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Tag: Growth

Choose to go to the Moon: The Propulsive Power of Belief Systems

Posted on by Emotive Brand

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
—John F. Kennedy

Wharton professor Andrew Carton combed through 18,000 pages of NASA archives in an effort to understand President John F. Kennedy’s profound impact on the organization’s trajectory. In doing so, Carton not only dusted off overlooked historical details—he unearthed insights into how visionary leaders can translate bold ambition into shared belief, turning a moonshot into reality.

Even the boldest leaders fall into the trap of translating vision into technical or corporate language, piling on proof points that smother the vision’s power. The longer and more detailed the explanation, the smaller the imagined future feels. Words like strategy, process, and ROI don’t deliver meaning, and therefore, they don’t give people something to believe in.

It’s notable that JFK didn’t emphasize data—he used it sparingly, only to validate. He didn’t elevate the impressive science required to land a man on the moon. Instead, he told a story, creating buy-in not through metrics, but emotion. JFK connected his vision to something far more powerful than logic: a shared belief in achieving something bigger, together.

Belief as Rocket Booster

To say JFK rallied NASA and the United States to rise to a daunting challenge is an understatement. Carton’s research found that he, with NASA, took several key steps to translate a new vision for the organization and the (initially skeptical) country.

  • He sharpened focus by simplifying NASA’s set of three overarching goals into the single loftiest aspiration: “to advance science.”
  • He connected grand aspiration to concrete objectives, the highest order of which was “to advance science by first landing on the moon before 1970.”
  • NASA leadership then developed the “ladder to the moon,” a set of specific milestones that enabled each employee to connect their contribution to the concrete objective and highest goal.

But progress would have stalled without a belief system as foundation for that bold agenda. A decade’s worth of collective striving was ignited by a set of emotionally charged ideas that compelled people to invest in the vision. This is how the moonshot became more than an engineering feat. It became a reflection of who we are and what we stand for as a nation.

“This city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space.”
—John F. Kennedy

Three core beliefs stand out in Kennedy’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech:

  1. We can do hard things.
  2. We are a people committed to advancing scientific progress and exploration.
  3. In a time of unrest, we are called to use science as a force for good.

JFK instinctively knew that data doesn’t change behavior—emotion does. Vision or ambition is the destination. Objectives and milestones lay out the flight path. But belief is the propulsion system that gets you there.

As Carton noted, “[NASA] employees construed their day-to-day work not as short-term tasks (‘I’m building electrical circuits’) but as the pursuit of NASA’s long-term objective (‘I’m putting a man on the moon’) and the aspiration this objective symbolized (‘I’m advancing science’).”

That’s what belief systems do. They align people and teams around meaning. They turn individual contribution into collective pursuit. They create coherence between what’s said, what’s done, and what’s felt.

Designing for Belief

When organizations fail to design for belief, they design for deceleration. Vision fades. Brand experiences contradict stated values. Teams drift. Customers sense dissonance. In moments of change or disruption, the absence of shared belief becomes a vacuum that uncertainty quickly fills.

But when belief is intentionally designed—and becomes the scaffolding system for the vision—every touchpoint can reinforce the emotional truth of the vision. For employees and consumers, brand becomes the medium through which belief is experienced, shared, and sustained.

That’s the real power of brand in accelerating leaders’ goals. It doesn’t just express what you believe. It helps others feel it too. And when people feel it, they strap in.

From Vision to Impact

Visionary leaders can tell you what the future looks like, but people don’t believe what you say. They believe what they feel.

Belief systems are how leaders transform conviction into collective motion. They’re how a company moves beyond step-by-step strategy to take on the momentum of a movement.

So the next time you’re tempted to translate your vision into safer, smaller, tactical language, resist. Instead, ask, “What do we believe? How do we help others feel that belief?”

Because belief—when designed, lived, and shared—is what gives vision lift-off.

