Interview Archives

Culture Is Everything: A Roundtable with Emotive Brand

Posted on April 30, 2019July 18, 2025 by Chris Ames

Atmosphere. Vibe. Energy. Mood. That certain je ne sais quoi. It’s often difficult to describe a company’s culture, but you can feel it the second you walk in the door. Rajeev Bhardwaj described work culture as “an intangible ecosystem that makes some places great to work and other places toxic.” BambooHR says it’s “like a set of miniature societies within a larger society, and their cultures are expressions of the work they perform, the values they adopt, and the collective behaviors of the people who work for them.”

Culture can bring strategy to life, ignite business success, and contribute to some truly raucous holiday parties. The wonderful and terrifying thing about culture is that you can’t really control it. Executives can shape, model, or guide behavior, but true culture is defined from the employee out. Today, we’re having a roundtable discussion about culture: its definition, its importance, and its influence on our work.

Bella Banbury, Founding Partner

I think about culture as the connective tissue that keeps employees connected to each other and their work. It is vital. Nothing functions well without it, people start pulling in different directions, pain points are elevated, people start focusing on the wrong things and losing sight of what matters. Everyone loses. Culture is unique to the set of people involved and the environment you work in. You have to recognize that people are different, need different things, perform in different ways, contribute in different ways. Let it grow and change based on the unique set of circumstances that are present. Make time for it. Water it.

Saja Chodosh, Strategist

I think of work culture as the personality of a workplace. When you bring a bunch of diverse, unique people together to work around common goals – what bubbles up? How does “the team” operate, think, work, and live as one? Work culture means a lot to me. I want to work for a company where I feel like who I am meshes with and drives the greater personality, goals, and aspirations of the company as a whole. I think culture is influenced by small behaviors, ways of interaction, little moments, that add up to something big. The culture at Emotive Brand is vivacious, always moving, passionate, bold. We are a team that blends hard work, strong viewpoints, and personal integrity with a sense of ever-flowing empathy, generosity, and collaboration. The occasional tequila bonding, too.

Keyoni Scott, Designer

Culture is incredibly important because I think it’s the lifeline you look to when things are stressful. When things are intense, culture is a reminder of why you’re working so hard. It can uplift your day and keep you focused. I’ve never been in a cubicle job, thankfully, but one of the things I love about Emotive Brand is that you’re invited to be yourself. Your voice is heard and I don’t feel afraid to be myself. You’re given space to try, to mess up, and to solve the problem at hand.

Jonathan Haggard, Senior Designer

I think the Bay Area, in general, can have a very demanding work culture. Unfortunately, many companies intentionally provide a culture of excessive work and dependence. I think there needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach the relationship between people and work. In order to win the war on talent, employers should be willing to embrace remote work, flexible time tables, and promote quality over quantity. So much of traditional work culture is about projecting a façade of productivity for eight-plus hours. I would much rather engage in a culture that cultivates a vibe of doing your best work, and when you’re done, be encouraged to live a full life outside of the office. You end up getting better work in the long run.

Shannon Caulfield, Project Manager

For me, culture is one of the most crucial things about running a business. You build the right culture by hiring people you believe can further promote a company’s vision and mission, and finding people whose values are aligned. But an aligned culture doesn’t mean everyone thinks the same – there’s so much value in diversity of thought. You get to learn so much every day by surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds and walks of life. It leads to much more creative solutions. We have a very close-knit and collaborative culture at Emotive Brand. Everyone is always willing to lend a helping hand, regardless of what role you have here. You know when you come to work, you’re not alone.

Monica Colver, Studio Manager

Cultivating a healthy work culture is important so that employees feel engaged, appreciated, and motivated to do their best work possible. Instilling a sense of community in the workplace is vital because work is where we spend the majority of our waking hours, so we might as well improve our quality of life by improving our relationships with our colleagues. The culture at Emotive Brand takes that sentiment to heart. We are a close-knit team, and as the Studio Manager, I am always seeking out new ways to facilitate connection within our team: organizing trips to museums, group hikes, rallying the team for spontaneous happy hours, as well as simply making a point of learning about everyone’s interests and personal projects.

Beth Abrahamson, Senior Designer

A positive work culture is not only essential to employee happiness, but can improve relationships with clients and the quality of the work itself. There is real value in intentionally creating space to get to know the people you work with every day. Bella and Tracy are major proponents of bringing your whole self to work, and encourage all of us to share our personal interests and passions, which ultimately creates a more vibrant and dynamic culture at Emotive Brand.

