Fast Forward Archives - Emotive Brand

Navigating the New Norm: Fast Forward for Efficient Growth and Strategic Stability

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Tracy Lloyd

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure to enhance efficiency, sharpen competitiveness, and improve profitability—all at the speed your business demands.

As a brand strategy firm, we understand that many of our clients, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, need a much more agile approach to address the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a six-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important. The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Below is an outline of what we tackle each week to gain momentum and drive impact.

Weeks 1-2: Immersion and Audit
We embark on a comprehensive week of intelligence gathering and analysis. We dive deep into your brand, business, and industry, fully immersing ourselves to gain insights and understanding.

We’ll assess your current positioning to distinguish your brand from key competitors, interview stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working, identify white space opportunities for you to own in market, evaluate your latest brand and product messaging, and present a comprehensive audit of our discoveries.

Week 3: Workshop
Based on our findings from the immersion and audit, we develop, explore, and workshop new ideas to enhance your positioning and messaging, ensuring alignment with internal teams.

Weeks 4-6: Develop, Refine, and Deliver
During the final phase of Fast Forward, we focus on producing your bespoke deliverables that will provide the highest possible value and impact on your organization. Below are just a few examples of deliverables you can choose from after we’ve aligned on the key challenges you are facing:

Implement your augmented positioning and messaging through website landing pages that stand out and move the needle
Refresh your sales deck to amplify the impact of your elevated story
Craft a narrative to align and empower cross-functional teams with a unifying vision and strategy to harmonize your efforts

At the end of the six-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process of our Fast Forward offering.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation. Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you looking to make an immediate impact?

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

Fast Forward Your Narrative: COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant?

Posted on April 2, 2020 by Tracy Lloyd

COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant?

At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, companies were scrambling to respond to the moment. But as recognition sets in that these changes are here to stay, we must respond to a new movement: one that moves fast, with feeling, for the future.

The landscape of brand, business, and culture has been undeniably transformed. So, we must figure out how to communicate in ways that were empathetic and relevant, contextually aware, human, and sensitive. Given our new normal—a constant state of change—today’s leaders, brand stewards, and their teams must be extremely focused, maintain leadership amidst uncertainty, and have the ability to rapidly and dynamically re-evaluate what their company stands for, how it communicates, and why it’s vital to the world.

Making sure your Corporate Narrative resonates with customers, partners, and employees requires an agile strategy and clear communications that reflect your company in a way that is authentic and appropriate for this moment. There is no better time to lean into your brand, ensuring that it connects to both hearts and minds, knows what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.

We have developed a new program to meet these challenges that we’re calling Fast Forward. It efficiently develops one specifically-targeted Corporate Narrative to ensure you are on-brand in how you communicate with employees, customers, your wider partner ecosystem, boards, and investors.

The CEO Narrative enables CEOs to communicate a leadership vision appropriate for a moment that reaches all audiences.
The CMO Narrative is customized to enable CMOs and their marketing teams to communicate with external audiences, such as customers, partners, and boards.
The CHRO Narrative is designed to give CHROs and their teams the messages they need to speak with employees during this time.
The CRO Narrative is focused on sales with customers, prospects, and partners.

On this page, you’ll find our recommended approach to quickly assess and adjust your Corporate Narrative to ensure your company is in the best position for what is undoubtedly a new era for business.

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Business Growth Strategies for a Brand Turnaround

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Tracy Lloyd

Business Growth Won’t Last Forever

Business growth should never be taken for granted. Even when things look promising, your business could still be at risk for falling into a slump, or worse, taking a dive. It’s impossible to deny that the market is volatile and unpredictable. Competition is abundant, and all businesses lose market share at some point.

When revenue hits a speed bump, it’s common for leaders to anxiously ride it out. But when business growth really slows down, denial isn’t going to get you out of the rut. Leadership may react with a mad scramble to redirect the sinking ship: new products, new markets, or new acquisitions can transpire overnight. But if these changes occur in a C-suite silo, there’s a high probability your employees and core customers will feel left in the dark. And employees with varying ideas about the future and customers, who no longer feel connected to your business, can easily derail a growth strategy.

Misalignment only leaves more opportunity for your competitors to encroach on even more of your space. And when that happens, employee morale can sink deeper, recruiting becomes more challenging, and share prices may plummet as investors abandon ship. At this point your options are clear: execute a thoughtful, agile turnaround strategy or risk becoming obsolete.

Bringing Your Brand Along for the Ride

Some of the most common approaches to a turnaround strategy include increasing growth through new market penetration, tapping into new markets, pursuing alternate sales channels, developing new products, or expanding your customer base. Regardless of which avenue you follow, transforming your business without preparing your brand to adapt alongside it can jeopardize your plans for growth.