The New Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

No role in an organization has evolved more rapidly than the CMO’s. It used to be that owning branding, communications, and campaigns defined the job. Now, CMOs need to be experts on customers, marketing tools and advanced analytics, and business strategy. Brand management remains an essential duty, but in service of driving business growth. Most importantly, because a CMO’s work connects directly to sales, product development, IT, finance, and other parts of the organization, CMOs find themselves needing to play a growing role in aligning their organization around new ways of thinking and working that will help them engage customers more effectively.

For those in TL;DR mode, the quick takeaway is: CMOs are being stretched, so they might sometimes need a hug (but please ask first).

Here’s a by-no-means exhaustive look at some of the shifts that we’ve seen impacting how a CMO shows up:

From To
Voice of the Brand Voice of the Customer
Intuition & Instincts Data & Technology
Brand Management Brand Innovation
Strategy + Execution Alignment
Awareness Recognition

 

Voice of the Customer

The amount of information we have about customers is only increasing. How does a temperature between 70 and 75 degrees impact consumer behavior on Mondays vs. Fridays? What is the correlation between a new Netflix series and GPU buying decisions? What invisible patterns in customers can data now make visible? More and more, it’s up to the CMO to develop the customer insights that shape how a business goes to market. And because so many groups touch the customers, from sales to product to finance to corporate strategy, the level of collaboration required to align on these insights requires a significant investment.

Data & Technology

The increase in customer data a business can capture also gives rise to new suites of tools and technologies that a CMO can use to mine for insights, optimize campaigns, and deliver experiences across channels. When almost every brand action can be quantified, decisions about how to go to market are becoming increasingly data-driven. As a result, the CMO is responsible for leading the digital transformation of the marketing organization, which requires deep partnership with IT (among others) to develop the tooling and data models that align with the organization’s technology systems. While a CMO needs to rely on her or his instincts and intuition when it comes to decision making, increasingly they need to justify their strategies with that data when it points in a certain direction. The more fluent a CMO becomes in technology, the easier it becomes to reconcile data-driven insights with gut instincts.

Brand Innovation

More than anyone in the organization, a CMO needs to connect the dots between a brand’s legacy and its future vision. As much as products need to innovate, brands must as well to remain relevant: messages need to resonate with how the world is changing, and their expression needs to drive differentiation. But in doing this, a brand must also feel familiar and take advantage of the equity it’s built with audiences. As brand management becomes increasingly data-driven, brand innovation is also becoming more dependent on analyzing trends, creating new audience definitions and segmentations, and delivering next-level experiences that are hyper personalized and hyper-relevant. And these insights provide fuel for both brand and product innovation. The CMO that can use data to drive innovation across the organization is one that will stick around.

Awareness & Recognition

For years, marketing’s job was to be seen: build awareness, own share of voice, stay top of mind. That’s no longer where the real evaluation happens. Customers, investors, analysts, and recruits increasingly form a point of view about a company before anyone from the company ever speaks to them—often by asking an AI system what the company is. That system doesn’t call sales. It assembles an answer from whatever is already on the record: the website, the product pages, executive interviews, customer language, analyst coverage, and years of scattered marketing history.

When that record is current, consistent, and complete, the AI’s answer sounds like the company. When it’s stale, contradictory, or thin, the AI defaults to the nearest familiar category—and the company gets misunderstood, for example, seen as smaller, older or something other than it has earned the right to be.

This is the shift CMOs are living through right now. It’s not enough to be found. A company has to be recognized—accurately, consistently, and for what it has actually become, not what it used to be. That’s a brand problem before it’s a technology problem, and it’s quickly becoming one of the most consequential things a CMO owns.

Building Alignment

It’s not enough for a CMO to develop a winning marketing strategy and execute flawlessly. As organizations become increasingly customer-centric, a CMO needs to bring every function in the C-Suite into the conversation about how to drive growth. From gaining the full embrace of Chief Revenue Officer for their marketing strategies, to the creativity of the CTO as you make your strategies more data driven, to HR working to bring new talent to the table, to the head of Product working in partnership around how to claim new audience segments, and the CTO finding budget to drive the strategy forward, marketing has become increasingly a team sport.