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

The Value of Outside Creativity on In-House Work

Posted on March 21, 2019July 18, 2025 by Chris Ames

As an agency, we have the benefit of outside perspective on client work. Our distance allows us to see situations with a more objective lens. But what happens when we get too close to our own work or get caught in a creative slump? As Design Director Robert Saywitz tells us, sometimes the best solution to in-house problems is outside inspiration. We sat down to discuss how his background in illustration, graphic novels, and mixed-media informs his design thinking.

Tell us a bit about your artistic practices.

I do a little bit of everything: painting, drawing, ink, mixed-media works on paper, graphic novels, personal and commercial illustration. I work with many non-traditional and found materials, such as antique books, wooden crates, or music-related items like vinyl and cassettes. Part of my process is to breathe new life into discarded or antiquated things that often find themselves on the street or in second-hand shops. I not only try to find materials that will work as a blank canvas for a drawing or painting but I also look for specific materials that relate to the subject matter, and to my own sense of storytelling.

For example, as part of my series, Music Was My First Love, I used antique, leather book covers as canvases for ink drawings of jazz musician and composer, Ornette Coleman. The triptych shows him at three stages in his life – a rising star, at the height of his powers, and as an aging legend. The deterioration of the materials adds much more to the story than any ink wash or layered background I could have tried to create by hand. This was also a nod to the process and how we convey and gather information – reading about art and music – as well as my own love of the physical book. At my heart, though, I’m a drawer. It all goes back to pencil and paper.

How does that sensibility feed into your practice for client work?

I never start on the computer. You have pens, paper, scissors, drafting boards, and oh, a computer as well. It’s just one piece in a massive toolkit to tell a story. I’ve always viewed myself as a visual storyteller. Whether it’s a singular poster or a super complex brand system. For me, I’m always searching for that layered story. Too much focus on any one instrument, like the computer, tends to dilute the experience. The computer is an amazing tool, but it’s not an idea generator. You can have happy accidents, but you can’t let the tools dictate the idea. I didn’t get into design until later in life. I came to it from an art background – and I think my sideways path in has made a big difference in how I approach work.

You mentioned the idea of posters. You often start projects by designing a poster, even if it won’t necessarily live in this format. What does this process illuminate for you?

The poster, for me, is a perfect object. It’s that blank slate, open canvas, anything-can-happen object. Whether it’s a logo or complete brand identity, I tend to think in terms of the poster. If you can figure out what the big idea is in a single frame, then you have the spark that allows you to expand the idea into an entire campaign. Solving the poster is like this secret puzzle that will inevitably answer questions that come up later in the process.

Initially, it was album covers and film posters that sparked my love for design and it was people like Saul Bass, who you felt could capture the entire mood of a two-hour movie in a 2-D plane. There’s something magical about starting from a simple rectangle and trying to tell a story in multiple parts. Again, for me it goes back to the pencil and paper – the sheet of paper is essentially that blank poster frame where the problem needs to be solved in a clear and compelling way. That’s how I approached the poster for Knucklehead, which is another example of letting the idea (not the computer) drive the design. My watercolor and ink illustrations with collaged magazine clippings captured the emotional quality and narrative of the film more than traditional photography could have hoped to achieve.

How much of your client work is inspired by these other worlds?

I think you can see it in almost everything I do. If there is ever an opportunity to bring in something that feels hand-drawn, organic, or illustrated, I think it adds warmth and empathy. My gut instinct is the pencil, not the mouse – and that line of thinking will always filter in. The art of making something is nuanced and gestural. I love when you can feel the hand of the creator a little bit. Especially in the digital age, when things can feel a little too slick, too polished, too clean. Obviously, every project has its own parameters, but at the end of the day, everything is human and you need that component. Even if it’s just a starting point that gets digitally refined later, the emotional core will bubble up.

For example, the identity I created for Normandie – a new restaurant in Portland, Oregon – began as an actual linoleum block print before getting tediously refined on the computer. The only way to create a bespoke, block-printed logo was to make it by hand.

How can say, a B2B tech company, get out of their comfort zone and let outside creativity bolster their offering?

It sounds cliché, but inspiration is everywhere – you just have to be willing to see it. A lot of that is just getting outside and looking for answers in unexpected places: the museum, the used bookstore, public gardens, architecture, travel guides, novels, even the design of old appliances. You’d be surprised how many times the work of someone in a completely different field can inspire or solve the problem you’re working on. It can be as simple as watching a really good documentary series, like Abstract, which showcases the work of designers in different fields at the top of their game.

