Marketing Archives

The Evolving Role of the CMO: Chief Alignment Officer

Posted on April 19, 2024December 12, 2024 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.

HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together

Posted on September 12, 2022 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 touch point. 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, 2021 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, 2021October 27, 2024 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.

Talking Marketing Strategies in a COVID-19 World: Interview with Joshua Schnoll, Marketing VP

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Saja Chodosh

An Interview with a VP of Marketing: Marketing Strategies, Growth, Innovation, & Teamwork in a COVID-19 World

We sat down with Joshua Schnoll, VP of Marketing at AppDirect, a subscription commerce platform that gives businesses the freedom to grow, to talk about marketing strategies in a COVID-19 world and beyond. Joshua shares insights and thoughts on how strategy has shifted, the implications of this time on growth, brand, innovation, and teamwork, as well as what kind of mindset leaders should be adopting as this crisis continues to unfold.

Obviously, our world has been greatly altered in the past months. How have your marketing strategies changed with it?

Most importantly, we’re hyper-focused on empathy. Empathy for everyone: teams, customers, future customers…even vendors. When we renegotiated with the hotel where we consistently do AppDirect’s Engage event, we approached it as a mutual decision. How can we do the right thing, for each other?

Just because COVID-19 has changed everything doesn’t mean we’ve stopped marketing at AppDirect. We’re just thinking about marketing strategy within the context of the moment. Our subscription commerce platform helps large telcos offer SaaS and IaaS solutions to SMBs. So, we immediately pivoted to create solutions and content for remote work. Zoom might be the application that most associate with remote work, but the reality is much broader. Security, document management…we’re helping firms understand what they needed to make the full transition and providing those solutions to them.

Clearly, our events strategy has also changed. We’re taking a conservative approach. Larger events (around 50 people or more) won’t be back until a vaccine is found, shifting us to a full digital strategy. That means weekly webinars, small virtual executive discussions where non-competing customers can discuss strategies, and virtual customer round tables that host a broader audience.

Do you think these shifts will last long-term? Or prove to be more ephemeral changes?

I was having this debate with some of my friends, asking the question: will the conference world rebound after this threat has passed? I believe that as social creatures our nature is to want to be around other people. When you get out of the office and travel to a different place, even if it’s a few blocks away, it’s enriching in a way that virtual events simply are not. The serendipitous meeting that occurs in the hallway, the session you mistakenly walk into that proves to be amazing, the great food you eat while meeting customers…those are simply impossible to replicate digitally today. As many collaboration tools are out there, collaboration is never more productive than when in person.

That being said, I do think that the number of in-person visits will reduce and 25-30% of what we used to do in-person will be remote. There will be more virtual events, as everyone builds that muscle in a way they hadn’t before.

As a marketer, you’re inherently interested in how your consumers, your people, are connecting with your brand…engaging, buying…how do you think today’s marketers should be thinking about connecting with people/users in relevant, compelling, meaningful ways?

I think it’s important to keep your long-term strategy in mind and not lose that. The context customers engage in has changed radically, and we need to react to that – but with an eye still kept on the strategy. Think holistically about the customer experience. Your company strengths are the same, but customer needs may have shifted and the world in which people live is altered. How can you meet them where they are today? I think patience is big here. This is a scary, uncertain time for people. Be relevant, be empathetic, and be patient. That’s where I’m focused.

Let’s talk digital. As you know well, the business world was already moving there. Will COVID-19 accelerate or transform the shift to digital? In what ways?

It’s funny – we help firms transform their digital commerce and our greatest competition has always been the status quo, not some competitor. In fundamentally changing your business, shifting to subscriptions, and enabling digital solutions, fear and risk are often what hold businesses back. And COVID is like a wrecking ball to the status quo. Things we once considered unimaginable are the current reality. We’re seeing a number of clients that had slow-rolled digital transformation efforts now fast-tracking them, if they have the resources. I’d say it helps to be partly down the road. Take K-12 education. If a school district hasn’t even thought about what learning platform they’d invest in and now they have to transition to fully digital, that’s going to be difficult. The more work you’ve done, the easier this is.

A lot of businesses who were previously thinking in terms of growth are now thinking about security, stability, staying afloat…do you think it’s possible to drive growth during this time? How?

It really gets back to the hierarchy of needs. For firms that are suffering devastation from an immediate shutdown of their sector, I’m not sure they can think much about growth. Other sectors are different. I think we all need to have patience for growth. Don’t lose those growth ambitions, but be patient.

How does brand play a role? Do you see the role or importance of brand shifting as well?

