Marketing Archives

The Evolving Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on April 19, 2024August 1, 2025 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 work 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

Voice of the Customer

The amount of information we have about customers is only increasing. How does a temperature between 70-75 degrees impact consumer behavior on Monday’s v 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 that points to 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 to 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 audiences, 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.

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 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.

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 creative agency that unlocks the power of emotion to propel a brand, culture, or business forward. We are a remote-first agency with a footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Challenger Brands: B2B Challengers

Posted on November 15, 2022August 1, 2025 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 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 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 up 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, 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.

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 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 agency in Oakland, California

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on September 12, 2022August 1, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge

HR and Marketing? The role of HR has evolved significantly in recent years. Attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is a high priority for executives, and most companies place this responsibility on HR. According to PwC 18th Annual CEO survey, a full 73% of respondents are concerned about the availability of talent – a 10% increase from 2014. Executives worry that it’s getting harder to recruit and keep the people who are both skilled high-performers and ‘fit’ within their organization’s culture. And without top talent, maintaining a competitive advantage, adapting to industry change, and growing business is nearly impossible.

Fierce marketplace competition makes it difficult for candidates to know if they are a good fit for the brand without some guidance. Ensuring employee ‘fit’ means your brand needs to know why it matters. That’s where an employer brand comes in. Your employer brand must do the hard work of being clear and consistent about its promise (EVP), communicating an authentic, meaningful brand experience across all touchpoints. When done well, an employer brand helps attract the right talent, allows prospects to self-select for fit with your organization, and increases the likelihood that they will develop into long-term, low-churn, high-producing members of your team.

The Heat is On

Today, HR is tasked with creating an employee experience that markets the business to recruits and employees. Crafting a relevant and resonant employer brand involves aligning your organization’s aspirations, values, needs, and wants with the people you are looking to recruit and retain—no easy feat.

The pressure to create a unified, engaging experience for employees and prospects is real. And, launching an employer brand often involves obtaining budget from a CEO who may not see its value. What’s more, building an employer brand can become nearly impossible if the corporate brand is outdated, or worse, non-existent. When HR operates in a silo, getting budget and approval can be an uphill battle.

We’ve worked with a number of clients with varying global challenges around recruitment and employee engagement and there’s one thing they all agree on: successfully building an employer brand can’t be done in isolation. Engaging and partnering with marketing from the very beginning is essential.

Five Ways to Create a Successful Partnership Between HR and Marketing

Designate an owner. Clarifying ownership is key. There is no better steward of an employer brand than the CEO, but gaining alignment from the rest of your leadership team, including key stakeholders, securing budget, and taking the project to the finish line won’t happen without a designated decision maker from either the HR or marketing team.

Map the employer brand to the corporate brand. Even if the corporate brand looks outdated or lacks relevance, the employer brand needs to build off of the brand’s foundation, otherwise it is confusing to your employees and the marketplace. Use what assets the brand has and build from there. If your corporate brand has a brand promise, find a way to use that as your North Star. The authenticity of the employer brand depends on HR and marketing working together to create an employee experience that is true to the brand.

Get a commitment from key stakeholders. Getting the leadership team invested in the employer brand is more than just establishing a committee where people can voice opinions. It’s also important for each leader to understand the reach of the employer brand as a key influencer of your brand’s image and reputation. Leadership needs to have skin in the game from the start. This up-front work will help you and your marketing team move quickly with alignment and see the project all the way through.

Build a coalition. Once you’ve got your employer brand strategy in place and support from the key stakeholders, you’ll need advocates from both marketing and HR to roll out the employer brand. Unfortunately, there’s no “launch” button for your employer brand. To make the biggest impact, you’ll need a team dedicated to the project who have always been part of the journey. Marketers know how to drive and measure audience engagement, create engaging experiences, nurture audiences, and tell a story that keeps people interested and engaged over a long period of time. And you don’t just need the marketing execs on board, you need the whole marketing team.

Don’t forget purpose. Your employer brand needs to be rooted in purpose and meaning in order to emotionally connect to and successfully recruit and retain the type of talent best suited for your business. HR understands what matters to employees, but marketing knows how to capture their attention, authentically win them over with purpose-driven messages, and create valuable brand experiences at every touchpoint. When HR and marketing collaborate on an employer brand strategy together, they ensure that the company lives up to its promise and executes it every day.

