impact of the personal, social, and environmental outcomes your brand generates.

This is not business-as-usual. But it is necessary business.

This is certainly a different way of thinking about, planning, and executing brand strategy. Mindful and purposeful leadership is required. Organizational flexibility and patience are necessary. Individual persistence and fortitude are required.

The next wave of brand strategy will bring its own challenges to the business world. But at the same time it will deliver what every brand wants and needs: a meaningful difference that generates business by resonating deeply in the hearts and minds of all the people vital to your brand’s success.

Surf’s up! Get ready to ride the wave!

Looking for a more in-depth view of how to engage in this new wave of brand strategy? Download our white paper on Transforming your brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Five Key Differences Between Emotional and Emotive Brands

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

It’s not too hard to spot an emotional brand. It uses emotions tactically to either make people laugh or to gently tug at their heartstrings. These brands typically only do this through their advertising.

Emotive brands are far more rare. These are brands that forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections through everything they do.

So while someone may happily buy a brand based on its emotional advertising, they are likely to be left bemused when dealing with the emotional brand’s crass customer service people.

The resulting brand dissonance will, no doubt, prompt them to turn to alternative brands. On the other hand, buyers of emotive brands have a seamless emotional experience in every aspect of the customer experience.

This is because the use of emotion is a highly considered brand strategy for emotive brands.

Emotive brands engage their entire organizations so that every brand moment evokes a similar set of feelings – feelings that bond the customer (and the employees) to the brand.

The resulting brand harmony will keep them coming back to the brand (and telling others all about it).

From a brand management point of view, this is the difference between:

  1. Cynically using people’s emotions, and credibly and authentically bonding with them through shared values, attitudes, and behavior
  2. Giving people a 30 second emotional kick, and getting people to care more for you forever
  3. Doing predictable stuff, and intelligently opposing the expected
  4. Being viewed cynically, and being embraced with respect
  5. Focusing on short-term opportunism, and embracing long-term value creation

Ultimately, it’s the difference between settling for meaningless marketing and striving for meaningful connections.

It’s a choice every brand can make.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Capitalizing on the Human Dimension of Professional Services

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

I find it ironic that many of the most people-driven enterprises in our economy – law, architecture, consulting, and engineering firms – are often the most superficial with branding.

For most professional service firms, “branding” is only about logos and color palettes. It seems branding’s only goal is to project a serious, professional, and trustworthy identity.

Unfortunately, this limited view of branding leads most professional service firms to the same bland destination.

Indeed, the Internet is littered with the drab, me-too, institutional websites of professional service firms. Flipping from site to site, one has a hard time distinguishing one firm from another. Across an industry, you’ll find the same, tired and predictable rational presentations of facts about each firm. In almost all cases, there are strikingly similar, and weirdly unnatural, photos of executives posed in front of wood paneling.

Does this sound like your professional service brand? If so, it’s really time to shift your view of what branding is capable of doing, and what a more humanly meaningful brand can do for your partners and your firm.

Challenged firms need a new approach

If your firm is struggling to attract new business, finding it hard to retain clients, losing the best recruits to other firms and languishing in the me-too land of professional services branding, its time a for a dose of human emotion in your workplace and in the marketplace.

Human emotion? Well, this is not about presenting happy, smiling faces or tear-jerking situations. Rather, it is about connecting in a more meaningful way with emotional human beings. The emotions and feelings I am talking about – which have the potential to propel your firm forward in a distinct way – are not frivolous or mercenary. They are relevant, engaging and accessible feelings that are totally natural to what your firm does, and what it does for people.

Creating a presence that resonates emotionally

For decades, branding has skirted around the fact that all rational decisions – from which mayonnaise jar to pick up off the shelf, to which firm to appoint – occur within a swirl of emotions. Apart from the emotions which an individual naturally brings to the moment (feeling in love, or feeling mad about being passed up for a promotion), there are also emotions in play that are introduced when an individual thinks about a particular brand.

These emotions – and the feelings they trigger – are either neutral, negative, or positive. Naturally, no brand intentionally strives for a neutral or negative emotional aura. But, what is strange is that few professional service brands strive for a uniquely positive emotional aura. This is particularly strange because of the human nature of the work professional service firms perform.

Emotive branding elevates professional service firms

We’ve found a way to bring professional service brands new meaning and relevance. We start by thinking of the best way for your clients, prospects and recruits to feel about your firm. We then guide you on how to update your processes, policies and practices so they better evoke these feelings. We create tools that get your partners and support staff to understand the value of emotional differentiation (both for the firm and individually). We help you revamp your firm’s communications, marrying your new emotional aura to your current rational presentation (the look and feel, the story you tell, and the voice you use).

Use emotions to differentiate in profoundly meaningful ways

Strive to make each experience people have with your firm more emotionally involving. Do it in specific, own-able ways that positively predispose them to act in your firm’s best interests. Create a distinctively appealing presence for your firm that stands apart from the crowd. Reach out using human emotion to make your rational story more compelling.

After all, people will decide based on how they feel about your firm’s brand. Why not do all you can to influence how they feel?

To see examples of B2B brand strategy and professional services examples please visit our client page.

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“What Matters Now” – A Wake Up Call For Business Leaders

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

While we anxiously await delivery of our copies of Professor Gary Hamel’s latest tome, “What Matters Now“, we wanted to share some of the main thoughts being promoted.Clearly, the business world is in a state of flux.

Hamel’s book promises to present an agenda for leaders everywhere who are eager to. . .

  • reverse the tide of commoditization
  • defeat bureaucracy
  • astonish their customers
  • foster extraordinary contribution
  • outrun change
  • build a company that’s truly fit for the future

Continue reading ““What Matters Now” – A Wake Up Call For Business Leaders”

If You Believe Your People Are Engaged, Think Again

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

We recently came across an old, but provocative article in The Economist entitled, “Corporate culture: The view from the top, and bottom“.

It detailed findings from the “National Governance, Culture and Leadership Assessment”, a survey based on thousands of American employees “from every rung of the corporate ladder”.

Key findings from our perspective:

  • “41% of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values, only 14% of employees swallow this.”
  • “27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. Also only 4% agree.”
  • “43% of those surveyed described their company’s culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion – what researcher Dov Seidman calls ‘blind obedience”.
  • “54% saw their employee’s culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr. Seidman calls “informed acquiescence”.
  • “Only 3% fell into the category of “self-governance”, in which everyone is guided by a ‘set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company’s mission'”.

Behind all this is the growing gap between what business needs and what matters to people.

By not creating a meaningful balance between the two, companies seem to alienating people more and more. Company efforts to engage and align employees using traditional messages and rewards are falling on deaf ears.

The emotive branding process seeks to bridge this damaging gap. Our clients walk away with a clear route to a more meaningful position in the hearts and minds of people. They put to use the tools we develop to change the attitudes and behavior of the people behind the brand.

It boils down to this simple formula: Why + Emotions = Meaning.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.