It’s no wonder that CMO turnover is high, and those in their positions feel they’re continuously in the hot seat. While the complexity of marketing is growing and budgets are coming under increasing scrutiny, there’s never been a more exciting time to be leading a marketing organization. All the data organizations have been amassing and the tools ready to parse it can reveal truly amazing insights about customers and how to connect with them. But only if a CMO can enlist the organization in lending a hand in making this all happen. And this comes down to storytelling and building alignment.

We’ve worked with many organizations to craft what we call a Growth Manifesto—a strategic narrative that shows how the thinking that goes into brand development can open up new possibilities across an organization—from how people think about innovation to the collaboration required to bring new ideas to life. We’ve seen that a Growth Manifesto serves as an incredibly effective tool for building that alignment that is essential to getting every part of an organization living a new brand promise. While CMOs will always own the brand, communications, and marketing lanes of a business, as their role evolves, we’re seeing how they also need to become experts at building alignment between the functions that marketing depends on.

We think about that alignment challenge as closing the distance between the company a business has actually become and the company the market—human or artificial—is prepared to recognize, believe, and price. Closing that gap has quietly become one of the biggest jobs on a CMO’s plate.

If you have thoughts about the new challenges CMOs face today, please add to the conversation below. And if you’re thinking about ways to address specific marketing challenges in your business, we are always happy to help you think through how to approach the challenge.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies. We help close the distance between the company you’ve built and the company the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and price—so you’re understood, valued, and priced for what you’ve built.

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. It’s one of the clearest levers a company has for closing the gap between what it’s actually built and what the market currently recognizes, believes, and prices it as—what we call the Belief Gap. A company can have real product, real customers, and real momentum, and still be misunderstood, undervalued, or compared against the wrong peers if its positioning hasn’t kept pace. But many product-proven companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is Your Brand Positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition? This is where a specific, recognizable pattern shows up: being seen as a follower—where a company has the capability to lead its category, but a competitor with a clearer, more consistently understood position gets the credit for defining it. Leadership isn’t determined by innovation alone; it also depends on recognition.

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic north star. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long- and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth. Here’s why that inconsistency matters more than it might seem. When your own leaders aren’t pulling from the same positioning, it doesn’t stay an internal problem for long. Sales tells one story about who you are. Marketing tells another. Your website reflects an earlier chapter of the business, while your investor deck reflects a newer one. None of these stories is necessarily wrong on its own—but none of them is the whole picture, either. From the outside, this is what it looks like to be seen in fragments: the market can’t assemble one coherent understanding of your company, not because anyone lied, but because no one inside is working from the same script.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people who are important to sustaining its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Continuing the Challenge

This post is the second in our three-part series on challenger brands. You can read part one, “Challenger Brands: A Primer,” right here.

Previously, we spoke about adopting a challenger mindset. It’s one defined by ambition, agility, and a willingness to take risks. Most importantly, we noted how businesses are no longer competing against each other—they are competing against the category they are in and the expectations of what a customer experience feels like.

At a glance, these personality traits naturally lend themselves to the B2C world. Ask anyone to rattle off a few challenger brands and you’ll invariably get the same answers: Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb—and it makes sense. When you’re trying to rewire people’s preconceived notions, B2C is, by definition, the shortest path to the customer.

But it is by no means the only path. The worlds of B2B technology and AI companies and B2B2C are being transformed by challenger brands. Just look at ZipRecruiter, Zoom, Slack, or even Salesforce. If you can’t see it on the surface, it’s most likely occurring behind the scenes in their business strategy.

B2B Technology and AI Companies as Challengers

Founder of 500 Startups, Dave McClure, notes that

“The next bubble is not in tech where innovation and capital are never in short supply. Rather, the real bubble is in far-too-generous P/E multiples and valuations of global public companies, whose business models are being obliterated by startups and improved by orders of magnitude. As more Fortune 500 CEOs recognize and admit their vulnerability to disruption, expect them to hedge their own public valuations by buying the very same unicorns that keep us awake at night.”