Collaboration Wins

HR and marketing are not used to collaborating on strategic initiatives, especially those driven by HR. But not engaging marketing in the project can be a fatal mistake. Marketing owns the brand and they need to be brought along on the journey. Marketing will appreciate being asked to participate and HR will save time and angst by getting them involved from the start.

Top talent have their choice of companies to work for. Access to information and opportunity has accelerated a new employer brand rule book where companies are continually learning to adapt the hiring, retention, engagement strategy, and practices for success. By coordinating these efforts with HR and marketing, your business will reap the benefits in terms of the talent you attract and how well they ‘fit’ into the company.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

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

Posted on April 26, 2021August 1, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on January 14, 2021August 8, 2025 by Tracy Lloyd

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

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding 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 and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’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.

Emotive branding 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 sets 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’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

Turn Your Instagram Into a Playground for Experimentation

Posted on July 16, 2019July 29, 2025 by Chris Ames

Instagram is incredible. All in one app, you can feel jealous of other people’s lives, hungry for other people’s food, and intimidated by other people’s makeup routines. When it comes to brand strategy agencies and design studios, Instagram tends to be used for either sharing polished client work or photos of employee’s dogs (equally important).

But more and more, we’re seeing studios break out from the norm and utilize the platform as a playground for design experimentation. Turning the web into their own personal focus group, agencies are sharing weird sketches, creative side projects, and honing new skills.

The Art of Symbols

Recently, we completed the #100DayProject on our Instagram – an experiment in reimagining 100 symbols through illustration and motion design. Part creative marathon, part research assignment, it was a fantastic way to test-drive some new ideas. Outside the typical constraints of a client project, we could ideate and follow our curiosity wherever it led us.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Byq0UOFh8k7/

As Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard says, “I think there’s something about quick validation via Instagram. I’ll throw ideas up on Instagram that I’m not sure if I should keep pushing. If it gets a positive response, I’ll keep going. And if it doesn’t, I know that it might not be worth pursuing. I don’t have to work at something for months to finally unveil it in some grand gesture.”

Testing, Testing

DIA studio specializes in kinetic typography, and they utilize their Instagram as a veritable gymnasium for moving type. Alongside client work, they showcase tests, attempts, and chaotic exercises. Maybe there’s an assumption one should only post perfect works from your portfolio to appear “professional,” but bringing the client in on your thinking shows your brilliance in another way. From a strategic and artistic point of view, people love gaining insight into the process.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhuwyAcFpbQ/

As Design Director Robert Saywitz says, “Social media has completely changed how we think about design. Instagram is a positive tool for design firms to share their own work – and work that inspires them – with the world. The impact of that instant access, compared to say, ten or twenty years ago when you’d have to hunt through websites or printed design annuals to connect with work, is massive. It’s also a beacon for finding agencies you’d like to work for.”

Unexpected Collaborations

Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, created a yearlong data drawing collaboration between partner Giorgia Lupi and information designer Stefanie Posavec. Each week, for a year, the designers sent each other a transatlantic postcard with analog, hand-drawn data describing what had happened during the week. Over the course of the self-initiated project, the pair became good friends, using data as their primary source of communication.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bzizc1DBDve/

As Creative Strategist Chris Ames says, “I love the idea of treating Instagram as an imperfect, collaborative tool between creatives. There’s a sleekness and polish to the digital age that we should push back against. I want to see process shots, behind the scenes sketches, the joke ideas that never made it to the client.”

The World Is Your Mood Board

Spin Studio, a graphic design agency in London, treats their Instagram as a constant source of inspiration. From experiments in typography to their travelogue photography, they capture whatever intrigues them. Everything is potential fuel for better client work. So often, projects become hermetically sealed within the confines of a studio. If we’re making work that ultimately goes out into the world, shouldn’t we turn a critical eye to the world around us?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BysUIhAB6ZF/

As Designer Keyoni Scott says, “Mobility is really powerful. Being able to always be in touch with a studio’s work and the new inspiring things they are doing is amazing. So, I think it’s really important to do quick experiments and just put your work out for people to see. I think everyone sees things differently and can be inspired in different ways, so you can’t be afraid to just put your work out there.”