Like we’ve discussed, this is bringing long-term implications for marketing, messaging, sales…. And brand must lead and play a role. Ask: how does the brand want to show up in the world? And use this strategy to guide how to move forward. Letting brand lead right now is really important. It’s not necessarily about optimizing for revenue, it’s about optimizing for a long-term relationship… and if you focus on making the brand relevant in a new context, and act appropriately, you’ll reap the benefits.

Interestingly, with constraints often comes newfound innovation… Do you see your business, and others around you, adopting more creative, resourceful, or innovative strategies?

AppDirect was founded in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession. Sticking with the status quo never works. This is a time to be more creative and resourceful. Think of ideas like “Goat-to-Meeting” – the animal sanctuary that started offering virtual tours and goat or llama cameos for company or school virtual meetings – that would have never been invented in a pre-COVID world. They’re finding new ways to connect with people and keep their not-for-profit farm going. Just the other day, our team was planning on how we can meaningfully connect with customers over a nice dinner. We’re looking at how to get meals and wine delivered to make a virtual dinner session feel real and special.

What mindset should a VP of Marketing be taking on during this time? What kind of thinking is working for you? What kind of thinking is working against you?

The productive mindset right now is a creative, strategic mindset. And I think, importantly, an optimistic and hopeful mindset. I don’t think this is the time for pessimism. It’s about the art of the possible. When you adopt a mindset of possibility, things get interesting and innovative. COVID has erased the separation between work and home, work selves and personal selves. And there’s something in embracing that informalness, that connection, that authenticity. And lastly, I think gratefulness for what we do have. For me, a great team of people. A company that is able to weather things. Health. Family.

How are you keeping morale up amongst your team and employee base?

We’ve gone through phases at AppDirect. When we first shifted to remote, we were really focused on making sure everyone had what they needed and were safe. We ran daily team stand-ups, we checked in regularly, we over-communicated on purpose. Once people started to realize that we were in this for the long haul, our approach shifted. It was clear that the most valuable commodity to our employees was their time. So to keep morale high, we enabled people to control their own time. We reduced the number of check-ins and increased flexibility so that people could have more time with kids and significant others. At the same time, we’ve been prioritizing team recognition. Acknowledging and celebrating the great effort everyone is making with small rewards like care packages for home.

If you need help adapting your marketing strategies, your brand, business, or culture during this time please reach out.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency based in San Fransisco, California.

A 5-Step Action Plan for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Posted on March 19, 2019 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, 2019 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.

2019 Marketing Budget Planning: Questions to Help You Get Started

Posted on January 1, 2019November 22, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

It’s That Time: 2019 Marketing Budget Planning

Developing your 2019 marketing budget is nobody’s favorite time of year. But it’s inevitable. Like clockwork each year, it’s here. As an agency immersed in helping businesses deliver the results they need to thrive, we understand first-hand that marketing budget planning can be overwhelming and taxing. Knowing what to include to deliver the results needed seems nearly impossible for many VPs of Marketing looking to drive growth, build brand, drive lead gen, and fuel revenue.

We know CFOs can be tough audiences. In fact, many VPs of Marketing that we know or work with express trepidation about the need to clearly articulate and validate a budget for the next year. It’s a daunting challenge. And even those who have significant growth and ROI to show from this year’s marketing spend still dread it.

As you develop your 2019 marketing budget, we’ve outlined a few questions to consider.

Positioning and Messaging

Confident that your positioning and messaging is tight, but still unable to deliver the growth you’re on the hook for? Have you considered building a brand campaign to drive awareness, spark engagement, and ultimately, foster loyalty? A brand campaign can grow your brand and business in meaningful and impactful ways by bringing your positioning and messaging to life. Learn more about why and how.

Differentiated Messaging

Struggling to articulate differentiated messaging that can support a complex technology that is difficult to understand? Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. And in order to be truly disruptive, you need to change the perception of what is possible. Consider how you might approach messaging differently.

Aligning Leadership Team

Having trouble moving forward on any decision because your Leadership Team is misaligned and you can’t get everyone to agree on the right strategy? Sometimes, it takes a deep dive and full immersion into your most pressing business and brand challenges to get everyone focused on the right priorities. Learn more about our Fast Forward workshop.

Positioning and Category Creation

Feel the need to reposition? Or, are you considering a new category to help you stand out and enable a stronger valuable to raise your next round? We believe a strong positioning strategy can help your business thrive, your brand become more meaningful, your team hire and retain top talent, and your business realize their full purpose and vision. Here’s why to consider adding a Positioning Strategy to next year’s marketing budget.

Customer Journey Mapping

Having trouble delivering on the experience you promise your customers? Think your company could benefit from research-based customer journey mapping to better understand the people who matter to your business? Customer journey mapping is proven to help businesses market better, sell easier, build better products, and deliver a better brand experience. Here’s how to do it right.

