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Tag: Insights

Why It’s Frickin’ Hard for Organizations to Brand Themselves

Posted on by Carol Emert

The need for a branding agency is hard to determine sometimes.

Many of Emotive Brand’s clients come to us after failed attempts to develop their own brand strategy. Just last week, a client sent us some themes they’d identified in an internal brand survey, along with a frustrated note: “We’ve gotten this far. We’re stuck. Can you help?”

Why is it so hard for organizations to brand themselves from the inside? Aren’t the people who live and breathe a brand every day the most obvious choice to articulate it?

That’s a logical conclusion, and clients who have tried often feel frustrated that they couldn’t move the ball. Invariably they are smart, knowledgeable and passionate about their organization. So why do their efforts fall short?

We think there are three reasons:

1. Proximity

Insider status seems like the ideal place from which to observe a brand – and that’s true. Insiders are crucial keepers of their organization’s values and meaning. It’s important that their knowledge and passion inform their brand strategy. But the fact is that inside is too close in this case. A certain distance is needed to see the big picture.

If I’m standing against a wall, I see bricks. If I back up, I can see the entire building and if I take a helicopter, I can see its context – the creek that’s about to overflow, the neighbor whose buildings are getting closer and closer to its property line, the customers who love it and the ones who are looking for the building, but can’t find it.

Branding requires an aerial view to understand not only what the brand is about, but its competitive landscape and its audience. To understand a brand and a business, context is mandatory, and that generally means an unbiased third party – with a helicopter.

2. Influence

Related to proximity are two powerful influences: corporate culture and company insiders.

In any organization, certain truths are simply in the air, binding the organization together in a common viewpoint. But those unspoken truths are hard to see from the inside and even harder to evaluate objectively. And they’re almost impossible to buck, even if they are getting in an organization’s way.

An even greater influence are the viewpoints and beliefs of the CEO, founder and other leaders. By definition these people have strong ideas about what their company is about – and they are critical for informing a brand strategy. But only an outsider is well-positioned to evaluate these ideas objectively and perhaps rethink them, or even recommend setting them aside.

3. Insight

The marketers who undertake branding projects for their organizations are highly skilled in communications and management. But probably they don’t spend every waking moment honing their insight muscle.

Every great brand idea has insight at its core, but very few people know how to unearth or articulate insights. That’s where our client mentioned above got stuck – they had assembled the pieces, but couldn’t put them together into an idea that was simple and true and inspiring.

Invariably, the branding attempts we see from our clients are completely logical and accurate, but they fail to go beyond the obvious. The effort gets stuck at 1 + 1 = 2, whereas a great, insightful brand strategy will get you to 3.

Admittedly, a branding agency’s recommendation that you hire a branding agency is more than a little suspect.

But here’s a secret: Even Emotive Brand had a tough time articulating our own brand when we re-evaluated it a few years ago for a website refresh. In the end, we pulled it off – we are a branding firm, after all! – but we certainly feel for anyone who has gone through the exercise and had it fall short of their hopes.

Emotive Brand is a branding agency

How Client-Side Experience Informs Agency-Side Strategy: Interview with Emotive Brand Creative Director

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Interview with Skott Bennett, Creative Director

As Creative Director of Emotive Brand, Skott puts his client-side experience to work. An expert at creating meaningful solutions that meet the unique needs of both our customers and clients, Skott offers thoughts on how his years inside companies much like many of our clients inform his work agency-side today.

What drew you to agency work?

I always tried to bring an agency approach to my client-side experiences. And where I found this approach really worked was with brand-related projects. Identifying and defining the true purpose behind an organization, and then developing and implementing those solutions across the organization – that’s where I was most fulfilled. And I’m thrilled that it’s now my focus – helping brands better articulate what makes them special and unique.

How do you think working on in-house creative teams prepared you for your current role?

Working on the inside of technology brands – like many of Emotive Brand’s clients – made me fully aware of the challenges these kind of organizations face. These companies are founded and fueled by smart, determined people who come from high-performance engineering cultures. They have incredible vision, but oftentimes something breaks down when they try to present that vision to the outside world.