Keep It Weird

Chances are, your website already has a section for case studies. Instagram doesn’t have to be your portfolio. Instead, it can be a repository for your 3 a.m. ideas, your moonshot designs, and wonderful distractions. After all, finding new ways to flex our creative muscles will only make the client work stronger in the end.

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

A 5-Step Action Plan for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Posted on March 19, 2019August 1, 2025 by Stephen Banbury

B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment 2.0

A former colleague of mine just started a job where she was required to stand up and deliver a sales presentation to the sales leadership team. That wouldn’t be unusual for a new salesperson – but she’s a marketer. And the experience of walking in the sales team’s shoes made her a better one.

B2B companies talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but talk will only get you so far. Companies need to take action to get their sales and marketing teams empathizing with each other, strategizing together, and working from the same playbook.

It’s a critical time for sales and marketing alignment. The benefits have never been greater. As technology and data transform business, new opportunities are emerging every day for the savviest B2B companies to boost lead quality, close more deals, strengthen their brands and improve their work culture through tighter teamwork.

So how to get from here from there? If you take the following action steps, you’re all but certain to enjoy stronger B2B revenue growth this year.

Action 1: Plan together

Most companies have already conducted their 2019 planning meetings, but if you haven’t, now is the time. And even if you have, you shouldn’t stop there. Before the holidays, be sure to put four quarterly sales and marketing planning meetings on your calendar for next year.

A lot of change can happen over the course of a year, so it’s important to have an in-depth planning session at least quarterly. This is a chance for B2B sales and marketing teams to sit together and review sales objectives for each time period. Then you can agree on how the strategic marketing plan can best support those objectives, from corporate and field events to high-value content.

Action 2: Walk in their shoes

Aligning goals and tactics is an important start, but for greater impact, marketing needs to truly understand the hurdles salespeople face every day.

Marketing tends sometimes to lean toward the aspirational, but sales enablement requires a more down-to-earth approach. It’s important that marketers attend regular sales team meetings – yes, every week — and hear firsthand what is working, what is not, what prospective customers truly care about, and what key questions marketing absolutely needs to answer.

As my friend’s experience above illustrates, having B2B marketers stand and deliver a sales presentation is a great way to enhance their understanding of how well their own slides work in practice, not just in theory. Actually telling the story is the best way to gauge how each piece connects with different audiences while identifying any gaps.

Sales, for its part, should appreciate that marketing is tasked with a longer-term, strategic role in growing the company, the brand, and its customer relationships.

Particularly as subscription-based SAAS becomes the dominant revenue model, topline growth is driven less by closing a few big deals and more by long-term nurturing that paves the way for customer loyalty and successful cross-selling and up-selling.

It takes mutual respect flowing both ways to fully leverage the strengths of both sales and marketing – so everyone can reap the benefits of these opportunities.

Action 3: Connect top to bottom

Sales and marketing alignment at the executive level is not enough. The entire organization, from the c-suite to operations to customer-facing field staff, should know each other and have regular conversations. If this isn’t happening, now is a good time to make those introductions.

Action 4: Pay for what you get

Typically sales teams are compensated based on meeting and exceeding revenue targets, while marketers aren’t – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Some B2B companies have started rewarding marketers for KPIs like deals influenced or deals sourced. Good CRM tools are making it possible to track the effectiveness of specific pieces of digital content, making detailed ROI measurement – and rewarding the content creators — more feasible.

Action 5: Lean heavily on your brand

As sales and marketing alignment gains steam, brand makes even more of a difference. It gives both sides a common understanding and shared language as they essentially co-create the B2B brand experience.

The most successful sales and marketing partnerships are aligned in their commitment from top to bottom – from their brand’s highest-level vision to its most tactical tools.

By nurturing mutual respect and leveraging the strengths of both the sales and marketing teams, your company will be set up for greater success in 2019 and beyond.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Brand Strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies. Learn more about our work with high-growth technology companies here.

How to Launch a New Brand Category

Posted on March 4, 2019August 6, 2025 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.