Many legacy B2B companies end up following a similar lifecycle. They start off small and hungry, build a legacy off of their early innovations, ride the wave for as long as possible, and then go out and acquire innovation when they start to stagnate. The daily churn of operating a business makes it very difficult to ignite the same innovation that got you started. So, you import. To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But it’s a strategy that ultimately puts your future in the hands of other creators.

Homegrown Innovation

Regardless of size, if B2B brands want to truly adopt a challenger mindset, they need to take active steps to continually foster their own innovation. Famously, Google has a 20% rule. Implemented by Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004, it’s designed to give employees one full day per week to work on a Google-related passion project of their choosing or creation. It’s the same strategy that created Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google News, AdSense, and many others.

The point being, words like agile and innovative don’t have to be words that are only synonymous with startups. B2B companies can instill a challenger’s sense of agility through the behaviors and culture they nurture. If you’re wondering how a B2B brand knows if it should adopt a challenger mindset, there’s a wonderful diagram created by Michael Hay, a business leader with fifteen years at IKEA, that can help. Outlining four essentials for driving a successful change of strategy, it acts as a checklist for recognizing and delivering change.

need for change

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal

At the end of the day, there are many lessons that B2B brands can steal from the challenger world. Are you leading with a strong story that unequivocally answers the question, “Why do you do what you do?” More than meet a singular need, are you meeting the needs of today and tomorrow better than anyone else? Are you talking with lead adopters at the front of the innovation curve and making them evangelists for your brand?

Perhaps the most important lesson that B2B brands can glean is in how they hire. As Adam Morgan writes,

“Employees at challenger brands require different qualities. They need to be mission-driven. They need to know why they get out of bed and go to work every morning and they need to be passionate about the problems the company is trying to solve. Being a maverick is also of far greater importance at a challenger, the opposite of at a larger organization where dissent is considered a flaw. Employees need to ask the provocative questions and not just take risks themselves, but also to be tolerant of risks that others might take.”

To learn more about how your product-proven B2B brand can benefit from adopting a challenger mindset, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

To finish reading our three-part challenger series, check out: Part Three—Challenger Brands: Design that Disrupts

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

B2B Tech and AI Brands Should Harness Emotion

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about the role of emotion in brand, and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate by building emotion into the foundation of the brand.

The strongest B2B brands give people something to understand and something to feel. The key is to define the company’s Conviction—what it fundamentally believes—and the Emotional Impact that conviction should create.

Why Emotion Matters in B2B Branding

Strong B2B branding is about digging deep into a company’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading; this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Building emotion into a B2B brand isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and set you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans. From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves. Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands. In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments. B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding. All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We work with product-proven B2B technology and AI companies approaching moments when how the market sees them matters most—from strategic transformation and category shifts to enterprise expansion, fundraising, acquisitions, and exits.

For B2B companies, differentiation isn’t only about what the product does. It’s also about what the company believes, why that matters, and whether the market can feel the difference.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Is Revenue Hiding in Plain Sight? Six Steps to Refocusing on the Customer

Posted on by Stephen Banbury

Leading a B2B technology and/or AI organization is a lot like trying to change the wheels on a bike while you’re still riding it. Half of the time, you’re rethinking internal systems and how to assemble them in new ways. The other half, you’re just trying to keep the business running and avoid any major potholes. There are many different ways to drive an organization, but if you’re not thinking about customer experience at every touchpoint, it might be time for a tune-up.

Sales, Engineering, or Marketing?

If you’re a sales-led organization, you’re primarily focused on revenue, deals, price, and market share. You empower your sales team, invest in training, and drive a disciplined, well-executed process. At the end of the day, you want them to hit their quotas. This model can be very effective. The challenge is that each individual salesperson often creates their own tools to get the job done. This can result in an inconsistent brand experience, where every customer is getting a different version of the story. Moreover, a sales-over-everything culture can create burnout and impact your roadmap with one-off requirements that can’t be scaled across the customer base.

Hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley are engineering-led organizations, with a heavy focus on sophisticated software, data, and analytics. Code supersedes everything, and every possible process is optimized for iterating as fast as possible. When you move fast and break things, you can create something extraordinary. But you can also fall into the ideological trap of building just for the sake of it. It’s not that you can’t be successful, but you run the risk of creating feature functions that don’t satisfy an unmet, underserved customer need.

Marketing-led organizations are all about researching and identifying products or services that your customer needs and wants. In theory, it’s a fantastic model that is mutually beneficial to both the customer and the organization. Unfortunately, in practice, there can be some barriers to entry. Startups, for example, often don’t have the luxury of being marketing-led, as they need to allocate their resources to engineering and sales. Marketing is something they’ll invest in later when they are doubling down on growth. In addition, it can be trickier to get consensus in a marketing-led organization. Whereas sales and engineering have more objective metrics to fall back on, the success and execution of a marketing-led organization often hinges on whether it becomes an essential part of a company’s DNA.

Customer Experience Is the Best Teacher

While all of these paradigms have their pros and cons, if your organization isn’t focused on customer experience at every touchpoint, it doesn’t matter which function is leading because you’ll be severely limiting your growth. The era of asymmetrical communications—top-down or inside-out, where companies push out messages in one direction—just isn’t working anymore.

Customers are more informed, more dynamic, and have higher expectations than ever before. They are expecting a nuanced, two-way conversation.

Plus, the link between online reputation and business performance is staggering. A recent study of the hospitality industry by Cornell University found that for every one percent improvement in a hotel’s online reputation, its revenue per available room improves by 1.4 percent.

Companies need to be receptive and customer-centric if they want to thrive in this climate. This starts with an authentic focus on providing a superior customer experience backed by real conviction—a clear, authentic belief in why your business exists and where it’s going. Why? Because conviction is not only contagious—it sustains growth. According to New York Times bestselling author Simon Mainwaring, 91 percent of consumers would switch brands if a different one was purpose-driven and had similar price and quality.

The Spirit of Customer-Centricity

Now, you might think that marketing is the only place for such a customer-centric mentality, but that’s not the case. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is thinking that the customer only interfaces with a singular marketing message or website. They interact through the product, through sales, or by phoning client services or tweeting at a support channel. All of those touchpoints have to represent the company and brand in a meaningful way.

If you’re a VP of Engineering, chances are you don’t want your top brains spending a lot of face-time with a customer. You want them in front of the screen where they can put their talent to work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to instill a spirit of customer-centricity in their role.

For instance, product managers should be regularly analyzing the interactions of the customer with the product, as well as talking with customers directly, so they can turn those insights into requirements for engineers. It’s about getting the perfect balance of qualitative and quantitative inputs. If you don’t consistently remind your employees who they are building for, they can lose track of the “Why?”—that larger, aspirational goal of why you’re building products in the first place. Here are some tangible steps every organization can take to create a culture of customer-centricity.

Six Steps to Refocusing on the B2B Customer

  1. Don’t make assumptions about your customers. I’ve been in countless meetings where someone quickly whiteboards a customer journey—all without ever talking to a real customer. When NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton was tasked with reducing crime in New York, he didn’t just read reports—he rode the rails himself. Quantitative data will get you far, but you can’t really put yourself in the customer’s shoes without qualitative data. That’s how you truly get an outside-in perspective.
  2. With B2B, never forget the customer’s customer. When you’re working with a large enterprise, it’s easy to forget the effects your decisions will have on an individual. You must think all the way through the customer journey. Try to create meaningful outcomes at every step in the process.
  3. In the B2B marketplace, you should design with the same love and attention to detail as you would for consumer products. You may think, “I don’t care how it looks, it just needs to work,” but in an increasingly crowded marketplace, creating differentiation through a delightful customer experience is key.
  4. Never underestimate the power of authentic customer stories. They serve as great collateral for sales, marketing, and social media and remind those in your company who don’t get to interact directly with customers of the impact they are making. Currently, 71 percent of millennials report feeling not engaged at work. But if you’re able to create a situation where employees derive meaning from their work, everything changes. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that employees who derive meaning from their work report almost twice the job satisfaction and are three times more likely to stay with their organization to fuel business success.
  5. Consider your partners. Especially if you’re a B2B selling through a channel, you need to be cognizant of the needs of your partners, as well as your customers. How you show up to your customers is incredibly important, and that’s why you must always maintain brand integrity through each and every channel.
  6. Executive alignment is everything. When you get alignment at the highest level, it cascades throughout the whole company, ensuring that all functions are cohesive and on board.

