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Tag: Meaning

B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

We were talking with someone the other week about the role of emotion in brand, 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 by building emotion into the foundation of the brand.

The strongest B2B brands give people something to understand and something to feel. The key is to define the company’s Conviction—what it fundamentally believes—and the Emotional Impact that conviction should create.

Why Emotion Matters in B2B Branding

Strong B2B branding is about digging deep into a company’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.

Building emotion into a B2B brand 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 set 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 work with product-proven B2B technology and AI companies approaching moments when how the market sees them matters most—from strategic transformation and category shifts to enterprise expansion, fundraising, acquisitions, and exits.

For B2B companies, differentiation isn’t only about what the product does. It’s also about what the company believes, why that matters, and whether the market can feel the difference.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Return on Meaning: Five Evaluation Criteria for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands Rooted in Meaning Win Big

Return on meaning for businesses and brands is a compelling notion. In today’s world, it’s important to reconsider the ways you matter to people that are authentic to your brand’s purpose in the larger world. Now is the time to return to core human needs and evaluate where your brand fits in. This is why savvy leaders are taking a different approach to brand strategy. They are embracing the ideals of purpose, empathy, and meaning. They are creating newer, deeper, and more enduring connections with the people vital to their brand’s success, both within and outside their organizations.

In this approach, the keys to success are honesty and authenticity. In other words, the meaningful claims your business makes needs to be absolutely true. They also need to be seen as empathetic in order to resonate with the people involved.

How Do You Identify the Roots of Your Brand’s Meaning?

Consider how your product, policies, and procedures add to individual and collective well-being, both for your customers, your employees, and the communities and world around you. We suggest you explore these five areas as you pursue what matters most about your brand.

1. Human Safety/Security

In what ways does your brand help people feel more comfortable in the world, improve their sense of protection, or otherwise reduce feelings of insecurity?

2. Human Connectedness

In what ways does your brand give people a stronger sense of community, provide better ways to connect and communicate, or otherwise reduce feelings of disconnectedness?

3. Human Personal Growth

In what ways does your brand help people grow in body, mind, and spirit, or otherwise reduce feelings of meaninglessness? And inspire action and growth?

4. Positive Social Contribution

In what ways does your brand improve collective well-being across society or otherwise reduce social decline?

5. Positive Environmental Impact

In what ways does your brand work to ensure better lives for future generations or otherwise reduce negative environmental impacts?

Your brand may not be able to draw upon all five of these roots of meaning. At the same time, it may have multiple ways of creating meaning based on a single root. Regardless, the test is always how true the supporting evidence is and how well you see it through the eyes of others.

A Refreshing and Gratifying Audit

You should feel proud and gratified after such an audit. At its best, an exercise like this will reveal how your brand generates meaning in ways you never before considered. When you use these meaningful attributes to shape your brand strategy, amazing things happen. Suddenly, you’re able to elevate your story, connect on deeper levels, and fundamentally change the way people think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

As such, more positive energy is created within and around your brand. This energy attracts the prospects you need to grow and move closer to your vision for the world you do business in. It gives your current customers good reasons to become long-term loyalists and advocates of your brand. It draws in the recruits you need to grow and innovate. It aligns, engages, and motivates your employees. It gives your leadership new depth and purpose.

Return on Meaning: A New Path Forward

By identifying your brand’s deep-rooted meaning, you set the stage for a more competitive presence, a stronger organization, and a better future. This is because meaning naturally generates more meaning. As you embrace the meaningful goodness of your brand, you and your team are inspired to build upon it and to develop new roots of meaning.

Step back from your daily pressures. Walk in the shoes of others. Go back to the basics of core human needs. Gaze deeply into your brand and let it reveal the roots of meaning that will help your brand thrive now and over time.

Download our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Are you interested in learning more about how your brand can have a stronger return on meaning? If so, contact us at Emotive Brand.

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. 

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. 

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels. 

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective. 

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

  1. Context: the workplace in crisis
  2. Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
  3. Toward the meaningful workplace
  4. Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
  5. Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
  6. Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
  7. Making your workplace more meaningful
  8. “Ambition” is the new “purpose”
  9. “Feelings” are the “values”
  10. “Behavior” are the new “culture”
  11. Making it happen
  12. Going beyond “messages”
  13. A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

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

The Role of Company Culture in Business Success

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Corporate World is Restructuring Company Culture

Your company culture matters more than ever. Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 survey, “The new organization: Different by design,” maps and draws connections between the talent, leadership, and competitiveness challenges organizations around the world face.

This year’s data indicates a shift: CEOs and HR leaders are more focused on culture as a source of competitive advantage than ever, and they are turning to restructuring their organizations to increase employee engagement and retention, improve leadership, and build the kind of meaningful culture that drives success.