A very tangible lesson is to set up Google Alerts under research categories you’re interested in. I have one set up for “book arts.” Every day, I get four or five unique articles sent to me from places I would never think to look, like a local paper in Des Moines, Iowa. You need to be open to everything serving as a potential source of inspiration, whether it’s going on a trip to the post office or wandering into an estate sale. The beauty of the iPhone is you always have a way to capture that random spark.

Beyond the digital, I think it’s incredibly important to start a physical inspiration folder. Put one in your design department and start to collect objects that intrigue or inspire. It doesn’t have to make sense right away. The internet tends to feed on itself, and there’s something liberating in having your designers get bold new ideas from the world around them. My personal studio is full of seemingly random artifacts: old instruction manuals, maps, magazine clippings, keys, matchbooks, old manual typewriters, compasses, ticket stubs. Design is all around us and you never know what object will unlock or inspire. I recently submitted to The Sketchbook Project, which is a crowd-funded sketchbook museum and community space. My submission was all about tiny maps, and its creation was a direct result of the process of maintaining this archive of physical inspiration.

How do you manage your creative and professional lives? Do you view them as at-odds or supporting one another?

A big internal obstacle for most working creatives is separating your two lives – the creative and the professional – because they don’t fit in. You feel like your day job is taking away from your art, or vice versa. I’ve struggled with that.

To be honest, coming to Emotive Brand is the first place where I truly feel those two lives are intermeshed. There’s no shame to keep one hidden. In fact, we’re encouraged to share and inspire others. In all the jobs I’ve worked, it’s never been that way, and it does a huge disservice to the employee, the agency, and even the client. When you build a culture of expression, the ideas just get better and feed off one another. It’s liberating and opens up all these other doors. I’ve always bifurcated my creative lives, but I don’t have to do that here. At a previous job, I would have my work included in a group show at a gallery and not tell anyone. Here, I feel totally enabled to let my outside creativity influence and improve everything else I do.

Check out all of Robert’s work on his website here.

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

Cover Image by Robert Saywitz: Chinatown (detail), watercolor and graphite on paper, 5 x 7 inches

San Francisco Branding Agency, Shares CEO Perspective on the Industry

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Tracy Lloyd

San Francisco branding agency shares POV

As co-founder and CEO of Emotive Brand, a San Francisco branding agency, Bella is committed to the Agency promise of helping to transform brands and making the greatest impact possible through our work.

Bella works to maintain the highest standard of client services and delivers strategic solutions that meaningfully connect brands with people. We sat down with Bella to get the latest on what’s happening at Emotive Brand and her perspectives on brand strategy globally. In the following, she gives her insight on daily challenges, high-paced growth, and how to inspire and sustain meaningful business in the midst of it all.

Emotive Brand has created a new offering – Fast Forward – designed for high-growth startup clients that need to make strategic shifts to quickly address product, industry, competition, alignment, and other issues.

How does EB help companies move FAST?

Developing brand strategy can be a long and expensive engagement. People get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to reap the benefits. Our new Fast Forward offering is about delivering a quick win. It’s great for a company that needs lots of work, but can’t prioritize what is needed most or what will make the most impact fastest. Fast Forward allows us to engage in an intense, immersive phase of work. Together, we help our clients identify what their priorities should be in real-time and then create a deliverable during our working session with them. It’s like instant gratification. This agile approach also creates the opportunity to get to know each other and provides a real feel for our process and what working together on a larger project would look like. Clients see the value of what a more robust process would be because they’ve experienced the accelerated impact of a Fast Forward. This is often just what a team needs in order to gain internal alignment around the level of investment needed to continue to move forward.

As a branding agency, why are you always recruiting?

We’re in growth-mode right now at EB. We’re constantly looking for where the talent is as we expand our team. And talent is much more mobile than it ever was before. People aren’t looking for a job for life. They want rich experiences that they can fill up on and then move on to new ones. People want to be constantly learning. They don’t want to be doing the same thing again and again. I think that’s one of the benefits of working at an agency. The work is always changing. But there’s a trend in the Bay Area where a lot of creative talent is moving in-house and out of agencies. This means it’s more competitive than ever to find and grab those great people.

In terms of client services, how do you build and maintain meaningful client relationships?

At EB, we recognize that people buy from people. And clients, quite simply, want to deal with people – people who understand them and are empathetic to their problems, needs, and emotions. They want people who listen. At the end of the day, we are people and we strive to engage with people as people and not just clients or business partners. We understand what it means to juggle the challenges of a corporate environment, of reporting to a Board, of satisfying different stakeholders, and of managing office politics. We understand what it means to take risks and that it can seem scary. We know how hard it can be to stand behind something different. It’s not easy to be a client and we recognize that.