Customer-Centric ≠ Customer-Led

You may have noticed that I have avoided the phrase customer-led. There’s a key difference between being customer-centric and customer-led. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Everything you do should be aimed at creating a fantastic customer experience. Nonetheless, you don’t want people-pleasing to get in the way of innovation. Customer feedback is incredibly important, but it can’t be the only data point. When that happens, it can lead to a dangerous feedback loop that creates tunnel vision. Trust your team, create an environment for risk-taking, and then go test the results.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter conceptually who is driving the company. What matters is that everyone deeply understands the pain points of the customers they serve. Everyone, regardless of role, should have a relationship with the customer.

As a leader, you need to facilitate an internal evolution where employees are not only passionate but can see the real-world results of their work. Belief is one of the most powerful tools in business. When people believe in what they are doing, they work harder, smarter, and with their whole hearts.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Launching A New Brand Category

The decision to join an existing category or to launch a new brand category is not an easy decision. Evaluating your product maturity, the product roadmap, and overall market maturity is critical. Once the decision is made, the strategy shifts to creating the right budget and plan to launch the new brand category. Building momentum is paramount to both the category’s success and, by proxy, your own brand’s position as the category leader.

As we’ve previously discussed, timing is critical for launch. You need to consider factors of competition, messaging, production, and market forces. And when the light is green, launching a new brand category with your brand as the de facto leader means getting buy-in, quickly. Building momentum for your new category, attracting important users and creating buzz necessitates its own strategy, one that has to be developed concurrently with defining and naming the new category.

Why New Brand Category Launches Fail

Just because you have a brilliant name doesn’t mean your category will be adopted. In fact, most fail. Lack of preparation, especially when it comes to budgeting, often results in categories that fizzle out. Businesses are often so focused on designing, manufacturing, and promoting their own product that they postpone the effort needed to market a newly developed category. And before they know it, it’s too late. The new category launch needs to lead your brand into the arena, not the other way around.

Common mistakes for launch include not creating enough context for the category, making claims about the category that fall short, failing to create enough distinction from competitive categories, missing the mark on customer education (people just don’t get it), or jumping the gun on timing. Creating a new brand category requires the same rigor as launching a new brand or new product.

Many of these failures have something in common: the company knows what it has created, but the market doesn’t yet see it the same way. That’s a version of what we call the Belief Gap—the distance between what you know to be true and what the market is prepared to recognize and believe. For a new category, closing that gap means giving people enough context, distinction, and repetition to understand why the category exists and where your company fits within it.

When developing your strategy for launching a new category, these five tactics are key. 

1. Be Consistent with Messaging
Just as you’ve developed and tested messaging around your brand, developing the messaging around your new brand category is equally important. Consistency is everything. In order to build traction, you’ll need competition, influencers, and customers to grab onto a clear and concise message. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the category is, why it’s better than the alternative, and why it matters. It may be tempting to embellish the messaging with claims that make it sound remarkable, but don’t. You’ll need messaging that is repeatable, authentic, and true to your brand in order to be picked up by your audience. Test the category messaging, and assuming it’s working, stick to it.

2. Generate Competition
It may sound counterintuitive, but when you are creating a category, competition helps legitimize a market and increases the size of the pie. Your brand will actually benefit if others are spending their marketing dollars to help popularize the value of what you are doing. The key, however, is to be first to market (see #1: owning the messaging around the category)—and continue to find ways to elevate yourself above the crowd, while maintaining both a product and thought leadership position.

