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Tag: Empathy

To AI Builders and Brand Leaders: Vibe Code Is the Real Moat

Posted on by Emotive Brand

AI isn’t about shipping faster. It’s about standing for something no one else can fake. Your competitors can copy your features. They can’t clone your conviction. They can’t duplicate your “why.”

That’s Vibe Code: the emotional source code behind every product, every interaction, every moment your brand earns trust. It’s not soft; it’s the hardest thing to build, and the only thing that lasts.

At Emotive Brand, we don’t write code. We architect the beliefs that make your code matter.

For years, we’ve helped visionary leaders prove a simple truth: Emotion isn’t a tactic. Emotion is the only strategy that works. The brands that lead in AI today (OpenAI, Notion, Anthropic) aren’t just technically better. Users feel what those companies believe. They choose them because of it.

Vibe Code isn’t about programming. It’s about positioning your AI’s purpose so powerfully that every feature reflects it.

  • We decode your conviction into brand principles that guide every product decision.
  • We build positioning that turns your AI’s POV into competitive advantage.
  • We design brand experiences that make your beliefs tangible at every touchpoint.
  • We measure meaning, because what you believe, and how you make people feel, is your value prop.

If you’re serious about building AI that lasts, you need more than models and features. You need a brand built on belief so clear, users never mistake your product for anyone else’s.

Technical parity is coming for everyone. Only belief will set you apart.

If you’re working on an AI brand, whether you’re defining, launching, or evolving, let’s talk.

Because if you don’t own your Vibe Code, your market will forget you. If you want to lead with belief, and make it unmistakable, that’s our work.

Is Your Vision a Fish Bowl or a Great Lake?

Posted on by Emotive Brand

That swirling sensation? It’s emotional whiplash from seesawing markets and topsy turvy headlines. Yet through it all, as a leader of business, brand, or culture, you must not only find your center, but rally and inspire others to keep moving forward.

So how do people do that?

In the throws of disruption, we don’t seek momentum in a spreadsheet. We turn inward, guided by what we truly believe—about how the world works, what’s possible for ourselves and others, and the nature of change.

Rising from our deeply held beliefs, internal narratives shape our decisions. They determine whether we forge ahead or swim in circles.

What Really Limits Growth

The classic goldfish analogy illuminates how self-limiting beliefs stifle our potential. It’s commonly said that the size of the goldfish is determined by the size of their environment—that they grow to their full 12-inch-ish size only when their habitat is expansive enough.

The truth is more nuanced. The growth potential of a goldfish is in fact curtailed by the poor, polluted water quality that inevitably results from too-small aquariums or bowls. Their environment turns toxic.

Applying this principle to leadership, the question becomes: Is your vision meaningful and bold enough to foster the shared belief and forward-looking mindset needed to fuel success and expand impact? Or does it limit creativity and stunt growth?

Yes, by this logic, your vision for the future is the goldfish habitat. The scale, daring, and ambition it represents (or lacks) all come together to set the bounds of what’s possible and expected, thereby dictating the emotional climate in which your team or organization operates. Just like water quality for our finned friends.

A Sink or Swim Moment for Leaders

Right now, it may be tempting to downsize your ambitions. At the macroeconomic level, markets are plunging one day, only to rebound the next. At the human level, the percentage of engaged employees is falling, a drop seen only twice in the past 12 years, in 2020 and 2024.

But this is a time for big thinking and rethinking. Because in an economy already shaken by constant change and disruption, those who stand still and scale back, frozen by fear, will be left behind when the economic growth steadies.

Applying the goldfish theory to your vision, you can test the waters and adjust accordingly.

Are your ambitions too small to allow your organization to thrive instead of merely survive? “Safe” doesn’t inspire innovation, confidence, or drive. And with so few possibilities in play, an undersized vision is too easily polluted by negativity.

Do you believe that in this time of change there is opportunity to regroup and reimagine? Your people can sense whether your vision is rooted in scarcity or abundance, and team behavior and outcomes are direct reflections.

Are you paying attention to how people are feeling, and how you want them to feel? It’s time to examine your beliefs—how they dictate your internal narrative and the bounds of the vision you share with the world. Be sure you’re generating emotional propulsion instead of pollution.