Articulating a brand’s purpose isn’t easy. You spend years building complex technology that solves tough problems and then you take it to market by making it simple? I have nothing but empathy for founders or leaders who get stuck on that. It’s a contradiction, but ultimately “look how hard this was to do!” isn’t the story that’s going to delight a customer or grow a business.

That’s why there’s so much value in ensuring that key stakeholders – those people who labored over their solutions and products – play a part in the creative/idea process. Even at the early stages, it’s critical. It has to be a team effort.

Having experienced the frustrations inside many companies today first-hand, what do you think some agencies are missing about what their clients really need?

The best agencies don’t just help you come up with a brand strategy or throw a visual identity at you. They actually educate you and help you sell that strategy inside the brand – from top to bottom. Most agencies will get hyper-focused and worried about selling to the person who’s always at the table. But there’s a lot more people who need to get on board for the roll-out to be successful. The agencies who stand out to me are the ones that have helped craft the plan and sell the plan throughout the entire organization.

Working client-side, you also realize how hard internal change really is. You can’t throw people into a new planet without a spacesuit. You have to bring them on the journey. And that’s where the value of having an outside perspective really kicks in.

Can you speak more to the value of bringing an outside perspective in?

What happens a lot inside a company is that people figure out how to get things done inside the building. “I know how to get Sales to agree to X. I know how to get Product to sign off on Y.” Just focused on the inside, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important people: your customers. The audience isn’t just your department head or your CEO, but it’s easy to get stuck in an echo chamber where those people become the only people who matter. And outside perspectives – the really good ones that are based on sound strategy – can smash these type of echo chambers.

Does your in-house experience allow you to build more trust with clients?

The best thing about in-house creative teams – something that even the best agencies can forget – is that no one is going to know the brand as well as them. That’s why you have to make them part of the process. When an in-house team feels like they’re being dictated to and not partnered with, trust is impossible. And no one’s happy.

Respect is key. In-house creative teams must be brought to the table. Maybe they’ve already tried to solve the problem the agency is trying to solve. Maybe no one thought to ask them and they’re sitting on a great idea. Ignoring them is a big mistake. Their talent, insights, and knowledge are integral to getting to the best solution possible.

We talk a lot these days about agile strategy. What’s the importance of agility for clients today?

Tech companies move fast. We all know that. And in-house creative teams move even faster. It’s a go, go, go mentality. Creative brief? Please. Like that ever happens. You have to go straight from idea to execution in most cases. Working on the agency side, you get the chance to take a deeper dive and really explore solutions and methods. But you also have to be agile. Companies are trusting your ability to both deep dive and also to stay quick-footed, flex, and move in pace with their business. As a result, I make it my operating principal to combine the deeper dive into strategy and research with the insane speed of a high-performing in-house team. That’s what clients today need.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.

Feel the “Good Burn” of a Strategy that Surprises

Posted on by Carol Emert

Get out of Your Comfort Zone

How do you feel about the brand strategies your agency is producing?

Good?

Comfortable?

If that’s the case, those strategies may not be doing as much for you as they can. Staying in your comfort zone strategically is about as impactful as staying in your comfort zone at the gym. If excellence is your aim, you’ll only get there by feeling the burn.

Of course, a bad strategy will make you uncomfortable too. So how do you know when a strategy is pushing your brand uncomfortably toward excellence?

Here Are Three Components of a Feel-The-Burn Strategy:

1. Information that Surprises

Every company has its own well-socialized story about who it is and what it’s about. Your branding agency needs to respect your story, but also needs to look outside — to broader trends in culture, technology and business; to your competitors; to your customers. It may go looking places you never expected.

At Emotive Brand, we recently discovered that a client’s key rival had withdrawn from an important segment of its market – essentially removing the client’s last direct competitor. As a result, we were able to push the bounds of its positioning and define our client as truly unique – something the client had neither known nor expected.

That’s what you call a good burn – and it comes from the agency being in the marketplace, pushing beyond the obvious and digging for the nuggets that truly differentiate.

2. Insights That Uncover New Opportunities

Information is great, but insights can be even more effective at differentiating your brand.

It’s your agency’s job to understand not just your customers’ obvious needs, but also the unmet needs they haven’t yet articulated.