3. Tap Into Influential Early Adopters
The snowboard surpassed the snurfer as a category when Burton came onto the scene with a posse of well-known surfers and skaters who were early adopters of the new sport. They were not only the target audience for snowboarding. They had enough cultural clout to make snowboarding popular. When launching a new category, finding ambassadors with strong reputations will help raise awareness for and substantiate your category.

4. Popularize
Otherwise known as PR. Keep in mind that the category is the focus of the PR efforts, not your brand. Focus on cultivating buzz around the category in an authentic way. This requires some restraint on behalf of your brand. Drawing too much attention to your brand right out of the gate is a misstep. This is because people won’t yet have a way of talking about it. So create context first. Then, generate conversations around the category with a strong media presence (industry influencers, bloggers, press, and social media should all be activated). The buzz around your brand will follow.

5. Educate Customers
Host conferences and events—both in person and online—that use the category name. Educating customers about the category should be the central driver for marketing. Build your reputation without overselling yourself. Establishing industry user groups with digital meetups is a powerful way to spark conversations and create groundswell with a wide audience. With enough momentum, your brand’s leadership will be in position as a thought leader. And further embedding the category and subsequently your brand in customers’ minds.

The Rewards of a Strategic Category Launch

Identifying a new category and building it from scratch can serve as a powerful path to growth for your brand. And the effort involved pays off. Category creators experience fast growth and receive high valuations from investors. Category leadership is one of the clearest value-defining moments a company can create for itself—a point where the market’s understanding of who you are directly shapes how you’re valued. Creating a new category, your brand will be in a solid position to surpass the competition. Or break into a flooded market. On top of that, your brand will be positioned to own the category as the de facto leader. Category creation is nothing short of a game changer.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Aligning Business Strategy to Brand Strategy for Long-term Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Planning for Tomorrow

We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning brand and business strategy. But many leaders dismiss the business strategy as unnecessary to the brand strategy. However, without understanding where the business is going, the brand can’t help the business grow in strategic ways.

Aligning Leadership

It’s obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. But gaining clarity on the business strategy can’t happen in a silo. You can’t develop a coherent brand strategy without internal alignment around the business strategy. That means bringing together the product, engineering, operations, sales, marketing, and HR leaders alongside the CEO to align on the direction of the business.

Aligning executives around where the business is headed helps us create the right brand strategy to achieve the strategic goals for the business strategy. Facilitating intensive executive interviews and running workshops within the leadership team goes a long way. With clarity around the business strategy, we are in a better position to ensure that the brand strategy we develop is tightly and strategically aligned to business goals and objectives.

What Your Business Strategy Should Answer

It’s important that when aligning leaders around a shared and articulated business strategy, you answer the following questions. The answers to these questions help us do the strategic work for you.

  • What are the short- and long-term goals for the business? Is there an exit strategy? A merger or acquisition in the future?
  • What are the revenue and growth expectations? Are there specific target revenue goals the board is looking for? Your investors? Wall Street?
  • What is the growth strategy? What is your pricing model? Are you selling products or solutions?
  • What’s the human capital plan for achieving the desired business goals? Does that involve recruiting a different and higher-level team in order to execute?
  • What is the product road map? Are you entering into new markets? Developing new products? What are you building vs. buying to enhance your product offering?
  • Is your business set up in the right ways to achieve your goals and objectives? Do you need to shift your organizational structure? Are you ready to hire in a C-suite team? What do they need from the brand?
  • How should you allocate resources in order to accomplish these goals?

These questions are integral for shaping the brand strategy—helping to guide your business toward its goals and objectives in the most efficient manner.

Many of these questions point toward the same thing: the value-defining moments—a fundraising round, an acquisition, an IPO, a major product expansion—when the market’s understanding of your business will matter most to how it’s valued.