Culture Transformation: Give Your Employees a Reason to Believe

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The Unspoken Truth

Feel the weight of it. In conference rooms across the world, leaders unveil visions meant to inspire, yet faces remain blank, hearts unmoved. This isn’t just a momentary disconnect. It’s the emotional void where transformation goes to die.

When 30% of your people feel invisible and 65% feel their contributions evaporate into thin air, they’re not just unhappy—they’re unreachable. The most brilliant strategy means nothing to a soul that doesn’t believe.

Belief Matters When Stakes Are High

We stand at the edge of a new emotional landscape. The old certainties have dissolved into air. Promotions are fewer. Pay bumps are smaller. IPOs are on hold. The promise of financial upside isn’t doing what it used to.

And your employees are paying attention.

As Carolyn Moore, a Chief People Officer coach who works with high-growth leaders puts it:

“Employees need a reason to believe.
And if you don’t give them one, they’ll go.”

 

She’s right. Your best people don’t just want to feel appreciated. They want to feel their work is meaningful, that it’s leading somewhere, and that it’s worth staying for. Without that belief, they’ll start weighing other options, whether they’re actively job-hunting or not.

The Beautiful Barriers We Build

What gets in the way isn’t bad intent. It’s leadership focus in the wrong place:

  • Values with no follow-through. When values live on posters but not in practice, people stop trusting what you say.
  • Inconsistent leadership. Mixed messages from the top fracture belief and wear people down.
  • Cultural noise. Endless initiatives, shifting priorities, and overuse of the word “transformation” make it hard to know what really matters.
  • Emotional blind spots. Most organizations don’t know how their employees actually feel, and even fewer know what to do with that insight.

The Power of Emotional Clarity

Belief isn’t built through behavior metrics. It’s built through emotional clarity.

At Emotive Brand, we use an approach called Emotional Acceleration. It’s a way to move people from understanding what you’re trying to do to believing in it enough to act.

It starts with a simple question: How do people feel right now? Not what they are doing. Not what they are producing. What are they feeling?

Through an Emotional Audit, we identify the gap between the emotional experience people are having today and the one they need in order to connect, align, and commit.

From Belief to Belonging

When you create reasons to believe, something extraordinary happens. People who moved through days on autopilot suddenly awaken to possibility. Teams that operated from obligation begin to move with purpose.

Belief isn’t soft. It’s strategic.

If your employees don’t believe their work matters, they’ll stop investing in it. But when they do? They push further. They stay longer. They build better.

Belief is what turns a bold vision into a shared one. It’s what makes a culture feel like a place worth belonging to. And in today’s talent market, it may be your greatest competitive advantage.

The Courage to Feel

The most profound business transformation isn’t something you implement. It’s something you feel—together.

Will you have the courage to discover what your people truly believe? Will you dare to build your future on emotional truth?

So ask yourself: Do your people have a reason to believe?

Because if they don’t, you’ve got work to do.

Roundtable with Bloomerang CEO Dennis Fois and CMO Ann Fellman: Part 1

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The Power of Emotion

One of the most purposeful organizations we’ve ever collaborated with, Bloomerang helps nonprofits raise more with the end-to-end giving platform and expert team built for purpose.

This has been a particularly rewarding partnership, with client-agency alchemy arising from a shared belief. It’s the idea embedded in our name—that strategic use of emotion is central to the success of brands and businesses.

At the risk of making them blush, Bloomerang’s CEO Dennis Fois and CMO Ann Fellman are the kind of leaders we call Visionary Reinventors. They have the emotional intelligence and daring to push higher, and look deeper, for the good of their business, people, industry, and the 23,000 nonprofits they serve.

They were gracious enough to sit down with us for a roundtable discussion exploring how emotion is core to driving their tremendous growth.

 

Emotive Brand:  When you composed the RFP, emotion was front and center in terms of how you thought about success. We’re curious—where does this passion for emotion come from? What was missing from the equation prior to our work together?

Dennis:  My feelings were that Bloomerang fell too much on the empathy side, without any bite or desire or drive or ambition. The opportunity here is to change the [nonprofit] industry, where there’s a scarcity mindset—that you can’t ask for more. They [nonprofits] read bad reports: “Oh, Giving Tuesday was down.” The academia around it is depressing. And so there is this construct of constraints and not abundance. I want to create a bright light of ambition–fast-charging, but also with hope and optimism.