To put this in perspective, the 2016 study found that for the first time, 90% of respondents are restructuring or are planning to do so.

What’s the thinking behind all this restructuring? These companies are fostering highly empowered teams that are driven by a new model of management and led by globally diverse leaders. They are striving to transform themselves to be better and “different by design.” They are making a shift away from hierarchical, functional business models toward cross-functional “networks of teams” in an effort to become more agile, more collaborative, and more attuned to customers. These companies are transforming the way they do business in order to foster a culture of enhanced performance.

And with these transformations, we’ve seen company culture play a greater role in a business’s strategy. Fully 82% of respondents view workplace culture as a potential source of competitive advantage. Over 50% of the companies surveyed say that they are actively attempting to change their company culture. Yet, there is evidence indicates that leaders are “awakening” to the importance of culture. Fewer than 12% of those surveyed say that they understand what their company culture is.

People ask us all the time how to create a stronger and more innovative culture. This type of change isn’t easy or fast, but when you get it right, it can drive innovation and competitive differentiation in a way that’s good for your business and creates a more committed, creative, and even happier workforce.

Brand strategy has a very direct connection to the issue of culture change, and investing in brand strategy is fast becoming the norm for smart companies who want to create strong cultures and build meaningful engagement with their teams to drive business. When employees know why the brand matters – what is driving the behavior of the company and its values – they can align in ways that outperform the competition.

Recommendations

As you reflect on brand strategy and cultural change, here are our top recommendations for meaningfully transforming your business:

  • Develop a purpose-led brand promise for your brand
  • Help employees understand how to live this promise
  • Take a good, objective look at your organizational design
  • Be transparent in your interactions with employees
  • Make sure leaders and managers are leading by example
  • Be clear with employees on why your brand matters
  • Create a physical working environment that fosters the culture you want
  • Recruit with the brand promise in mind to attract like-minded people

The data from Deloitte paints a compelling picture of executives getting serious about understanding and managing culture as a linchpin their business’s strategy and transformation. For company leaders who are committed to building a better “different by design” organization, the best step forward is to integrate your brand strategy with your transformation or restructuring plan.

Please follow this link to read Deloitte’s survey.

For further insights on company culture, please enjoy our white paper on Meaningful Workplaces.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Creating Meaningful Brand Connections

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Creating Meaning by creating more meaningful brand connections

In our latest white paper, “Transforming your brand into an emotive brand“, we introduce a number of key drivers of our thinking, including the notion of “Meaning/meaningful brand connections”.

In our white paper we top-line this key driver in this way:

Emotive and meaningful brands strive to operate at a higher level than conventional brands. They act, interact, and react in ways that make every moment emotionally meaningful. Your customers and employees are left feeling more secure and connected. They feel your brand has helped them grow as humans. They feel your brand has touched them through love and beauty. 

What do we mean by “meaning”?

Our pursuit of meaning goes beyond mere linguistics, as in “ABS means automatic braking system.” It also goes beyond the first level of outcomes, typically the “benefit” accrued, as in, “more stability in sudden maneuvers.” It often even extends beyond the second level of interpretation, as in, “so, your family travels more safely.”

And it always goes beyond the product level. Indeed, we search for meaning across a brand’s products, policies, processes, procedures, and practices. We interrogate the impact the brand has not only within the scope of the customer experience, but across a spectrum of meaningful outcomes that can appear on the individual, social, and environmental levels.

Our quest is to harvest the goodness that is now otherwise buried in the brand, and to bundle it into a set of high-order brand truths. These truths form the basis of the brand narrative we produce.

What are meaningful brand connections?

Meaningful connections come when a brand forges a link between what it does, and what people are seeking on a very deep, human level. We believe that deep down, we are all seeking the same three things:

  1. To feel safe and secure in our surroundings, our social situation, and in our hearts
  2. To feel connected to the people, ideas, and ideals that we care about, and which nurture us
  3. To feel we are growing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, through our thoughts, actions, and possessions

Seeing the world, and the brand within that world, through this lens helps us interrogate, dissect, and rethink the brand to find those traits and attributes that link directly to these deep drivers of people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

The value of bringing this meaning to the surface is often not clear, because it presents the brand in a new, and often unfamiliar light. It provokes anxiety by suggesting that what is truly meaningful about the brand is very different from the way the brand has been traditionally presented.

The resolution to this tension is the blending of the “commercial” and “human” meanings in future brand actions and communications. This gradual evolution can lead to true brand transformation, as the people of the brand embrace its truths and live out its promise.

Why be meaningful?

Meaningful connections that flow from deep within the organization, and that reach deep down inside the hearts and minds of people, lead to greater brand appeal, differentiation, and loyalty.

The internal dynamic changes when the heartbeat of meaning is present; there is greater collaboration, self-initiative, innovation, attentive customer service, as well as higher degrees of engagement, gratification, and loyalty. This meaning-driven difference internally resonates externally, attracting prospects, recruits, suppliers, and communities to the brand.