Consider the recent news of Tesla Motor’s offer to acquire SolarCity. With Tesla shares dropping 16% over the last year, Tesla turned to the acquisition as a business growth strategy. They could no longer afford to burn through the $2.2 billion dollars of the last 4 quarters. The acquisition was an obvious attempt to turn around Tesla’s business. The problem was that Tesla took the leap into solar energy without fully considering the consequences of the brand, and more specifically the people the brand matters to. And shares have plummeted even further since the deal’s announcement. What’s the cause? Apparently, investors aren’t on board with the idea of buying solar panels. Tesla misunderstood its target audience and will now have to backtrack to renew brand loyalty. Although this example shows long-term vision, business growth without a parallel brand strategy may have insurmountable long-term consequences for Tesla and SolarCity.

Map Brand to Business

Aligning your brand to your business as it undergoes a transformation is the best way to create a roadmap that is tailored for business growth. The vision for the business needs to guide all business decisions. By bringing your brand and business together, you’ll ensure that your business stays true to who you are, what you do, and why you matter. As you position your business to grow, respecting the underlying vision of the company will ensure that the growth is in line with what the brand stands for.

Brand strategy will address your key target audiences, your value proposition, your positioning, your narrative, and your go-to-market strategy. With these elements adjusted to reflect the business transformation, your brand will be prepared to roll out a strategic marketing plan. To really change the tide of business growth, the strategy needs to incorporate long-term goals with a short-term action plan. It needs to be measurable, too. Identify the key indicators of business growth and hold the business accountable as it transforms. A turnaround that shows improvement to employee engagement, brand perception, NPS, and customer loyalty will ultimately affect sales. And increasing top line revenue increases market share and for some, stock price.

It’s All About Execution

But that’s just the plan. Executing the brand strategy as the business shifts requires agility in the changing market. Too often, companies take a year to develop a strategy and by the time they’re ready to implement it, the market has shifted. Testing and iterating in real time will allow your business and brand to adapt quickly so that it remains relevant. It’s critical to develop a flexible strategy with participation from your sales and marketing team. They will provide necessary, immediate feedback from the people on the front line of your business. Their buy-in and shared responsibility creates alignment from the top-down. As the business turnaround happens, the sales and marketing teams drive the messaging to make sure your target audience is on board, too.

Achieving Sustainable Growth

Growth strategies are never achieved without a brand that is strong enough to weather the tides of change. Whether you’re looking to grow through market penetration, market development, alternative channels, product development, or expanding your customer base, your brand needs to lead the way. And change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. An agile, measurable approach that stays true to the long-term vision is key to turning around your company’s trajectory. Grow your brand and grow your business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

A Learning Culture Can Bring New Value to your Business

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Expertise in Learning?

Starting a new job or entering a new industry always entails a learning curve. People understand they have to learn quickly in order to survive. It’s the key to their success.

When people work closely in a business or specific industry, as experience builds and time accumulates they often forget this sense of voracious learning. It becomes more and more difficult to see things in a new light. And some top leaders are stuck thinking in a silo.

Some call this ‘the paradox of expertise.’ As expertise increases, people struggle to notice possibilities, discern novel patterns, or see new prospects, ideas, or insights.

Out-Learning the Competition

Learning – studying and absorbing trends, market forces, new technology, research, and happenings within your industry and outside it – is key to success today. It will drive your business towards the future, keep your brand agile and able to shift as fast as the world you work within. Building a culture of voracious learners is one of the best things you can do for your business.

Here’s how to build a learning culture:

1. Look wide and far:

If you gather information from the same, ingrained sources as your competition, the findings and the decisions you make from those findings won’t stand out. Shifting perceptions requires widening the lens of where you’re looking. And innovation and creativity thrive on perception shifting.

Expanding your point of view and discovering a different angle requires bringing people with a diverse array of mindsets into the conversation. Experiment and adopt new ways of thinking, seeing, and working. What you do and how you think should never be contained. So examine what’s happening in other industries and draw parallels and note constrasts. In fact, the most established practices in one industry could be revolutionary when translated into another.

Interconnectivity is key to successful business today. And understanding a business and where it can go requires learning about the world at large and where you are situated within it. A learning culture can help bring new thinking, ideas, and opportunities to your business.

2. Learn collaboratively:

Collaboration hinges on humility. It’s important to listen as if you can learn something – asking questions, engaging fully, and being open to other angles. Everyone within your organization should have the mindset “I’m still learning” – no matter your role.

Admit when you don’t know something. Ask for help from different people. Gather an opinion from someone you don’t usually talk with. These kind of collaborative practices can be quite valuable.

A designer can learn a lot from a strategist, an accountant from a writer, a C-Suite leader from a new recruit, and vice versa. And always share your findings. Engaging in collaborative learning can take an organization to the next level.