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 sounds 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 adaptors 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 are powerful ways 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 customer’s 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. 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.

This post is the 4th in series on brand category creation. Learn When to Create a New Brand Category, How to Create a New Brand Category, and Naming a New Brand Category.

Download our White Paper on Brand Category Creation.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Getting all the Stakeholders on the Same Page

Posted on February 19, 2019July 28, 2025 by Chris Ames

In America, there is a strong belief that the success or failure of your venture comes down to individual drive. It’s you, and you alone, that can turn the tide in your favor. In reality, as even the most steadfast founders learn, much of your time will be devoted to appeasing external stakeholders. Sometimes, those who know the least about your vision will have the most influence over its chance of survival.

Navigating the C-suite requires knowing how to engage stakeholders by building and nurturing relationships. The meaningful enterprise has moved from a transactional foundation — where enterprises serve their own benefit, even at the expense of others — to a relational foundation — which acknowledges that interdependence among diverse parties is essential for sustained success. Here’s the thing about relying on others: it’s always slower in the short-term. But for those with the patience to sacrifice short-term speed for long-term agility, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Before we get too deep, a bit of housekeeping. What exactly is a stakeholder? A stakeholder is anyone who can affect or is affected by the actions of a corporation. The concept of the stakeholder was first used in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institute, and described them as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist.” This description is as wonderful as it is vague, allowing you to cast the net as widely or as tightly as you wish. Is it those who directly fund you? Or those who provide those late-night emails of clarity when you’re spiraling? In short, yes. For a bit more guidance, look to the difference between internal and external stakeholders.

Internal stakeholders typically comprise employees, managers, owners, and in some cases, volunteers, interns, or students. The importance of consulting with internal stakeholders is self-evident. They are the ones on the front lines. They hear everything, know everything, and work across all touchpoints. Think of them as the physical engine. You can’t get a tune-up from a specialist without bringing them an actual machine. Most founders understand how vital their own team is. The trick is bringing that same love, care, and attention to outside counsel.

External stakeholders are those outside the corporation who interact with it in some way. This could be funders, investors, shareholders, advisors, banks, finance companies, suppliers, policymakers, legislators, social media influencers, and of course, customers. Each of these groups of stakeholders is usually termed a “constituency,” and each constituency represents a homogenous group usually holding a similar interest in the organization’s affairs. Think of them as the team of specialty mechanics, each having a particular, bespoke solution to make your engine run a little better.

When it works like it’s supposed to, stakeholder consultation results in a relationship of mutual benefit. It enables us to spot trends, emerging challenges, and risks. It brings a fresh set of eyes to your venture, offering new perspectives which can be used to improve project design and outcomes. And as anyone at a cocktail party has learned, playing nice can form unlikely collaborations and partnerships. All of this helps your brand to:

Determine needs and expectations
Identify perceptions and attitudes
Evaluate implementations and actions
Establish the brand values and positioning of the corporation as seen by others
Ensure your decision making is more informed and in tune
Administer a greater chance of implementation and activation

So, when and how do you bring in the troops? Kevin Crump, writer, and Customer Success Manager recommends weaving them in as early as possible.

“If you engage your stakeholders early in the project — ideally during the planning stage — everyone gets a common understanding of the scope, the timing, the budget, and the resource demands from the get-go,” he says. “This means no major surprises later in the lifecycle, and no ongoing divergence between stakeholder vision and reality. That’s why we have menus in restaurants. We don’t just expect the waiter to serve us exactly what we want without discussing it first.”

In this lovely diagram from B2B International, a B2B market research company, we see how a method of planning, process, presentation, and promise can be used to maintain effective communication throughout the entire lifecycle.

This outline is a great bird’s eye view of how to approach stakeholders. But what happens when you’re in the weeds with someone difficult? Here are four strategies for making sure you don’t burn your only bridge out of town.