Given the current pressures on brands, and the continuing challenges that loom ahead, many smart brand owners are seeking their meaningful difference. They see it as a high-level strategic choice that brings with it serious commitments of time, energy, and money.

Those who eschew the meaning option do so at their own risk. As more and more people become aware of their need for meaningful connections, and see that our culture offers few options, they will increasingly be drawn to those people, ideas, ideals, and brands that satisfy their core human needs.

Don’t stand idly by as meaning comes of age. Look deep within your world and see it as a person seeking meaning would do. Grab onto the meaning you find. Work hard to integrate that meaning into everything you do, every product you make, and every moment you have with the people important to your brand.

Transform Your Brand into an Emotive Brand Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Creating A Meaningful Workplace: It Doesn’t Happen By Messaging Alone

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Eighth in a series

“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine

It was earlier noted that people today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives.

This shift has not only prompted companies to reconsider their business models, product offerings, and workplaces, it has made them re-think the terms on which they engage people.

Messaging alone won’t pull employees in

This is especially true when trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the master plan to every employee or hanging posters in the cafeteria. Indeed, every aspect of the master plan’s deployment needs to be done in a highly sensitive and respectful way.

It has been said that messaging is dead, meaning that the idea of simply creating and broadcasting a bank of words, no matter how charmingly poetic they may be, simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Such business transmissions smack of company speak, and worse, of marketing. Eyes glaze over. Defensive shields are erected. Pure messaging attempts fail.

The goal, after all, is a meaningful outcome that seeks to bring the employer and the employee closer together. This is not to say messaging doesn’t play a role in the development of a Meaningful Workplace.

What it does say is that messaging cannot be the primary tool for instilling a sense of ambition, for evoking feelings, and for creating a meaningful culture.

Did you miss the first seven parts of this series? You might want to read:

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Employer Brand: It Doesn’t Happen by Messaging Alone

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine

People today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives and in their work. This is why there has been a rise in budgets directed to more meaningfully connect with employers and an increase in budgets to develop a company’s Employer Brand.

Messaging alone won’t pull employees in

This is especially true when investing in your Employer Brand, and trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the master plan to every employee or hanging posters in the cafeteria. Indeed, every aspect of the master plan’s deployment needs to be done in a highly sensitive and respectful way.

It has been said that messaging is dead, meaning that the idea of simply creating and broadcasting a bank of words, no matter how charmingly poetic they may be, simply doesn’t cut it any more.

Such business transmissions smack of company speak, and worse, of marketing. Eyes glaze over. Defensive shields are erected. Pure messaging attempts fail.

The goal, after all, is a meaningful outcome that seeks to bring the employer and the employee closer together. This is not to say messaging doesn’t play a role in the development of an Employer Brand.

What it does say is that messaging cannot be the primary tool for instilling a sense of ambition, for evoking feelings, and for creating a meaningful culture.

This excerpt is the eighth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Photo credit.

The Meaning Gap and What it Means for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Your business’s performance suffers when people don’t do what your business needs them to do. So why aren’t they doing what you need them to do? The meaning gap represents the distance that’s growing between your business and the people vital to it’s success. As your business becomes more sophisticated, measured, and managed – in other words, less human – it moves one way.

As people, acting as customers, employees, social media users, and citizens, become more mindful, concerned, and discerning – in other words, more human – they move in a different way.

Unless you act, this gap will keep growing wider and wider.

  • Your business will become more and more distant from people.
  • People will stop seeing why your business matters to them, and therefore, change their behavior in ways that work against your interests.
  • Your customers will become more and more dissatisfied and start searching for more meaningful alternatives.
  • Your employees will work with less vigor and unconsciously thwart your efforts to innovate and provide superior customer service.

Going deeper into your business, the people who are you partners, suppliers, distributors, and investors are also looking to align with businesses that matter beyond profit. As the meaning gap becomes more evident to them, they will be less likely to support you, work with you, or invest in your business.

This is all because we have moved on from the days of mindless consumerism and working-for-a-paycheck, to a time when people seek to create meaning in their lives and in everything they do.

They no longer just buy or work or stay silent or think only of themselves.

They want to do more with their lives, do things that matter, and feel they are making a positive difference through their decisions and actions.

Most important, they want to associate with businesses that help them do all of this in ways they admire, respect, and value.

The goal is to bridge the meaning gap by reaching out to people in new ways that engage them on an emotionally meaningful level.

Curious? Read our paper, “The Meaning Gap: What it Means to Your Business.” You may also find our paper, “The Age of Meaning” helpful in understanding the drivers behind the emerging values, attitudes, and behaviors of the people vital to your business’s success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.