Clear Business Strategy Enables Clear Brand Strategy

With the plan for the future of the business clarified, the brand strategy will answer:

  • What category do you fit into?
  • How do you define market fit?
  • What is the competitive landscape?
  • What is your positioning in the marketplace?
  • Who are your top target audiences?
  • What is the value proposition?
  • What is your Conviction?
  • In what ways is your brand unique?
  • What Emotional Impact do you want to evoke?
  • How does your brand look and feel?
  • What voice does your brand speak in?

With clarity on these questions, we can build a Brand Foundation that connects the direction of the business to the way the company needs to show up in the market. At its core are the company’s Conviction—what it fundamentally believes—and its intended Emotional Impact—how that belief should be experienced. From there, positioning, identity, voice, and other expressions of the brand can be built from the same strategic and emotional source.

Business strategy and brand strategy need to work together. Aligning the brand strategy to your business strategy makes your brand better positioned for success. As a result, you will differentiate your brand and make it more meaningful. Defining a clear business strategy makes it easier to create a roadmap that is tailored toward your brand’s short- and long-term growth.

And most importantly, leaders who see the value in sharing their business strategy and long-term vision for their business will get far more value and a stronger ROI from a brand strategy.

Learn more about the power of aligning your business and brand strategies.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many product-proven companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things take off. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences—prospects, customers, and recruits—who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business—inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy—making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Four Ways This Shows Up

This kind of mismatch between what your business has become and how the market understands it isn’t random—it tends to show up in one of four recognizable ways.

Seen as Smaller. Your company has grown—in ambition, capability, or platform—faster than the market’s understanding of it. You’ve built something bigger than the label people still put on you: a platform gets called a product, infrastructure gets called a feature. This is exactly the gap Category Reframing (#2 below) is built to close.

Seen as Older. The market is still picturing an earlier version of your business. You’ve expanded your platform, added AI, moved into new markets—but perception hasn’t caught up. Every conversation starts with correcting an outdated impression before you can talk about where you’re actually headed.

Seen in Fragments. Different parts of your company are telling different, technically accurate stories that never resolve into one coherent picture. Add-on brands, internal-only product names, a website stitched together as the business evolved—each piece makes sense from the inside, but from the outside, nothing quite adds up. This is the problem Brand Architecture (#1) and a real Strategic Narrative (#7) are built to solve.

Seen as a Follower. You have the substance to lead your category, but a competitor with a clearer, more consistent position is getting the credit for defining it—even though you did much of the pioneering work. Knowing your Competition (#6) matters, but so does making sure the market can actually tell the two of you apart.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s not a sign your business lacks value. It’s a sign the market’s understanding hasn’t caught up with what you’ve actually built—and that’s exactly what a brand refresh is for.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture
For many product-proven companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing
Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many product-proven companies will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or a new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning
Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience
Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For product-proven companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what they are looking to solve, and how you can create messaging that speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why
It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition
In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition—inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Strategic Narrative
Investing in developing a Strategic Narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your Strategic Narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets
Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically led redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Disruptive and transformational technologies

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

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

Messaging for disruptive and transformational technology is hard

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

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

These are challenges we often see our clients face as they struggle to integrate brand-level messages centered on the “why” into the broader messaging story. Instead, they lead with the “what” and “how.” When things are so complicated and are so transformational in nature, the messaging needs to be holistic in nature and incorporate the entire story—a story centered around the customer, not the technology itself. This departure from product takes courage.

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

The role of B2B messaging in tech and AI

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

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

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

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

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

Getting it right

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

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

Supporting marketing and sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When leadership, sales, and marketing are aligned around the same messaging, the company is far more likely to present a coherent version of itself wherever it shows up. That coherence matters because messaging rarely stays contained within one team or channel. It moves through sales conversations, campaigns, presentations, product language, and countless other interactions. The more consistently those expressions reinforce the same underlying idea, the easier it is for the market to understand and recognize the company for what it actually is.

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

B2B messaging as a driver of business

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

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

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies, based in San Francisco.