What are the latest and greatest EB successes in your mind?

As a brand strategy firm, we continue to lead the conversation about what it means to be a purpose-led company and how brand strategy can support that. When companies seek us out for that kind of work it feels good. The types of companies that we work for in the B2B, technology, and professional services recognize that being purpose-led can give them an edge. I’m proud that we continue to pioneer the thinking around purpose-led brands. And our clients keep coming back for more. We hold valuable, long-standing relationships and our work continues to grow.

In your opinion, what are the main challenges facing brand strategy today?

Time. Time is the biggest challenge. Everyone wants to move really quickly, but doing great work takes time. However, if you take too much time, things move on. The industry you’re in moves forward without you. It’s about finding a balance between moving too fast and being too slow. You can’t cut all the corners. As an agency, we have to find the balance of dedicating the right amount of time to our work and building flexibility into our process. We take the time where it is needed most and look to move quickly though areas that need less time. It is the same for our own brand. We are growing as an agency and it’s important that we continue to invest in our own brand and behaviors. We have to practice what we preach and that does take dedication, hard work, and practice.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy

Posted on May 12, 2017August 1, 2025 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.

How to Make a Business and Brand Transformation Successful

Posted on May 2, 2017July 28, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Emotive Brand hinges itself on the power of business transformation through brand strategy, and brand strategist, Jo Schull adds a honed strategic mind to our team. By working directly with clients to help understand the true essence of their business, she uncovers the necessary internal and external strategies needed to transform the potential of their brand into a reality. In this interview, Jo offers her thoughts and expertise on how to make a brand and business transformation successful.

People are always talking about business transformation – what does that mean?

Business transformation can mean different things to different people. Some leaders see business transformations as bold, quick moves meant to shake things up. Others look at business transformation as the start of a change – a process that starts with purpose, strategy, and vision, and then takes shape through a series of changes to the business.

When or why should businesses attempt a transformation?

Many businesses wait too late to ‘transform’ themselves. They wait until they’re in trouble. They wait until competitors have encroached on their territory, until employee morale is low, until recruiting is difficult, until share prices are down. They wait for when the business is stuck in a downturn. These are all certainly good and necessary reasons to attempt a business transformation, but smart businesses are always looking ahead. These leaders know that the best transformations anticipate and head off crises.

What’s an example of that?

Smart businesses are constantly thinking about what’s next. They ask themselves: what’s the next phase of their evolution? For some, it might be about a product expansion or moving into other markets. For others, it might be about refining their customer experience: how can their offering become the best and most beloved brand for their core customers? In the end, it all comes down to honing in on the business’s purpose — understanding and communicating clearly why you exist as a business. From this, the business can be intentional about its future, who you serve, and why you want to serve them.

What are the essential components of a successful transformation?

The business must have executive-level participation and ownership. The leaders of the company have to be an essential part of the process. They set strategy, make business and brand decisions, and are responsible for the company’s overall performance. They lead the change.
The process must be inclusive. All cultures are different. Some are top-down, and others are more inclusive and democratic. The most successful transformations are those that feel authentic. And the best way to achieve authenticity is by including many voices in the process. As much as it’s important that leaders lead the process, it is equally important that the process involves perspectives and participation from across the organization. This includes different divisions, different geographies, different functions, and different levels within the organization. Many top-down transformations have failed because leaders did not understand the day-to-day realities of the business.
The transformation must be true to your brand and business. There’s nothing worse than attempting a brand and business transformation that is misaligned with your brand or business position. Your employees will be the first to see the disconnect and your customers won’t be far behind.

How do you work with leadership teams to create alignment during a business transformation?

We start by getting the leadership team clear on three things:

1) Why does your company exist in the first place?

2) What’s the next big problem you can solve for your customers?

3) Where are the biggest threats and opportunities?

Ideally, leadership teams are aligned on these questions. But occasionally, they are not. Either way, it’s important that when going into any sort of transformation that leadership teams are aligned about these questions. A transformation will get them on the same page about why they exist, what they are trying to do, and where the next opportunities lie.

How do you rally employees?

When we talk about rallying employees, there’s no one right way to do it.

You may ask: Is this a course correction, or a 180° shift? What’s the state of employee morale? Will this come as a shock or has the leadership of your company been transparent and brought employees along the journey? How large is the company? There are always many factors at play, but here are some guiding principles.