A well-honed insight-finding instinct can both identify emerging opportunities and position you in a unique way to take advantage of them.

Such insights will inevitably be a surprise, and that may send you out of your comfort zone. Emerging opportunities naturally feel riskier than the tried-and-true. But they also provide an opportunity for greater reward. And that makes them a good burn.

3. Storytelling That Propels You Into Orbit

The factual story that your agency unearths is one thing; how it’s told is another chance for you to either push the bounds or settle for the merely comfortable.

Brand storytelling goes beyond the facts. It should convey the very energy and vitality of your organization. You should be able to feel the truth of it in your heart and your gut. It should make everyone around you feel proud and inspired. Your most valued employees should read it and start auto-deleting headhunter In-mails without a second thought.

And, yes, sometimes it’s uncomfortable to feel your feet lift off the ground and move toward a higher plane. A more predictable word choice, a more pedestrian idea might be easier. But just like at the gym, there will be a rich payoff for feeling the good burn of a truly elevating brand story.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm.

The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

The Role of Insights

As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations.

In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of an insight?  

Insight is, by its nature, tricky to understand and therefore hard to define. Insights aren’t linear, like data or information. They are triangulated from information and other inputs – notably emotions – to then come up with something new.

Information is 1+1=2. Insight is 1+1=3, and the 3 literally feels different.

In branding, insights inform the core truths of your brand strategy and work as the foundation on which everything else is built. 

What is the goal of a strategist making insights in brand strategy?

There are probably infinite truths about any brand. The role of the strategist is to figure out which ones are the most important to the brand itself and at the same time resonant with its stakeholders. Good insights make sense both intellectually and emotionally. Once you find a powerful insight, you’re playing in very rich territory for the brand.

How do you get to an insight?

To drive brand success, the most powerful insights are the ones that triangulate powerful core truths about the brand itself, its target audience, the competitive landscape, and the broader cultural context. So strategists need to immerse themselves in the brand, its key audiences and the greater fishbowl it is swimming in, whether that context is business, technology, pop culture, or what have you.

To understand the brand itself, a strategist will investigate its origins, its history, its products or services, what its people and internal culture are like, what its highest aspirations are, and how it speaks and acts in the world.

For target audiences, it’s important to uncover peoples’ key challenges and aspirations that are relevant to the brand, their met and unmet needs (both functional and emotional), their perceptions of the brand and its competitors, and how the brand might best fit best into their needs and aspirations.

How do insights help change how people inside the brand see their business?

When we present clients’ brand story to them, it’s like we’ve articulated something that maybe has always felt true, but has never been fully expressed. It suddenly crystalizes what really matters about their brand and business – and this clarity can inspire action, excitement, a unified vision, and really power the brand forward.

Can companies do their own branding? What do you think is the value of an external agency?

It makes sense that the people who know a brand best should be the best at articulating it, right? But, my experience has been that many companies struggle to brand themselves.

There are a few reasons. For one thing, companies already have an emotional investment in who they think they are. Everyone will know how the CEO thinks about the brand, too, and inevitably that’s going to unduly influence the thinking.

Instead of unearthing real insights, company insiders will typically be operating on the more superficial level of information. As a result, they fall short of the depth and richness they know their brand story should have. When you look at internally developed brand strategies, they typically feel rather flat and obvious instead of rich and insightful.

Essentially, it usually takes an outsider to get a clean and unbiased view of the brand and then tell its story in a really powerful way. 

What are the key characteristics of a person who is good at unearthing insights?

The most important is empathy. Understanding emotional truths requires being emotionally attuned to the situation and the people. If there is no emotional attunement, there will never be an emotional insight.

You have to be a truth-teller, willing to put aside your own ego and ideas, and prioritize finding the truth no matter where it lies. This requires not bringing too much of your own filter and biases to it too.

At the same time, you must be analytical. This isn’t an exercise in just feeling. You have to be moving down a path of useful insights that lead to meaningful brand strategies that help your clients realize their highest aspirations as a brand and as a business.

When you strike that balance between empathy and analysis, you can create rich and compelling brand strategies that are absolutely game changing.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.