3. Be open to what’s possible:

Don’t settle for the status quo. Ask: What can I learn now? What’s possible for my knowledge? My organization? Its products and/or services? Its people? The brand? The best brands of today are built for the future. By being open to what’s possible, you can position yourself to be at the cutting edge of that future.

So take interest in what you don’t know. Strive to gain new perspectives and new information. Expand your knowledge and the scope of your learning in order to fuel creativity, innovation, and agile decision making.

Learn to Thrive

Consider some learning-focused companies today that are thriving. The CEO of WD-40 Company, Garry Ridge, prides himself on building a learning-obsessed company culture. And rightly so. The focus Ridge placed on a voracious learning culture explains how how the company nearly tripled its share price since 2009.

Google has formalized informal and continuous learning, giving employees allocated time to explore their own interests within the workplace. GE has created programs such as Change Acceleration Process, meant to foster experiential and continuous learning and fuel innovation.

The examples are many. No innovative, cutting edge, top company today is at the top because they stopped asking questions. These companies are always curious and always learning.

Creating a learning culture can foster the business agility and open mindedness that businesses and brands require today. And leaders who put a premium on learning can help fuel a culture of learners that will shine from the inside out. So focus on learning as an asset and position your business for greatness.

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

Why Bring in an Outside Branding Agency?

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

In-House Mentality

The age old question of determining if you need to bring in an external branding agency is still relevant today. Whether it’s because of tight budgets, a hesitation about letting outsiders inside your business, or a general ‘we can just do it ourselves’ mentality, many companies look internally to tackle even their largest branding projects.

But whether it’s a repositioning, a new visual identity, or an all-around brand turnaround, this might be a mistake for businesses who really want to position themselves to thrive in a fast-paced, highly-competitive market.

What Value Can a Branding Agency Bring?

There are many benefits of bringing in an outside branding agency.

A fresh perspective:

It is easy to get stuck in old models of thinking. And those close to the business often have blinders on about what’s not working and what can be improved. As a result, an outside perspective is often key to fostering innovation, creativity, and problem solving. New questions arise. The conversation changes. People get unstuck and realigned. And key business problems are solved with efficiency.

Expertise and skill:

Agencies bring to bear a diverse array of experiences from many different industries. And this broad perspective is invaluable. Agencies have proven frameworks and methodologies to solve problems and uncover opportunities. As such, they can prescribe the best approach based on your specific situation and needs. And they have a team of professionals that have tackled all kinds of different business, brand, and culture challenges and bring that knowledge to the table for you. And it is this kind of expertise that guarantees a better positioned, more meaningful, effective, and impactful strategy.

The ability to move with speed:

Speed is key to competing today. So if your brand can’t move quickly, adapt dynamically, and fast forward itself towards the future, your business won’t be able thrive in today’s competitive landscape. A branding agency brings a dedicated focus to your project that is just not possible for an internal team that is already balancing a full plate. Also, financial investment in a project makes it more of a priority and guarantees the attention of executives that it needs to get it done.

Readiness for change:

Change is hard. And it’s often difficult for those inside your business to convince others on the inside that the change is right. The external perspective an agency brings along with proven experience could be what is needed to help your team take that strategic step forward. And once the strategy is approved inside the C-Suite, it is time to once again lean on the experience of the agency to develop a plan to successfully socialize it through the rest of the organization.

An understanding of the value of brand strategy:

Investing in a brand strategy means investing in your business. There’s great value in making a purposeful, meaningful brand strategy a core driver of an organization. But key players inside the organization might not hold the same opinion. There is much value to gain well beyond the marketing team. As a result, guidance communicating the value of investing in a brand strategy to everyone within your business is key to the projects success. Sales, product, human resources, customer success and engineering can all benefit greatly. An agency can help assure that you have the right level of support for it to pay off.

A long-term partnership:

A top branding agency engagement should bring value beyond just the current project at hand. It’s hugely beneficial to have a group of people outside of your organization. These people already understand your business inside and out. And as business progresses and important decisions arise, they are there to seek out for guidance. A strong relationship with an agency can help build a valuable network that can grow and grow.

Some things are better done together. And building a strong, impactful, and meaningful brand requires all the people key to your success coming together. Invest in working with a branding agency and you will add an entire team that can work alongside yours. Invest in your brand’s success and position your business for greatness.

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

Agile Brands Break Through

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Agile Brands are the New Norm

More than ever before, people expect brands to evolve around their needs, anticipate their desires, and cater to the ways they want to connect with the world. The expectation to keep up with market innovations and business trends translates into a demand for agile brands. Customer behavior is always shifting, and values are changing faster than most companies can keep up with. Consequently, people dismiss brand communications that are behind the consumer curve. For businesses, this mean it’s often hard to keep up. Fittingly, Wired calls this an ear of “Digital Darwinism”: a time when “technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt.”