Inspire: To many people, ‘rally’ implies large events where leadership teams unveil big visions and strategies to employees. Those events have their purpose – especially in large companies where leaders need to reach hundreds or thousands of employees at once – but a one-time event isn’t enough to create sustainable change.
Demonstrate: What’s equally important, if not more crucial, are the actions of the leadership team every day following those large inspirational events. Employees need to see evidence of change – both progress toward goals and examples of new ways of working.
Involve: If employees have been involved in the process, they’ll already have a stake in the transformation. They’ll understand the reasons for change and will believe in the vision for the future.
Reinforce: Examine internal systems such as messaging, reviews, rewards, and recognition to make sure they’re supporting and reinforcing the change you want to make, especially when dealing with culture change. Nothing erodes employee trust more quickly than policies and procedures that are at odds with a company’s stated values and beliefs.
Communicate: Keep the new strategic direction top of mind. Build it into employee communications and presentations. Bring it into areas where employees will see it. Highlight a section of the strategy and focus on it for a month or a quarter. But whatever you do, don’t let your new strategy languish in a drawer.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Top Brand Strategy Firm Shares Thoughts on Brand Purpose

Posted on April 22, 2017July 21, 2025 by Saja Chodosh

A brand strategy firm perspective

There’s been a lot of buzz lately around brand purpose – a concept that San Francisco’s Brand Strategy Firm, Emotive Brand has championed from our very beginning. Unfortunately, with buzz, comes confusion. It’s easy to get lost in the vernacular and repetitions and lose the answers to the key questions at hand. Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, offers some clarity, opinions, and answers to questions surrounding the concept of purpose-led brands.

1. What does it mean to be a purpose-led brand?

A purpose-led brand is a brand that is driven by a shared ambition, goal, or reason for being. Being a truly purpose-led brand means so much more than marketing your company’s purpose. I think many leaders have the ambition to be purpose-led, but are unwilling to do what it takes behaviorally to live their purpose. Purpose is something that people can identify with, internalize, and put into action for themselves. Purpose-led companies go beyond the obvious drivers of generating profit and creating shareholder value, and try to connect with people in authentic and emotionally meaningful ways. In 2016, I’m seeing a trend and stronger conviction in the idea that there is room for purpose AND profit, and I imagine we will see more and more leaders move toward this belief as they manage their business. Those leaders who are truly guided by their purpose will see their business gain the benefits of both purpose and profit.

2. How can brand purpose differentiate your business?

Purpose is what people are looking for in their day to day lives. So brands that lead with purpose have a real opportunity to connect with people in ways that matter. Be it to recruit top talent to an organization or to encourage people to choose your brand over another, purpose is becoming a deciding factor in our decision-making. We want to buy into something that makes us feel good. Something that makes us feel like we are a part of something larger than ourselves — larger than a single and fleeting purchase or a uninspired job that pays the bills. Purpose differentiates businesses because it connects ideas, people, activities, causes, and products that make lives matter in new and compelling ways.

3. How do you find your purpose?

I believe purpose finds you. And it is the one thing that drives people to build something that can change lives. Purpose is what drives you. For business owners, it might be the “why” that explains their decision to leave a previous job and create something new – something they believe in, are inspired by daily, something they feel could change the world. Your purpose is what attracts people to help you build it, and people to buy it. It is the common denominator of belief and this sets the foundation for other to be willing to work toward your shared ambition. When you lead with purpose, you can develop incredibly energized followers who share your beliefs.

4. Why should companies be thinking about purpose in the workplace?

There is no doubt in my mind that leading with purpose is what enables a thriving corporate culture. It is what will attract the right employees to you, keep the right employees with you, and more meaningfully engage employees in ways that will help both them and your business thrive. Workplaces automatically become more meaningful when employees share in the purpose of what the company is about.

To take this one step further and drive even more alignment and meaning in the workplace, outline the behavior shifts that employees and departments should work toward to support the purpose. This provides the opportunity for them to understand how their roles matter in the larger scheme of delivering on that purpose. When companies take this step, great things can happen: to the culture, to the bottom line, to how people feel about you internally and externally. A shared and embraced goal creates an aligned and engaged workplace.

5. Are purpose-led brands just the marketing buzzword of 2016?

I don’t think so. We’ve created a proprietary methodology and have been building a practice around purpose-led brands for the past 10 years. I believe purpose-led will become the defacto standard at some point. The world is changing, and people are looking for more meaning in their lives. We built Emotive Brand on this premise. And as time goes on, I think the value proposition, that, people want to work for, buy from, and engage with purpose-led brands, will be the most important way for brands to meaningfully connect with people today and in the future — which will create a win-win for everyone.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

The Value of a Sales-Led Positioning For High-Tech Companies

Posted on August 1, 2016August 1, 2025 by Paige Lansing Valle

A Sales Perspective

Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, shares how her sales background informs her work today, and offers insights on the true value of bringing sales to the strategy table.