This is a time when we’ve never seen so much generational wealth. There are over 11 million millionaires in the United States alone. We’ve never had this amount of disposable income. There’s literally no reason why giving shouldn’t be going up every year. So this idea for emotion, this passion, needs to come through.

I want to sit on a rocking chair on a ranch when I’m older and reflect that we built a generational company that is looked on as, “They actually shook things up. They were the catalysts for more investment, more technology, better resources.”

But if you connect yourself to the industry and say, “We’re going to do more here,” then you need to bring empathy while also being a bit of a challenger.

Emotive Brand:  I’ve been sitting in a group of management consultants for the past two days, and one of the things that we heard loud and clear again and again was that leaders who are all empathy are the worst leaders imaginable—empathy has to be conjoined with performance for any impact to actually occur.

Dennis:  That’s well said. Yesterday at our kickoff, we talked about the issue that we have–and that’s complacency. We are doing so well. Our retention rates are off the hook. I have never seen anything like it. And you could say, “We are on a tear here,” but if you’re being intellectually honest, you say, “Are the gross retention rates, the fact that your customers don’t churn, because you’re that good? Or is it the feature of a complacent industry?”

If you allow the standards of the industry to define your standards, you’re done. And so there needs to be a perpetual engine, an internal drive to lift and change the industry, to overcome inertia. It’s very easy to forgive yourself for mediocre performance when you’re doing good work.

It’s a wonderful blanket of comfort to say, “Yeah, but I’m working on something really important. I helped that nonprofit. I am doing life-changing work here.” It’s a dynamic that we have to manage.

Emotive Brand:  Ann, amidst all the success that Dennis has just outlined, what did you believe was missing from the brand today or the equation that you were bringing to market?

Ann:  I grew up in B2B marketing. My whole career was tech, and speaking tech. I’d read paragraphs and be like, ‘What on earth did I just read? I have no idea what that said. That means absolutely nothing to me.’

So I’ve always believed that this is not B2B. This is B2H. We are selling to human beings. We are selling to people who have emotions. Whether I’m making a software sale, or buying some consulting, I’m going to be emotional about spending that money. I just am. And so I’ve always been one to say, “Can we push the brand, the marketing, the message to an emotional level, because we’re humans.” We’re not selling to computers–yet.

It’s okay to put emotional color and commentary into your message and how you show up, because it’s more enjoyable. You remember when you have fun doing something. We had a wild kickoff yesterday, talking about some pretty serious stuff. We’re asking people to work harder, do more, and at the same time, we’re laughing and making jokes about poop emojis– [laughter]

Dennis:  Sorry.

Ann:  And so we’re being real human beings with emotion to connect. We’re going to do hard stuff, but we’re going to have joy in that. So when we think about what makes a really good company, yeah, you got to have all the tech, but you’ve got to have a powerful story that connects with humans, right there, front and center.

Emotive Brand:  That’s amazing. We just wrote a white paper about the role of emotion, and the research says it’s even more important in B2B. Maybe because the decisions are big and weighty, and there’s more riding on it.

Ann:  Yeah. You could lose your job if you make the wrong decision–put in some really crappy tech and you end up destroying the teams, their momentum, and morale. There’s so many layers of emotion behind these decisions.

Emotive Brand:  Our experience working with many tech companies over many years is that they undervalue the so-called soft skills and soft metrics that actually drive not just decision-making, but the change and transformation necessary for those companies to show up in the world in a really significant way. It’s interesting how much that’s pushed to the margins, especially in the world of B2B, where to Amber’s point, I think it has the most potential to make a difference.

Dennis:  Yes. This is a really good point. I understand where it comes from, especially when you’re talking about a technology company. Listen, the technology companies are by and large product companies. The goal as you scale is to sell the same product over and over. And if you’re not careful, it creates a very inside-out view—you want to stay very close to the true essence of the product, describe that in the best possible way and get everybody to say the same things over and over again. Obviously, that avoids a real understanding of how people buy, so that’s where leadership needs to step in.
Most organizations want to sell based on the value of change, and you can only sell the change if you have stories.

Ann:  It’s always the phrasing of ‘this thing does blah-blah-blah.’ But no. Now you need to fill in the last piece, which is, so I can do what? Who cares? So I can raise more, so then I can deliver more.