Strategic Marketing Budget

At the end of the day, every business has unique challenges and struggles. That’s why our approach is always tailored to our clients. Discussing specific challenges with someone outside the walls of your business can help ignite new thinking around how to address projects and problems you want to tackle next year.

If you would like to understand how we can augment your internal team or discuss specific projects you have coming up in 2018 so you can get a better idea of our approach, timing, and fees, please give us a call. Now is the right time for you to evaluate the options and costs associated with working with an agency so you have what you need to develop your marketing budget for 2018.

Emotive Brand is a B2B San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

To Every Marketing VP: How to Talk About Brand so Your CEO Will Listen

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Sara Gaviser Leslie

The Role of VP of Marketing – It’s Not Easy

Is VP of Marketing one of the hardest corporate jobs? We think so. As a Marketing VP, you have a set of responsibilities that varies dramatically day-to-day – and company to company. You touch every area of an organization and engage with almost every member of the leadership team to solve your business’s most pertinent problems. People look to you to drive demand gen campaigns, build awareness for products and the overall brand, support sales teams, support the company’s HR, and fuel recruitment efforts. And, of course, no technology marketing job is complete if you aren’t working to get included – and/or maintain your place – in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Even if you do all of these things well, though, nothing matters if you don’t have a strong brand strategy. Your brand strategy connects your work in marketing to the business strategy. It provides a backbone to everything you do. It explains what you do, why you matter, and what people should expect from you. If you don’t have a strong brand strategy, you risk confining yourself to the role of executor, not an essential member of the company’s leadership.

Whether you use an outside agency or bring together a team within your company, first off, you’ll need to convince the CEO to invest in the brand development process. We’ve found that this can be the most difficult step in developing your brand strategy because CEOs often don’t understand it! You mention “brand strategy” and you hear:
“We have a logo,” or, “I like our color scheme,” or “PR’s doing a great job getting us press.”

Maybe your CEO has had a bad experience with a branding project – and wants to avoid more of the same in the future. They respond to you with something like this:

“A brand strategy workshop? I don’t want to tell people my spirit animal!”

So How Do You Get Around CEO Misconceptions About Brand Strategy?

First, you need to explain that a brand strategy is just that, a strategy. It describes why and how you do what you do. It creates meaningful and emotional connections between the brand and both internal and external audiences. One of the most important elements of brand strategy is positioning. Positioning is about separating your company from your competitors, telling the market where you stand as a brand, and explaining the part of the market that you will own.

Then, depending on what you are trying to accomplish, here’s how you should talk about the business problems your brand strategy project solves:

Demand Gen: A strong brand will differentiate you from your competitors and convert leads
Go-to-market Strategy: When you’ve got a great brand story to tell – crisp and interesting – you can increase customer awareness. You develop pull for your brand and drive sales.
Recruiting and Retention: When you purposely build emotion into your brand, you create the potential for not just customers but also current and prospective employees to opt in.

Language Matters: Talk Business

For example, if the project you want to invest in will drive all marketing initiatives for the year, explain to the CEO that your “repositioning” project takes a new cut at the company’s go-to-market strategy, helps to differentiate the product, and increases productivity of the channel and grow sales.

If you want to do an employer brand project and must convince your company’s Head of People or HR, talk about “internal alignment”,“culture”, and“behavior”, and how your work will ultimately reduce turnover and recruiting costs.

Though it sounds counterintuitive, when you take the word “brand” out of the conversation and focus on the business problem, you speak in a language that a non-marketing person can understand. You also introduce accountability – solutions to business problems have measurable and reliable results. When you use business terms to sell your brand project, you’ll have an easier time reaching your audience and, ultimately, be more successful.

Emotive Brand a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

You may also like this post about aligning business strategy and brand strategy for long term growth.

What Brands Need to Do Right to Nail Their Digital Strategy

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Experts #5: Michael Beavers

Continuing our Emotive Brand Experts series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

Michael Beavers is a Silicon Valley-based digital strategist who works with leading technology enterprises, consumer brands, and startups. A veteran from both sides of the client and agency relationship, he’s worked with Google, Yahoo!, Intel, and many others.

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How do you define digital strategy?

Digital strategy describes the intersection of business strategy, insights about the human beings who interact with your company, and the systems through which they do so – then translating those insights into design and engineering implications. Your brand is represented online through a wide variety of channels. But there’s a big difference between delivering a brand message and thoughtfully delivering services and information that make the claims of a brand true. The services you create through every interaction with your customer are how your brand is perceived against the claims or characteristics of your brand.

Where do you begin as a digital strategist?

Regardless of the size of a project, I begin with inquiries about everything I can about a company. What do they do? For whom? Why?

I like to sit down with various stakeholders and examine what they do, why they do it, what digital things they depend on: websites, digital campaigns, ads, enterprise software, emails, everything. I also try to understand the company’s mix of enterprise software and IT environments that enable all of these tactics.