Tell us about your sales background.

I have an interesting background that has led me to the agency world, and on to brand strategy. Initially, I got my start in non-profit fundraising and development. A start-up CEO bought an expensive table from me to attend a gala event I was hosting. Throughout the sales process of getting that deal done, he said to me that I was in the wrong job, and thought I should be in sales … at his company. And so I did. And from there, I sold technology for many years—some emerging technologies, other enterprise solutions—in the states and living as an expat overseas.

How does your background shape your approach?

Everyone brings their past experiences and jobs with them. My background happens to be in sales. And I bring that knowledge into our approach at Emotive Brand.

Because I know how to sell and understand what it takes to be successful in sales, I focus a lot of my time there. It helps me back into brand strategy. With a sales mindset, I can reach a full understanding of how to position and sell technology to the enterprise. In fact, I’ve realized I can’t really brand something until I know how to sell it. I need to grasp what’s working and what’s not from the perspective of the sales team.

Since the sales team is closest to customers, they have a strong understanding of what customers need to buy. They are naturally driven to be successful. And they want everything at their disposal to be successful. They are the people I want to spend time with so I can witness first-hand what is going on. Understanding what will help them helps fuel our own team and our work. It is also a good reality check for me to balance what I hear from other parts of the organization directly for myself, and to witness the realities of what it is like for the sales team who is out on the front line.

Other people might come from different angles, but I think that this particular angle is something that is distinct to the way we work at Emotive Brand. I think it differentiates the way we approach strategy.

So sales teams are involved in your brand strategy process?

Yes. I like to involve them in a few, key places in our process. Early on, I like to go on sales calls and listen in whenever possible. It helps me get grounded in what’s going on. I listen to their pitch – how they address objections and how they position the technology. I pay attention to tone of voice. I look for signs that indicate that the customer understands. I want to know the exact point at which a no transforms to a yes, and then pinpoint why.

Later on, I like to involve sales when we begin work on prioritizing target audiences and then again when we are developing the value proposition(s) and messaging. At the end of the day, so many aspects of brand strategy have value by being vetted by sales – positioning, messaging, defining categories, and go-to-market strategies. I gather huge insights from the sales team – insights, I might not be able to get anywhere else. It’s my job to ladder back these findings and connect all the dots, and from there build the most impactful strategy possible.

It is obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. It’s not as obvious to work with the sales organization. But, for us, it works. Bringing sales to the table creates alignment, and breeds a better, stronger, smarter end product.

What kind of clients are your skills in sales of particular value to?

We work with a lot of high-growth startups that are going to market with products and services that are new, and often times inconceivable to most people today. They’ve built and engineered products that are ahead of the marketplace. This requires hard work from the brand in order to cut through the clutter. Our clients need help clearly articulating their true value to customers. Often times the market needs help understanding the brand’s value proposition and our clients need these tools to help their marketing and sales teams execute successfully. They need to quickly penetrate the market and sometimes even create a new market when one doesn’t exist. We have done our very best work for companies who have complex B2B technology, are beginning to sell into the enterprise, and who need to create new value for old thinking.

Where does brand strategy come in to play?

Brand strategy is about solving business problems. It’s as simple as that. All of our clients come to us with a business problem and we create a strategy to solve it. Most often the problems we are solving are about growth, differentiation, and creating a strong value proposition. Our clients almost always have a solid understanding of the features and benefits their product offers, but leading with that is not working. They may not know it at the time, but this is where the brand needs to step in and help them better tell their story.

For us, it always starts with defining why a brand matters at the highest level. We make it easier for a target audience to understand a technology and its role. From there, it’s all about creating the corporate narrative. Nailing the category, the positioning, and creating a strong value proposition and messaging to appeal to your top buying personas.

Brand strategy answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams need to understand the answers to these questions in order to be successful.

Knowing how to sell makes it easier for me to think about the end user buying our clients technology and how to best support a sales team with the tools they need to go to battle and more easily articulate this new way of doing business. We arm them with the tools that more easily helps them do what they do well — close deals.

Are there any challenges involved in bringing sales to the table?

Taking sales people out of the field is hard. So it’s important that we use them strategically and not waste their time. We don’t need everyone in sales involved in the process, but we make sure to include enough people so the strategy can benefit from their front-line experiences. They are very good at helping us gauge reality.

