Overlay
Let's talk

Hello!

Agile Brands Break Through

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.

Is Your Company Primed for Sustained Growth?

Growth is always good. But sustained growth is always better.

It’s not just a matter of a stronger will or more ambition. Sustained growth companies are more agile, more resilient, and more innovative. Our work with a group of mid-market clients, along with a growing body of academic research, indicates the companies who enjoy sustained growth have embraced their purpose, and have built a culture and a set of practices that “live it”.

Purpose sharpens vision, inspires teams, and empowers people. Purpose helps every person find fresh ways to think differently, to see how market dynamics can be used to their advantage. Data show that people, teams, and whole companies working with purpose outperform in the present even as they build for the future.

Purpose is incredibly powerful when it is integrated into strategy and inculcated into culture. It enables companies to overcome three essential challenges to growth in turbulent times.

Optimizing for Now and Next

Purpose helps companies refine the present,move past old ideas, take action, and reshape the markets of tomorrow.

Getting the Best Talent and the Best from Talent

A strong and visible purpose helps find and retain new top talent while inspiring existing team members to out-think, out-do, and outperform the competition.

Building a Mid-Market Brand that Attracts and Retains Customers

Purpose helps companies own more relevance and achieve greater resonance in the minds of their target markets. It links rational attributes and benefits to the brand’s positive impact on people, society, and the world.

We’ve captured our learnings and observations in a white paper entitled Purpose: The Pathway to Sustained Growth. We hope you’ll discover more about why purpose matters and how you can leverage your authentic purpose to grow your business.

Fast Forward Your Startup: Agile Strategy for High-Growth Companies

A new approach for supporting high-growth companies

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 on high-growth companies and brands to evolve and implement strategies in shorter and shorter time frames.

As a brand strategy firm, we discovered that many of our high-growth companies, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, needed a much more agile approach to addressing the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a four-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. Step one is Immersion: a week-long intelligence gathering and analysis phase. Week two is On-site : our team working in partnership with your core team to diagnose your key challenges, selecting the most pressing needs to focus on, exploring  options, and then aligning around and work collaboratively to refine strategies, actions, and communications to achieve those objectives (it is intensely iterative). Weeks three and four are focused on producing the deliverables, which are finished at the Emotive Brand studio.

At the end of the four-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.

Print

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process during the On-site Phase.

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 a high-growth company looking to make an immediate impact?

Contact Tracy Lloyd, Emotive Brand Co-Founder to discuss how it we can help your business thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

Fast Forward: Our New Offering for High-Growth Companies

Developing Fast Forward, an agile marketing, branding, and business offering was the right thing for our team to develop for startups, to address the issues startups are facing right now.

We have created Fast Forward designed for our high-growth clients that need to make strategic shifts to quickly address product, industry, competitive, alignment, and other issues. Fast Forward is an agile workshop approach that very quickly develops a strategically aligned and nuanced understanding of your business and brand’s current situation. We bring the most important issues to light — business obstacles that your people and the Emotive Brand team must address head-on to maximize impact.

Agile marketing approach to address the need for speed

Fast Forward is a 3-week process built for impact and speed. Week one includes five days of on-site workshops; weeks two and three are devoted to creating deliverables specific to your immediate needs.

Condensing our process demands greater focus, attention, and teamwork. From day one, we embed our team into yours and get straight to work.

Fast Forward workshops begin by identifying and triaging the essential challenges and opportunities your business must address. It’s a very hands-on, collaborative approach. Your people are involved in a series of workshops that engage them in wrestling with your key issues. We don’t just facilitate these workshops; we concentrate our intellect, creativity, and experience on solving the issues together.

At the culmination of the on-site workshops, you emerge with an agreed upon set of high-impact strategic deliverables that addresses your most salient issues. These deliverables are tailored to your specific needs, and could include visual brand elements, company positioning, Go-To-Market strategies, target audience work, brand positioning, brand narrative, messaging etc.

By prioritizing deliverables unique to your business, challenges, and opportunities you face, we are able to amplify and accelerate the effectiveness of your investment and efforts and help you move forward with newfound purpose and energy.

Fast Forward is the fastest way for startups to move the needle of their business and brand forward

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about our agile marketing solution — Fast Forward, or our work with high-growth companies. Check out how we helped Metal Toad accelerate their business quickly in our case study.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm focused on helping startups, their leadership teams, and their business thrive.

Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly

Why we believe founders need to rethink their investment in their startup brand

There’s the startup rush. That undeniable startup rush. That adrenaline flow that starts the moment you have an idea worth sharing. An idea that you’re willing to ask perfect strangers to fund. It’s a rush when someone says yes, and another rush when that first check shows up. The one that rents the homely first office and gets you going.

After that it gets harder.

The technology component of the idea might be easy for you. After all, it’s what you were trained to do. But for many startup founders, the hard part is figuring out the people part. It might come as a surprise that people do not always obey the laws of physics. That’s why brands were invented.