1. Seeing. You can’t solve a problem if you can’t identify it. The first step is to clearly identify your stakeholders and figure out what motivates them. Primary stakeholders are those directly affected by the work. Customers often fall into this category. Secondary stakeholders are those indirectly affected by the work. This includes support teams or those impacted by the outcome. Key stakeholders are those with strong influence and vested interest. This would be the executives. Each group has different interests, objectives, and agendas — many of which will be in direct competition. Identifying and ranking their influence and interest will help keep projects moving in the right direction. The truth is, not all stakeholders are created equal, so sleuthing out who holds sway and who is your best champion will save you a lot of stress. Ask yourself questions like:

What are their most pressing business needs?
What is the best way to communicate with them?
What information or details do they need?”
Do they fully understand your work or do they need some extra explanation?
Who influences them?
What are they responsible for?
Who do they report to?

2. Listening. This is much easier said than done but resist the urge to close communication channels just because you don’t like what you hear. When receiving negative feedback, I always have to remind myself that it’s very unlikely someone is doing this as a personal attack against me. (Though not impossible.) Nine times out of ten, even the most off-kilter comment is based on some insight, backroom conversation, or email you weren’t looped in on. Try to see where difficult stakeholders are coming from and put yourself in their shoes to better understand their motivation and goals. Do their needs align with your project’s objectives? Do they simply want things done a different way? Common ground isn’t always common, but it’s worth searching for.

3. Meeting. Never underestimate the power of individual communication. For one, it’s a more human, efficient way to explore diverging viewpoints. You can clear the air, vent, and hear things from a new perspective without the formality of a group presentation. And two, meeting without other stakeholders in the room takes the pressure off and prevents negative opinions from spreading. Sometimes, it’s about just letting someone feel that they are heard.

4. Proving. A sad truth: you’re probably going to lose a battle of opinions to a senior employee. That’s why you should arm yourself with cold, hard facts that support the direction you want to take.

“Change the game by quickly running a test and collecting some evidence,” says Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group. “Move the discussion from opinions to data. Share what you’re learning very openly. It may be that neither of your opinions was right.”

Especially in data-hungry Silicon Valley, data will always trump hunches. More than being right, it shows you’re taking a more analytical approach to your role, which will bolster your credibility for the future. Even if you can’t find a mathematical proof point, you can use the voices of actual customers to make it less about your opinion and more about what’s right for the market.

In the immortal words of John Donne, no man is an island. As much as we’d like to singularly launch our idea into the Fortune 500, chances are we’ll need the help of external stakeholders. So, here’s to the power of compromise, communication, and diversity of opinion.

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

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Let’s Get Political: Can Brands Stand for More Than Profit?

Posted on February 14, 2019July 28, 2025 by Chris Ames

These days, when you see a brand trending on Twitter, it can only mean one thing: they got political.

Brands aligning themselves with a cause is no new thing, but there’s something about the social media age that makes it electric. Even a low-risk cause, like suggesting that men should aim to be the best versions of themselves, is enough to start hashtag boycotts and video challenges of people destroying their own property. For better or worse, we’re in an era where if people don’t like a particular cause you’ve supported, they will actively search and destroy your ad partnerships. The modern relationship between brands and politics is super interesting, and has led me to the following three questions.

1. Why do people respond so emotionally to brands?
2. Can brands stand for more than profit?
3. If you’re going to get political, how do you do it in a way that feels authentic?

Millennial Marketing and Brand Democracy

As an agency that specializes in emotion, it’s been fascinating to watch the increasingly volatile connection between brands and people. Nearly two-thirds of consumers around the world will buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue according to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study, a staggering increase of 13 points from last year.

I believe this trend is a result of two main forces in the market, the first being the rise of purpose-driven, mission-led marketing that uses storytelling to create strong emotional ties to their products. Especially in the last ten years, brands have fully leaned into the power of narrative and its ability to win customers. Here’s a winning formula that’s being constantly replicated: take something banal, give it gorgeous design and a strong backstory, deliver it straight to your customers, and donate a fraction of the proceeds to a charitable cause. It works for anything: toilet paper, shoes, socks, glasses, you name it.

This dynamic transforms marketing from function to aspiration. All of these products – once thought strictly utilitarian – are now narrative-filled objects that reflect on the buyer’s own personal brand. When there is all this meaning and identity and personality baked into the brands you interact with, no wonder it feels like such a betrayal when they support something you disagree with. That volatility is not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, it’s a use case for the power of branding. If you can find a way to wield that emotion, you’ll have a sea of loyal customers. At least, until they disagree with you.