Often the digital goals expressed by my client need to be shaped further or altered beyond their original form. Then I shape both into something everyone can agree to before we put our goals and assumptions to the real test with customers.

How have you seen digital strategy change over time?

Gosh, what hasn’t changed? Devices are constantly changing, and not just the way we code for them. Technology is a scaffold for human behavior. What’s interesting is that human behavior changes that scaffolding, but the opposite is also true. Companies have a responsibility to make claims about their brands, back them up with great human and technology-enabled interactions that should never manipulate customers, but respect and shape how they behave with your company.

The early days of the commercial Internet were about experimentation and the organizational stuff companies have to offer. There was a middle phase where a lot of companies take a more manipulative view of consumers, which everyone sees through. I’m encouraged, however, as I see more companies view themselves as complimenting who they are and what’s great about themselves through software and services delivered through UIs across all devices. Everyone is now a software company, and some are acting like it.

What are some common missteps you see in the field?

Most of the time when a company is funding a web project with a marketing team, they think too narrowly about the user experience and what web teams rely on to inform that experience. Take any website from any global brand. Is it enough to organize the company’s information logically and push a beautiful design to production as quickly as possible? Maybe…but probably not.

What’s logical to internal stakeholders is the result of years of living inside of a company’s culture, its operations, and its organization. If that’s the basis of your user experience, you may simply be exposing your org chart and dysfunction. That’s not good enough.

A great strategy reflects the company’s goals and challenges but leans heavily on insights about customers and their worlds and contexts under which they experience your company. From a digital perspective, that’s what “brand” is.

The best way to inform your brand is through studying customers and users with minimized bias. When web teams at companies understand the value of research, the differences in customer satisfaction and brand perception is significant.

My very favorite question during strategy formation is, “How do we know?”

How do you discover that? Through personas?

Oftentimes, yes. Personas can be very helpful, but there are bad anti-personas out there, chiefly from marketers understanding personas to be assumptive bio-sketches of who they imagine their customers to be.

Personas were originally an advent for software design. But they’re useful for marketing and messaging, so it is common to place a “target segmentation” lens on personas for messaging. This has deleterious effects on how qualitative research is funded and how protocols get designed. Those outputs are rarely suitable for designing great digital experiences.

When informed with real observed data, personas are powerful informers of a digital experience. You can convey messaging in any number of ways, but above everything, you must give people something to do that is in line with their tasks and contexts.

This is the difference between marketing with digital “stuff” and marketing software or UI-led service delivery, which make brand claims real.

It is important for brands to update the axiom of customers always being right: the customer is always right to do what they do, so we should understand what it is that would help them believe in us as a company.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years?

I think the biggest change is unfolding before our eyes today in our national politics; specifically, the interdependencies of social media, ad networks, monetizing news content, and foreign operatives exploiting things that we all depend on to stay informed and go through our days.

The distribution of content and opinion through news and personal social channels has never been this intertwined. Because makers of the commercial could not foresee foreign interference, the Gutenberg press of our age has gone awry.

It breaks my heart to see but I’m also encouraged by what I see in the design and engineering community. Discussions about signaling meaning and trust, design and engineering ethics, and consumer awareness of security have never been greater. So that’s the new current situation and context for all digital strategy.

A company trying to sell more stuff to the right people has to understand how to be authentic. It must align its values to those of its customers, and make it real through trustworthy commercial interface products.

Brands must also now deal with the proliferation of the marketing technology stack. It encompasses everything: hosting, content automation, marketing automation, CRM suites, analytics, social media, and case management.

The implication is that marketers have a lot more to manage now. The complexity and scale of marketing has increased exponentially, and customers interacting with your digital experiences bring heightened skepticism and service expectation. Staying on top of those skills is really challenging. That’s why it’s often helpful to have expert outsiders, people willing to gently bust the silos and mixed contexts that hinder great customer experience.

What advice would you give to fellow digital strategists?

The best advice I can give is to stay curious and have fun with this stuff. Try to dig into as many tactics for understanding as you can but don’t over-index on any one skill. It will be different tomorrow anyway. Be at least categorically familiar with various web technologies, marketing automation, analytics, and how to read and interpret how they report insights you can use to form your strategy.

Know yourself. Are you a T-shaped professional and embrace your natural curiosities? Are you comfortable exposing your areas of ignorance to understand them better?

Do you think in both short and long-term frames? You may already be a great digital strategist, even if you don’t have an engineering or design background.

Spend time figuring out those worlds. Designers and engineers are ultimately the people who you serve through your strategy. Your communication should be an organized vessel of clear insights and objectives. Their work is what makes the brand real for customers. They need your help.

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