Emotive Brand:  As you frame the success of your leadership team, I can’t help but think that on some level, it’s because there is a greater sense of emotional investment, not just in each other, but in the success. It cannot only be a rational desire for success.

Dennis:  I think what all of us have in common is that it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to be working on a project like this. It’s where unbelievable financial success and outcomes and high quality company-building comes together with a genuine world impact. It’s not a unicorn story where we’re changing the world through AI. No, it’s real societal impact. Normally, you have to pick one of the two.

Ann:  Yeah, we chose the hard path. We chose to push ourselves further.

Emotive Brand:  It’s like a reflection of what you want for nonprofits. The bar raising.

Ann:  We’re choosing to raise the bar, and we’re going to take our teams and our customers with us in that choice.

Emotive Brand:  Yeah. I mean I love the proverbial eating your own dog food, but I’m curious, do you see brand as the mechanism to communicate that to your prospects and current customers?

Ann:  It has to. No customer wakes up thinking about your business every day or your product, unless there’s an absolute problem. So your brand is that positive manifestation of the outcomes, and then you’ve got to put it front and center, all the time.

Emotive Brand:  And so is success in your mind if Bloomerang is always connoted with unlocking that sense of abundance and opportunity? Is that the ultimate kind of emotional unlock that you hope to achieve?

Dennis:  I think so, because if we successfully do what you just said, then you basically blast it through all of the excuses not to grow. Now you’re confronted with your own reality–what is driving you? Well hopefully, it’s that passion for the purpose.

 

Our gratitude goes out to Ann and Dennis for taking the time to reflect with us. Keep an eye out for Part 2 of our conversation, focused on the power of partnership. We’ll look into the alchemy of Bloomerang and Emotive Brand’s stellar collaboration.

The Future Belongs to Those Who Make Us Feel

Posted on by Emotive Brand

As technological, political, and societal shifts accelerate at mind-scrambling speed, not all are lost. A new type of leader is rising to meet this unprecedented moment: Visionary reinventors.

While more traditional leaders are disoriented by growing complexity, visionary reinventors maintain clarity, direction, and unstoppable momentum.

They know that as AI ascends, uncertainty abounds, and culture morphs and even fractures, one thing remains constant–the strategic power of human emotion.

By defining, honing, and owning the emotional impact of the brands and organizations they lead, visionary reinventors forge meaningful and enduring connections with customers, investors, and employees.

This emotion-centered approach empowers a fiercely proactive posture. Visionary reinventors don’t wait for the world to be ready.

These modern leaders move people, markets, and industries above features and functionality to the higher ground of belief, a place of new perspective, where change is not feared–but desired, demanded, and inevitable.

They know that innovation alone does not and can not unleash true disruption. Visionary reinventors understand that today, more than ever, disruption unfolds from an emotional epicenter.

Passionate conviction ripples out, igniting the energy of a movement. What once felt like foundational truth is revealed as dogma, suddenly inadequate and unbearable, making way for new possibilities and deeper purpose.

After all, the elevation of human potential is what makes technology truly powerful. And in ever more saturated markets, how products make us feel is what drives their value.

Consider these two examples, each with a functional and emotional premise.

image-functional-and-emotional-premise-examples

Make no mistake–the emotional framing captures truth. It simply translates the functional premise into the human meaning, painting a picture not of a product but of a better future for people.

This is how visionary reinventors communicate. They don’t convince—they inspire belief. They don’t pull people along—they create a strong emotional current that moves people to alignment and action.

Ideas propelled by emotion have a magnetism and magnitude that can’t be neatly contained in any pitch deck. How they make people feel can’t be replicated by competitors. And once unleashed and embraced, they can’t be stopped.

Emotion’s catalytic role in transformative leadership lives at the core of Emotive Brand’s approach. Every day, we have the privilege of partnering with visionary reinventors to reimagine brands, create categories, and ignite change.

We’ve seen it firsthand. The future isn’t built by those who wait for the world to be ready—it’s built by those who make the world feel ready.

The Business of Transformation is Human

Posted on by Amber Johnson

How we feel matters. It determines—and has the power to transform—how we show up in the world and for each other, and in the end, the type of impact we create. We see it in our work with Emotive Brand clients all the time.