What’s the bottom-line payoff of bringing sales thinking to brand strategy?

There is so much exciting stuff going on in technology right now. For our clients’ customers, it’s hard to keep up to date and understand who’s going to bring the right value to their business. Brand strategy can help position a business to thrive – creating the right tools to go to market, and helping customers more clearly understand why a business matters and how it’s different. Using my sales background is a way for us to get to the heart of why the brand truly matters so we can create the right brand strategy.

This understanding helps create a value framework, situate the brand and its people for success, and ready a business to scale. Our work is about creating a brand that truly connects with people rationally and emotionally. A strategy doesn’t have real value unless it actually helps a brand reach the people who matter most to its business in meaningful ways. Bringing a sales mindset to the strategic table makes for a more impactful strategy. That’s the bottom line.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

CEO’s Perspective on The Value of Branding and Strategy

Posted on April 6, 2016July 24, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

A CEO’s perspective on the value of branding and strategy

At first glance, “empathy” feels like a strange word to use in connection with a business like Central Valley, a building and agricultural supply company serving Northern California’s wine country and surrounding areas. But in recent years, building a culture based on empathy – the ability to relate to customers and to one another – has been a cornerstone of the Central Valley strategy under the leadership of third-generation owner and CEO Steve Patterson.

Steve has worked at the family business since the mid-1990s, shortly after his father passed away. It wasn’t Steve’s first job. After attending Pomona College in Southern California, he worked in San Francisco for an insurance carrier and then in Mexico for a company importing and exporting building materials (where he met his future wife; they now live in Winters, California with their seven children). But when his father passed, he decided to come back to Napa Valley to help his mother keep Central Valley alive and plan for the future.

Central Valley has become his career, and Steve is committed to creating a brand and culture that will serve customers and attract the kind of people who can help Central Valley continue to thrive.

When you decided to become part of the family business, were you prepared to run the company?

Not at all. Central Valley already had an outside advisory panel and I had a personal mentor who told me “You’re not ready to be CEO yet.” The idea was that I would work in several parts of the business to learn the basics, so I spent time in Operations, Sales, and General Management before taking the role of president.

The first two years, Central Valley enjoyed the benefit of a good economy, and then the economy turned south and so did our business. The great lesson for me from that time was that you can’t take all the credit when things are going well, and you don’t deserve all the blame when things are going badly.

Even that didn’t prepare you for the implosion in the residential real estate business – the Great Recession – did it?

Absolutely not. We were growing well in the early part of the decade. By 2005, sales were around $110 million. But by 2009, that figure had dropped to about $40 million. Managing through that downturn required a tremendous amount of fortitude, and I had to make some difficult and unpopular decisions.

Sometime in 2010, we believed things were on the way up again, and I started to explore some ideas around strategic execution – not strategic planning, but execution. One of the challenges we decided to tackle was to reinvigorate the brand. The idea was to reassess who we are and who we want to be. We decided to do this from the perspective of our customers, who include professional builders and contractors as well as the broader communities we serve.

We created an internal team to help us find a branding agency and met with several branding firms. The process of agency selection was very instructive. We learned what exactly we were looking for and how branding works, which had never been systematically addressed during Central Valley’s history.

And you found Emotive Brand. What did you like about their approach?

Tracy and Bella are a really dynamic team, and their agency was right in the sweet spot in terms of size for Central Valley. We felt that our business really mattered to them, and we were confident we would get some solid thinking from Emotive. And we immediately liked the EB approach that stressed the behavioral as much as the visual.

But I’ll tell you what really resonated with me: the notion of empathy. Empathy is really useful for every stakeholder, from customers to vendors to employees. Central Valley is essentially a family business, and I’m sure I know by name the vast majority of our regular employees. Every person here is important to the business and it’s vitally important that everyone understand how empathy can apply to our various roles. We have to relate to one another and be able to relate to customers.

When we started focusing on empathy, we started to ask questions like, “Who are the right customers for Central Valley?” Whether we knew it or not, this was a really deep concept for us. We can’t please everyone, but we should work hard to please the customers who matter most and whose business we want over the long-term.

Emotive Brand constructed a new visual identity for Central Valley, and you’ve implemented it broadly. What about the behavioral side? What about your company’s promise, “Making the next moment truly matter”?

We are always looking for ways to go beyond what is needed, wanted, or expected. I look for opportunities to reinforce this component of what our brand stands for all the time. For example, we have bi-weekly “Brand Aids” sessions – short meetings with employees where we explore the emotional impact of what we’re doing, and how it works in practice. That way, employees can see and hear – and understand – how a concept like empathy fuels our work and what it means day to day.