The other force, in my opinion, is a shift in the power dynamic between big government and private business. Another key finding from the Edelman report is that nearly half of all consumers believe that brands have better ideas for solving our country’s problems than the government. Here’s what Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, had to say about what are now known as “belief-driven buyers.”

“This is the birth of Brand Democracy; as consumers are electing brands as their change agents. Brands are now being pushed to go beyond their classic business interests to become advocates. It is a new relationship between company and consumer, where purchase is premised on the brand’s willingness to live its values, act with purpose, and if necessary, make the leap into activism.”

Can Brands Stand for More Than Just Profit?

Let’s get this straight: businesses want to make money. That’s the engine behind every action they take. Sometimes, that engine can be steered in a direction of social progress, but it is still fueled by profit.

Nike had the most controversial ad campaign of last year. Colin Kaepernick’s “Just Do It” ad, which bears the slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” seemed to be the most politically divisive campaign in the company’s history. It was praised by the left for shining a light on police brutality and racial injustice. Sales at Nike not only increased, they skyrocketed. “Nike’s stock recently hit an all-time high and has gone up nearly five percent since the Kaepernick ads launched in early September,” reports Yahoo Sports. “That translates to an additional $6 billion in market value.”

But as writer Joshua Hunter brilliantly put in his piece for the Atlantic, Nike’s cause is simply good business. “One of capitalism’s most enduring myths is the idea that there are good corporations and bad corporations,” he says. “The truth is far more simple: Colin Kaepernick has a dream, and selling dreams is Nike’s business.”

At the end of the day, Nike still does business with the NFL, which has done its best to stifle Kaepernick’s protest movement. Is that hypocritical? Is that calculated risk management? And if you’re a brand looking to get political, how do you do it in a genuine, authentic way that won’t bite you later on?

What You Make and What You Care About

Here’s an exercise I think is useful: create a Venn Diagram that plots out what you make and what you care about. Where brands get into trouble is when these are two completely separate circles. You end up with soda companies thinking they can solve racism, or this hilarious skit about Cheetos from SNL. The distance between what you’re making and the difference you’re looking to make can’t be too far. If it is, you look like an emotional tourist.

Look at Gillette. The new ad “We Believe” – a 48-second spot that plays on the company’s tagline of “Is this the best a man can get?” – addresses issues like bullying, sexual harassment, and the #MeToo movement. Does this pass the test? Well, they make shaving razors, probably the first object I would suggest for something representative of traditional masculinity. And since 1989, they have been using their tagline to offer an idea of what it means to be a man. For them to have an opinion on the changing roles of men is completely within their wheelhouse.

For a data-centric spin on political messaging, look at the way Netflix has positioned its popularity as a unifying force to break down barriers. “We All Have Six Shows In Common” is an innovative ad that claims any two Netflix members, anywhere in the world will share an average of six shows in common. The brilliant thing about this spot – and the reason it avoids the mistakes of Pepsi – is that it says so much without saying anything. All of the dialogue comes from the Netflix shows themselves, with reactions from a diverse and inclusive viewing public. They don’t have to say, “Streaming television will solve bigotry.” They simply show us a common point of connection and let us draw the conclusions.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s travel ban, Airbnb took a more direct political approach with their “We Accept” ad. “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong,” they say. “The world is more beautiful the more you accept.”

Do we buy it? Well, they created an entire platform on the belief that you should be able to find a place anywhere in the world that feels like home. Their technology is built on genuine human-to-human connection and a desire to expand your perspective through travel. It makes sense.

Is It Worth the Risk?

In a conversation on big brands and political activism, marketers believed taking a political stance:

Shows their company cares about more than making profits (75.8%)
Has a positive effect on the company’s ability to attract and retain customers and partners (69.7%)
Bolsters the company’s ability to attract and retain employees (69.7%)
Boosts the company’s ability to stand out in the market (51.5%)

We know that politics are messy. You risk alienating your audience if you back a cause they don’t believe in. But the truth is, whether or not they want the responsibility, brands are powerful vehicles of meaning in our world. If they choose to do so, brands can act as cultural agents that can shape commerce and community life. Companies put their products out into the world every day. The real question is, what do they want that world to look like?

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

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