So how do you create a startup brand to wrap around your technological tour de force so actual humans can relate to it? Why should a supremely motivated, completely obsessed, workaholic driven, possibly undernourished startup CEO invest time, effort, and money to develop a brand with a purpose that has a deep, emotive core?

Investing in your brand can help in these 6 ways

  1. Differentiate or die

You’re in a crowded ecosystem. You have 100+ competitors in your Lumascape. You need a more distinctive position than: “We’re disrupting X” or “We’re like, you know, the Uber of Y.” A meaningful positioning can help everyone understand why YOU matter and why they should care. Differentiation is key to survival as a startup, so you need to get this right.

  1. Help them love you

In today’s hyper-competitive world, emotion is the secret sauce of many of the world’s most successful brands. It can help your brand become more appealing, differentiated, and loved once you recognize its power. Developing positioning and messaging that mixes both the rational and the emotional aspects of your brand will win both the hearts and minds of those people you are trying to capture.

  1. Get everyone on the same page

Nothing slows down an enterprise more than a workforce that is working at cross-purposes, who is unmotivated, and who are unclear about what the strategy is. You need to align the leadership team and employees around one solid reason for being, a strong positioning, and consistent messaging built on a solid foundation of brand purpose and company values. When a company is truly aligned, and working toward the same purpose, it can truly achieve anything.

  1. Exit on your terms

Every startup has an exit strategy. Aligning your brand strategy to your business strategy can really help you get there faster. Too many founders try to keep this under wraps when developing a brand strategy and the brand strategy is built to support the wrong strategy. Trust your agency to help you achieve your goals and objectives, share your exit strategy, and let them help you create the right brand strategy to help you get there.

  1. Behavior drives results

Extraordinary things happen when an organization embraces a purposeful brand strategy. It drives new attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors across your team. It evolves your marketing, communications, and advertising. It inspires new product development. It makes your workplace more productive. It changes how people experience your brand. The last piece is behavior. It’s both difficult and simple: When companies adapt their behavior to live up to the brand promise, people notice. And that’s exactly the result you want.

  1. Invest once

You don’t want to do it twice, so you want to do it right the first time. It’s true that many people, especially in software, are used to fixing errors on the fly. Software is relatively easy to repair. Reputation isn’t. Reputations are earned through consistent behavior over time. So it’s advisable to get your brand aligned early so it will stand the test of time.

At Emotive Brand, we usher newly created entities into the branded world for the first time. We straighten out brands that have fallen out of step with the pace of the industry. We reinvent brands that wake up one morning merged with another company’s brand.

Don’t wait too long to discover the true, authentic purpose of your startup brand, and define why it matters to the people that matter to your business. It will be well worth your time.

If you are interested in our agile marketing approach for high-growth companies, please visit some of our case studies and see how we’ve helped drive growth, developed strong messaging and positioning, and differentiated even the most crowded ecosystems.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution

When you spend a lot of time working with people in the C-suite, you’re exposed to C-sized business problems. Those larger strategic issues that can’t be solved by the CEO alone, or by existing resources. When changes in your industry push you to shift business strategy, it’s a sign that your brand strategy needs to shift in a synchronized way to reposition for success.

Example: We’ve surveyed C-level executives about the number one desire they have for their brand strategy. Know what they want? Differentiation. A competitive advantage. A defensible position. Differentiation is tough. When your competitors are howling like wolves at the door, how can you stand out from the pack? If your company plays a supporting role in a complex ecosystem, how can you stand out from the crowd? Brand strategy can help.

Continue reading “Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution”

Does your Business need an Updated Brand Narrative?

Does your brand need a Brand Narrative?

Your brand does if it faces any of these situations:

  • Differentiation: Does your brand have a sober, unexciting, or blurry identity in an increasingly competitive and perhaps commoditized market? Are you able to cut through the clutter in ways that matter?
  • Growth: Is it getting harder to increase market share, drive sales, and improve profit? Are new markets and products growing quickly enough?
  • Talent: Is it getting increasingly difficult for your brand to recruit the talent you need? Is your top talent leaving? Are competitor’s hiring the talent you hoped to hire?
  • Engagement: Are your employees aligned and heading in the same direction? Is your brand being held back with issues around collaboration, innovation, and loyalty?
  • Complexity: Is your business growing rapidly in both size and scope? Have you just acquired a new company? Do you have disparate product lines and target audiences? Are your brand and workplace behaviors inconsistent and counter-productive?

Of course, a strong Brand Narrative will also help your brand even if it’s operating from a position of strength. Successful brands can further establish their preeminence, forge far stronger and harder to break bonds with both customers, prospects, and employees, and increase the perceived distance between themselves and their near competitors.

A good Brand Narrative adds a bright North Star to your brand strategy. It helps you create brand experiences that change the way people feel about your brand, based on the emotional rewards of your brand promise and the way you strive to make people feel in every interaction.

To learn more about the Emotive Branding Methodology, please download the paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.