We work on specific behaviors. I’ll give you one example. In many countries, like Mexico for example, it’s common for employees in shops to offer a simple a “good morning” or “good afternoon” when a customer walks into a store, but this is not as widespread in the States. We’ve talked about how a simple “good morning” or other genuine inquiry to the customer functions as an acknowledgment that the customer is there. It’s a way of inviting them to ask if they need help without putting them on the spot.

We also have annual “One Team” all-hands meetings. These are real celebrations of our people and our values. We choose one of our five locations, bring everyone in, show everyone some of the innovations we’ve added to that site, and give people a chance to meet and share experiences. This is a “show, don’t tell” kind of event, and it really instills empathy company-wide.

Right now, we’re in the process of reconfiguring the way we hire people, to get the right folks with a natural sense of empathy and with a helpful, team-oriented mentality. Instead of infusing hires with our approach, we want to hire those who have our approach in their DNA.

What’s your mood these days about Central Valley?

I am very positive and very optimistic about where Central Valley is today and where it’s going. We did an employee survey recently and got very high scores from our people – and we posted every single comment, 28 pages of them, in the break rooms. We’re also planning for the long-term with an initiative we call “Vision 2020,” which is informed by the branding foundation we have laid down.

And we are doing something different. We made a recent hire from a competitor. He had been with that competitor for 22 years. While at his former company, a colleague of his told him to check Central Valley out as “there’s something interesting going on over there.” On his first day with us, he told one of his new colleagues that the things he has seen at Central Valley just wouldn’t have happened at his old employer. What he was referring to was the culture and the way we do business. We’re doing something different and we’re doing something right.

Read the case study for Central Valley.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and creative firm.

The Role of Planning, An Interview with Emotive Brand’s Strategy Director

Posted on March 28, 2016July 25, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

As Director of Strategy at Emotive Brand, Taylor works at the intersection of analytical rigor and creative inspiration. An account planner with a background in both research and creative strategy development, his work helps leaders and organizations discover and embrace positive change. In this post, he offers his thoughts on the significant role of planning when it comes to creating a meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of planning?

I spoke with a guy at NASCAR and when I asked him what he did he said: “I make the car go faster.” Simple as that. I would argue that planning isn’t just about speed. More important, it’s about the ability to adapt. It’s about flexibility. It’s a set of tools, perspectives, and practices that set organizations up for success – that out-adapt and out-mean the competition.

What is the goal of a planner in brand strategy?

The goal of the planner is to help leaders and organizations realize their purpose. Planning reshapes markets and creates more powerful and profitable bonds with people inside and outside of the organization.

In practical terms, it comes down to alignment. The planner asks: what is your purpose and how can we make that purpose meaningful to the people important to your success? To do this, planners have to consider how the brain works, how culture works, how humans behave. It’s not just about the product or benefits. It’s about meaning.

Good planning creates clarity in the face of information overload. It helps people to move forward feeling inspired and fired-up about common objectives that everyone can stand behind. A successful planner makes the complex easy to embrace.

How does planning help change how people see business challenges?

There is always a lot to do. Many of the executives, I’d say most, spend their days in ‘heads down’ mode, dealing with never-ending urgent issues. This can lead to laser focus or tunnel vision, usually both. My role is to help them see where they are and where they are going – making sense of the pace and direction of change in the outside world, identifying the evolution of expectations, and the shifts that will open up opportunities and possibilities.

We are all human, and we are prone to focus within the bubble in which we operate in on a day-to-day basis. It’s habit. Planning opens up the bubble and gives larger context to what’s happening. It opens the aperture so that the people who matter to your business can see the world from multiple points of view. These perspectives help build a new understanding of the challenges and give the organization the available tools to address those challenges.

How does planning play a key role in developing a meaningful strategy?

Planning aligns brand strategy with business strategy, and this alignment promotes more meaningful and inspired strategy. It empowers people to make meaningful, incremental, and disruptive strategic decisions with confidence.

Do you think planning promotes creativity in this way?

Yes, planning is inherently creative. Account planning comes from advertising and this type of planning is three-fold. First, planners work with clients to understand their purpose, situation, needs, and objectives. Second, they place the situation within the broader frame of culture, customer, and category. And third, they work with creative minds to make sure the strategy moves forward as powerfully as possible.

Planning is strategic, and strategy is intrinsically creative. And the first two stages of planning set the stage for creativity. Planning makes innovation less risky.