The most rewarding part of strategic writing and design is not spotting our work in the wild—perched on grocery store shelves, splashed across websites, or looming large on billboards. It’s having the opportunity to change how people think and feel about their work. You know, that thing they spend most of their limited time on earth doing.

At Emotive, we get to see clients’ faces brighten as we reframe what their company and brand stand for, to illuminate higher purpose and uncover deeper meaning.

When the strategy and creative are right, it’s clear–because sparks of transformation flicker before your eyes. Client teams light up with new ideas to shape all areas of the business. Their energy level and ambition rise. Too many leaders say emotion is intangible. We know it’s palpable.

How people feel matters more than ever, and can tank or propel the success of brands and businesses. Here are three reasons why.

Humans now face constant change and uncertainty.
The seismic jolt of the pandemic keeps reverberating, alongside a push to get people back into the office. There’s the specter of layoffs, political division, and the high cost of living. With technology, epitomized by AI, progressing faster than humans can adapt, upheaval is neverending.

“Change leaves people and organizations feeling confused, vulnerable, and fractured at a time when resilience, cohesion, and collaboration are necessary to perform at the highest levels.”

—Harvard Business Review

 

People are exhausted by constant change. So if you want to spearhead transformation, you have to give them something worth caring about, something they can feel and believe in.

People are fed up with corporate bullshit.
The scourge of shrinkflation. Greenwashing. Planned obsolescence. Employees’ and consumers’ tolerance for being deceived is depleting. That’s why the number of B Corps and Benefit Corporations keeps climbing, along with the popularity of de-influencers and the “right to repair” movement.

“During the challenging year of 2020, only 4.5% of B Corps failed, compared to 12.5% of American businesses overall.”

—Federal Reserve Board

 

Getting ahead of these issues, instead of waiting to be exposed and called out, is not just the right thing to do. By building trust and loyalty with employees and consumers, a proactive approach can save and sustain businesses.

Humans need more than products and paychecks.
Your brand or organization has a golden opportunity to lift people up at a time when all of us are fighting battles that wear us down. Like navigating education and healthcare systems that fall short, being squeezed as part of the sandwich generation, or needing purpose at work but struggling to afford soaring rents as a Gen Zer.

Retention, loyalty, and growth—the aims of transformation programs—are best served through genuine connection and alignment with how people feel and what they care about.

“The human emotions of people working at the centre of a transformation play a pivotal role in its success or failure.”

—EY and Oxford University report

 

At Emotive, we leverage emotion to transform brands and businesses in ways that contribute, even just a little bit, to a better world for people. No mere paycheck can compare.

How Do You Orient Your Team When Everything Seems Uncertain?

Posted on by Jamey Aiken

The old axiom about uncertainty being the only certainty in business seems quaint given today’s headlines: Historically low unemployment. Hiring shortages one day and hiring freezes the next. Creeping inflation. Shaky markets. Unexpected layoffs. It’s whiplash inducing. And it’s the world we live in.

As the economy shifts and shudders, leaders are challenged to make strategic decisions with increasingly limited foresight. And employees? They’re left feeling disoriented, confused, and vulnerable. It’s a recipe for getting stuck. People become less willing to make mistakes, to stick their necks out for each other, or to take the smart risks necessary to adapt to the changing environment. In a time when flexibility and agility are critical qualities to business success, many organizations find themselves in a state of emotional contraction, unable to zag gracefully forward.

The problem is alignment. Conventional objective-setting tools simply fall short as a way to get everyone on the same page because they’re based on past assumptions rather than the competing signals of the future. Plus, they don’t give employees the right context for seeing themselves in that changing future—much less get them excited about it. For companies to navigate wave after wave of uncertainty, you need a more responsive approach:

Understand how your employees are feeling right now.
Are they cynical or optimistic? Are they barely hanging on or feeling enthused and inspired? Do they understand the vision for where the company is going? Or do they need more evidence and explanation? The more understood and recognized people feel in times of uncertainty, the more opportunities you have to deepen trust and allegiance. If you ask, people will let you know how aligned they are with a vision for the future and the strategy to get there. You can identify what dissonances need to be reconciled. Where the sources of doubt take hold. What fears need to be assuaged before they grow out of proportion. Powerful alignment—the kind required to change and adapt with the business environment—is only possible if you have clear insight into the emotional state of your organization at any given moment.