Struggling to Adjust

The need for speed is an inherent challenge for many businesses. Others are dismissing the need to adapt altogether: stuck in a business-as-usual pattern, putting money towards investments that may not even be aligned to the shifting landscape, and as a result, stunting their evolution as a business. It’s no question that it’s becoming harder and harder to be relevant, let alone stay relevant.

Take advertising as an example. We’ve heard all the recent buzz surrounding the question: is advertising dead? Advertising isn’t dead, but advertising, as we knew it has most definitely changed. Because people today understand the tactics of communicating, discovering, sharing, and experiencing advertisements, consumers are often the ones ahead of the innovation curve, quickly dismissive of the old ways ads used to reach them. As a result, advertisers are trying all kinds of new tactics to connect with savvy consumers. And if they can’t move quickly enough to adjust to consumer’s new needs, they’ll end up fading into the clutter. The business risks losing money, time and resources on an irrelevant campaign.

Marketing teams face similar obstacles. This new era presents many challenges for businesses looking to exceed expectations and stay ahead of the consumer curve. Consumer expectations for how a brand communicates at every touchpoint – from a newsletter, to a digital ad, or in-store experience – have heightened. Markets are changing, consumer behavior is progressing, and smart businesses are focused on how to stay ahead of shifts. The ones that truly compete are able to anticipate how to adapt. In this new era of connectivity, the expectations for brand communications are high, and agile brands need the right kind of approach that enables it to adapt, shift, and gain respect and loyalty from consumers.

A Need for Speed

Staying ahead and quickly reacting to shifts is hard work and can be a drain on internal resources if your business is always in reactionary mode. Creating cutting-edge, vision-driven and transformational communications that are truly ahead of the curve stems from a strong and agile brand strategy. With external support, you’ll be able to move faster and more strategically to pinpoint what audiences matter to your brand, why they matter, how your brand can reach them today, tomorrow, and years up the line. A strong brand isn’t enough to break through. You need an agile, flexible, and strong brand to sustain business growth and relevancy.

Just as people are demanding more from brands, businesses are demanding more from agencies. And successful agencies are adapting to those needs – adopting faster, more efficient models for doing business. The objectives of brand strategy have evolved, and with it, agencies must also evolve.

A partner that is nimble and agile is critical to bringing your brand up to speed. By helping your brand meet the needs and expectations of your target audience today, you’ll be in a stronger position to anticipate the needs of the target audience for tomorrow. Staying relevant requires agility, speed, and a focused mastery of the industry.

Fast Forward

We know that many brands need a new, more agile approach to address the changing dynamics of markets and businesses. To meet those needs, we’ve developed Fast Forward for agile brands. Our approach offers a set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. Learn more how we can Fast Forward your business, build an agile brand that sits ahead of the curve, and transform your business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

High-Growth Software Firm Looking to Accelerate Business Quickly

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

Metal Toad: a high-growth business needed to be aligned to create maximum impact

Metal Toad is a successful, high-growth software business with a highly regarded reputation and big ambitions. As technology consultants, Metal Toad works to modernize businesses by building strategic applications for clients like Sony, Cisco, PBS, Verizon Wireless, and ABC. When they came to Emotive Brand for help, the management team was at a crossroads.

As often happens in the midst of a boom, an enthusiasm for growth left the business pursuing too many diverse initiatives. They needed to quickly realign and focus leadership around what they do and why they matter, closing the gap between their long-term vision and the reality of what their clients need today. And they needed to hold onto their momentum while continuing to deliver flawlessly. Fast Forward was the perfect answer.

As is true with many high-growth companies, Metal Toad’s challenges needed an agile approach to address the evolving nature of their business. With Fast Forward, we were able to spend one week on site with the executive team prioritizing their challenges and creating a strategy to move forward. By removing the team from their day-to-day responsibilities and creating a focused environment, challenges that were holding the business back came quickly and clearly to the surface.

Together, we developed a strategic map of the emergent, dominant, and residual forces shaping Metal Toad and its industry. This map allowed the team to come to a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities they faced, setting the solid foundation necessary for producing groundbreaking ideas, and ultimately, change.

Through the Fast Forward engagement, the Metal Toad leadership team was able to come together, collaborate, and craft a powerful brand promise that paved the way for the future of the business. The new positioning provided focus and clarity to optimize present and future organizational initiatives with maximum impact. A week later, we delivered updated copy for the website landing page to help communicate the new value proposition and convert leads.

“In less than a week, Emotive Brand was able to give us a powerful and differentiated platform for our business that was completely authentic and achievable.” Tony Rasmussen, VP Engineering, Metal Toad

Learn more about the partnership between Metal Toad and Emotive Brand, the lessons learned, and how we brought the strategy to life in the Metal Toad case study.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco based brand strategy agency.

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Tag: Fast Forward