Address employees’ emotions with a clear story of how you plan to move forward.
While emotional understanding can improve conventional objective-setting by creating deeper connections with people, you still need to establish a clear point of view that will guide your organization toward its future. All businesses have multiple critical initiatives going on at any given moment: corporate strategy, product, go-to-market, brand, people & culture. If the narrative about how they connect is haphazard or unintentional—or confused by external market conditions—people will start quilting their own narratives. The result is multiple, often conflicting stories that lead to different end states. In other words, brand confusion. You must cut through the noise of function-specific goals, objectives, KPIs, and OKRs to make business and brand more emotionally relevant to the people in an organization.

Get employees focused on a future that they are empowered to create.
In times of flux, business leaders face pressure to leap into action—to batten down the hatches, set a course, and prepare teams to brace for the worst. But what employees most need today is leadership that inspires people with purpose and meaning amidst uncertainty. If your organization is feeling trapped by mounting performance pressure and shrinking time horizons, you must give every employee the ability to see, believe, and participate in creating a future that they know is not only possible but necessary. Emotion is the accelerant, the enabler, the multiplier, and the amplifier that connects powerful ideas more deeply and resonantly to the people who need them.

To move your business forward and ultimately grow in times of uncertainty, you need better ways to connect to what employees are feeling. And you need to equip them not with a best guess about the future, but rather with a clear picture of how they’ll create their future. When employees feel they have the agency and ability to control their destiny, they lean into the future with an entirely different spirit. This is how you translate all the ambition that underpins your brand into a coherent set of actions that keep an organization aligned, confident, and positive as it speeds into the uncertain future.

Entering Your Growth Stage: Position Your Brand, Not Your Product

Posted on by Emotive Brand

You just closed your Series A and you’re ready to share your story with the world. You built revolutionary technology that will be better, faster, cheaper—or all three—than anything else in the market. Now you need to hire top talent, build brand awareness, and equip your sales team to drive revenue. You know how innovative your technology is and you’re ready to create a new category.

With customers in beta and limited clear competitors, you’re likely tempted to focus solely on your product and how much better your product is than anything else on the market. But a strong product vision, budding features, and benefits aren’t enough to cut through the competitive space, lure top talent, and enable something more important to build. Leading solely with your product—even the most disruptive—is a mistake. We’ve seen this approach fail, time and again.

You’ve got to give people something bigger to believe in.

If you want to connect with your customers, partners, and prospective employees, you need to differentiate yourself with a well-developed brand. Lead with this brand and then punctuate with your product.

Positioning Beyond the Product

Positioning, the first step in branding, is about the space you carve out in the market. Great positioning communicates the one thing you want people to know about your brand and explains how you are truly differentiated, relevant, and singular in nature.

When we meet with founders, however, they are often focused only on the product. Product positioning is not the same as brand positioning. Product marketing focuses on features and benefits, speeds and feeds, and even ROI.

That is not enough to compete today.

Bringing the Outside In

Your brand positioning is an articulation of you as a company and your product: who you are, what you do, how do you do it better and different, why you matter, and—importantly—why anyone should care.

If you try to articulate your brand positioning by just looking at your product and direct competitors, your brand will fall short. You need to bring the outside in. The most important outsider to focus on first? Your prospective customer.

Yes, you’ve spent time with your customers. You’ve probably talked about the competitor offerings they’ve bought or considered. But do you have empathy for them? Many prospects say they’re interested in a “better” solution but when it comes down to purchasing, are they ready? Do you understand what it takes to displace a legacy solution? What does your buyer need to know and feel to have the confidence to do a rip and replace? To earn this confidence, you need a brand that stands for something meaningful and different.

Don’t limit your discovery work to how your brand compares to entrenched competitors. Empathy means understanding all of the demands on a customers’ time and wallet; it’s about a wide-angle view. The people in your target buyer audience have a long list of priorities for the year. Cloud migration, data replication, security—these corporate initiatives all vie for their attention and budget. Your brand needs to not only reflect the reality of your direct competitors but these other players too.

Additionally, take the time to look outside of your category. Learn from other technologies that have succeeded in similar situations—displaced legacy technologies, created net-new infrastructure, used AI or ML to solve the toughest of challenges. Data analytics, cloud migration, and modern data infrastructure plays are changing the technology landscape. You can learn a lot by extending your competitive evaluation beyond your expected primary competitive set.

Finally, tap your investors as a resource. If you’ve made it to the launch date, your investors are a great external resource you can tap. They’ve seen many companies in your space—including direct competitors and adjacent players. Test your positioning and messaging with them and use them as you build your brand.

Pay Attention to Voice

What you say is important, but how you say it matters just as much—if not even more critical. Voice is an extension of your brand; when your voice matches the kind of brand you are building, magic happens. Take Snowflake, for instance. Snowflake came onto the scene with a product they marketed as a “cloud data warehouse”. While this product name was new, the category “data warehouse” was not. Snowflake made a splash with cheeky messaging and a differentiated but predictable brand voice. They put up billboard messages like “Love at first petabyte”, “Mi Data Es Su Data”, “The Data Sharehouse Has Arrived” and “Ghost Your On-prem”. This voice strengthens the brand and creates more connections between the company and its audiences.

Make an Emotional Connection

Even if you are selling deep tech, you can’t ignore emotions. Customers don’t connect with features; they connect with an emotion that a product drives. Think about how a netops engineer will feel when they learn that your security product can stop 99% of all phishing scams. Will they experience relief? Will they feel powerful? Drill down to that idea and make sure your brand and your messaging reflect that emotion.

Give Them Something to Believe In

We’ve worked with many Series A companies that go to market with a solid brand but without a fully realized product. The company leads with an initial use case but, longer-term, they have much larger ambitions. Even so, their brand works for today and for the future.

Your brand can—and should—be aspirational. It should enable early adopters to buy into what you offer right now and communicate what customers will receive from you over time. A future-facing brand will also help attract talent; candidates want to work for a company with technology that has the potential for impact. And, an overarching brand can ignite a tribe of people who share your beliefs and will follow your brand as you grow and expand your offering.

Branding is not the time to be introspective. When you look outside, you develop empathy for your customers, understand their emotions, and take a wide view of your industry. An outside-in perspective helps you build a brand that can cut through the clutter, grab attention, and differentiate with meaning.

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

Transforming Business Through Empathy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy and Business? Some say no, we say yes.

There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy.

Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own.

Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position to one that is robust in meaning and purpose.

Empathy as a driver of brand strategy

When you’re close-in to a business’s daily operations it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful and purposeful dimension for your brand requires you to step out of your own perceptions of what’s good and valuable about your brand. It forces you to look at your brand – and everything it represents – through the lens of human needs, values, and aspirations. Through an empathetic approach, it’s easier to see the meaningful outcomes people experience based on their interactions with your brand. As such, empathy leads you to the deep-rooted, emotional connections that can be forged to create strong and enduring bonds. You won’t reach this point without allowing yourself to take the necessary steps back to the most common and fundamental needs, values and aspirations of humanity.

Empathy as a cultural ethos

Your business is a set of policies and procedures that have been conceived and designed to produce desired metrics (e.g. productivity, efficiency, profitability). Empathy can be used to elevate how well these functions not only produce the desired metrics, but do so in a way that aligns to the needs, values, and aspirations of the people involved. Empathy helps you create a more human-centric culture, by encouraging you to rethink and reconfigure the nature of your policies and procedures. As such, empathy helps you better engage and motivate employees. This means they’ll be far more likely to listen to, appreciate, and follow your leadership.

Empathy as an engine of innovation

If your business, like many, is struggling with hyper-competition and increasing product commoditization, innovation will be a primary focus. Nothing inspires innovation better than empathy. By encouraging your development people to “walk in your customer’s shoes”, either literally or through sensed experience, you bring them closer to what’s really important and valuable to the market. An empathetic attitude sheds new light on what’s needed now and how to best address that need or opportunity.

Empathy as a leadership practice

We’re all born empathetic. As babies we all had the capacity to perceive how others were feeling and what they were experiencing. Sadly, over time, we lose this skill. However, it is remarkably easy to revive and put to good use. Mindful leadership is the goal. All it requires is that you adapt your leadership presentation and style based on an understanding of your follower’s needs, values, and aspirations. You don’t necessarily change your management objectives, you simply radically improve your leadership performance by forging more meaningful connections with your followers.

If you are looking into the future, looking for new ways to transform your business, and have questions about your brand’s ability to navigate the rough seas ahead, you’ll want to carefully consider your own, and your organization’s, capacity for empathy. The strongest businesses going forward will be known for how their meaning and purpose-led behavior enhances both individual and collective well-being. They only reach this strong position by embracing empathy every step of the way.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
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Cultivating Empathy: Essential in Uncertain Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy in Uncertain Times

These days, everything feels unsettled. We’ve watched travel discontinue, lively offices expeditiously shift to remote work, restaurants and small businesses shut their doors, cities still and quiet, as the landscape of our global economy shifts on a daily basis. Recognition that this COVID-19 state of living, working, and doing business will not be ephemeral is settling in. We’re seeing first hand as our clients are forced to quickly adapt—make swift decisions, innovate new solutions, and reimagine the way they’ve always done business.

It’s clear that the weight communications hold has heavied. Executives are reaching out to their employees, eager to instill both calm and action. Businesses are connecting with stakeholders aiming to secure trust. Brands are reaching out to customers, motivated to emotionally resonate with consumers’ current state of mind. These connections, big and small, have never been more critical. Empathy has never been more essential.

Getting Closer in a Socially Distanced World

Empathy is an innate human skill that is available to each and every one of us. As such, it is a talent that stands ready to be reanimated through leadership, organizational behavior, and brand behavior.

As your brand aims to re-create a collective sense of what truly matters to people, and responds accordingly, it has the opportunity to take on a new and more emotionally valuable role in people’s lives. Employees will feel closer to your organization if they feel it is working hard in favor of their interests. Customers will feel a sense of kinship if they feel your brand truly understands them. Now is the time to think about how the experience of your organization’s products, marketing, and support all confirm its commitment to putting people first. How do you ensure that people walk away from every communication feeling they’ve been listened to, that their needs (both emotional and rational) have been better met, and their fears have been quieted? That every connection means one step closer together?

Redefining Empathy

At Emotive Brand, we see empathy as something a bit more than simply “sharing someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation.” (the dictionary definition). To us, it’s more powerful than both sympathy and compassion combined. Empathy is two-fold: both understanding and action. It’s the ability to truly feel and understand someone else’s situation—their emotional state of mind, their needs, desires, and fears. To use that empathetic understanding and take action that is in tune with the person and their state—ultimately improving it.

It’s no secret that business has never been strong on empathy. The closest it usually comes is in consumer research, but that science often leads to inhuman numerical analyses of the human psyche. People are notorious for telling researchers what they want to hear and are often unable to articulate what they really want or need.

Empathetic understanding is not necessarily an empirical process. Rather it is an experiential one leading to deep insights and a profound understanding and appreciation of the lives of others. It is a way to feel the hopes, dreams, fears, and concerns of the people your business seeks to impact. It is a way to vicariously experience what they see and feel when they use your products, experience your marketing, and deal with your people. This informs you of how you can retune and refine what your business does in ways that better reflect the insights you’ve gained through empathetic understanding. This also leads you to new ways of doing business that is more aligned with today’s world and more resonant with where people are today.

It’s Time to Rediscover Your Innate Empathy Skills

The smallest children show empathy for others, but we tend to lose this skill as we enter the mainstream of life. We can, however, reawaken this valuable talent and put it to good use.

The first step is to turn up the dial of two other innate traits: curiosity and caring. Think of the people who your brand impacts as people you know, love, and treasure. Try to imagine the perspective they have on what’s happening, the attitudes and beliefs that drive their behaviors, and the emotional nature of their new daily realities. Give them permission to have values and needs other than your own. Don’t ascribe right and wrong, rather strive to find out more about what drives them, what fulfills them, and what brings them greater peace of mind.

Empathy Has Rewards

For leaders today, empathy might be your most powerful tool. By better understanding what makes followers tick, empathetic leaders can find ways to make their new ideas, messages, strategies, and dreams more relevant and emotionally important. This shifts the response from followers, not only in aligning them to your vision, but also energizing them to work better together, develop new ideas, and strive for the highest goals.

The rewards multiply for an organization in which empathy is a core practice today. More resonance, greater impact. More appealing, relevant, and differentiated products. More compelling, activating, and loyalty-building marketing. More innovation, collaboration, and spirit flowing within the organization and greater stability to underpin your business.

If you want help embedding empathy into your executive and company communications during this time, please reach out.

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