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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 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.

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.

Leadership in a COVID-19 World: Navigating “Fields of Paradox”

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Turbulence Takes a Toll

The acceleration of COVID-19, the speed and intensity of change, the current economic terrain, and the pressure to innovate, adapt, stabilize, and address each new challenge (of which there are many) with focus, grace, empathy, and precision is no doubt taking a toll on all of today’s business leaders. 

The current state of affairs reminded us of an interview with Gianpiero Petriglieri, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, who provides insights into the implications of turbulent times on leadership. 

“Whatever sector or industry you look at, we face enormous uncertainty and anxiety. Leaders operate under an increasing amount of pressure and great visibility. They are called on to provide predictability, at the same to spark leaps of innovation; to be resolute and inclusive; to have a firm point of view, yet to also take into account a plurality of constituencies; to be self-confident and question themselves at the same time.”

“Fields of Paradox”  

Professor Petriglieri refers to this tension between resolution and plurality as a “field of paradox”. And to prevail in this turbulent environment, leaders need to operate mindfully, effectively, and responsibly.

For many (if not most) leaders, this signals a significant change in their normal approach to leadership. It pulls leaders out of their isolation and forces them to rethink their leadership intents, attitudes and behaviors. It prompts leaders to translate their personal vision, purpose, and ambition to a new language and behavior that up-levels empathy and compassion,  ensures relevance, and truly responds to the concerns of others.  

Finding Solid Ground: It’s Universal

Remember that everyone–your customers, employees, partners, suppliers, investors, and even your own friends and family–are also caught up in their own “fields of paradox”. Feeling both fear and love, anxiety and calm, uncertainty and hope, loneliness and community, distance and closeness. This means the people that you need to reach are seeking out, choosing, and gravitating towards the ideas, people, products, and businesses that will help them navigate these daily paradoxes. 

The leadership challenge becomes how to meet people where they are, wherever they are. This requires an unparalleled level of empathy and ability to understand the contradictory emotional states of your employees, customers, and business partners. 

Toward a Meaningful Position

As a discipline, Emotive Branding, our proprietary methodology, seeks to move businesses to a new meaningful position from which their beliefs and offerings more closely align with what people are seeking–both emotionally and rationally. For any leader today looking to “rethink” and “translate” their personal vision, purpose, and ambition to better resonate in today’s status quo, please reach out with questions. 

Read my full interview with Gianpiero Petriglieri here.

Please reach out if you want guidance on how to rearticulate your leadership vision during this time. 

Emotive Brand is an Oakland based brand strategy and design agency. 

New Opportunities for Insurance Brands Today: Disruption Plus Meaning

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

The Force of Digital for Insurance Brands Today

According to Network World, we touch our phones an average of 2,617 times a day. There is no underestimating the role of digital today. And with the proliferation of technology, consumers have come to expect a better insurance experience – one that is more meaningful, consistent, and trustworthy.

Right now, trust is low and insurers are struggling to move away from the “unfair,” “horrible,” and “outdated” reputation that surrounds most providers today. This means not only embracing new, innovative tech, but using digital to power personalization, build deeper levels of empathy, and create more meaningful and differentiated experiences for consumers.

Lack of Satisfaction Opens New Doors

New ways of buying insurance are appearing in the marketplace. According to Fast Company, 70% of consumers expect a self-service option for handling commercial questions and complaints. 64% of millennials expect self-service. In an HBR global survey, more than 65% of customers said they would think seriously about buying insurance products from non-insurers. More specifically, 23% said they would buy insurance from Google or Amazon-like online providers.

By 2020, our workplaces will include individuals spanning five generation. This means one-size-fits-all solutions should be going extinct. Insurethebox is one company leading the telematics trend. The brand gathers driving behavior data and rewards drivers for safe driving. These kind of trades – consumer information for the chance of lower costs – are becoming more commonplace and are likely to enter the healthcare industry soon. New models like “pay as you go” are gaining popularity as well.

Insurance Brands: Building Better Experiences

The research points to the same underlying fact: people are looking for something more. While many insurance companies are focused on offering lower costs as a means of differentiation, research has shown that people are actually willing to pay even more for insurance if it means getting better coverage, better experiences, better advice, transparent and simple communications, and products that are customized to their unique needs.

This is a huge opportunity for those insurance brands that can get the customer experience right. Here’s how.

1. Empathy

Because insurance companies often interact with customers during emotionally-charged events, stress, anxiety, and uncertainty are common feelings surrounding brand interactions. This creates higher stakes for brands looking to connect with their customers in the right ways. An empathetic approach is always best. Great benefits help show you really care. So does consistent, warm, and responsive service. As technology advances, staying human amidst a digital world becomes even more important. Cold, distant insurance companies looking to earn customer loyalty have no place in an industry that demands high emotional intelligence and consistent, trust-provoking behaviors to succeed.

2. Personalization

Personalization was the buzz of 2016 – and is still the buzz. 73% of global marketers today believe they must deliver a personalized experience to be successful. They aren’t wrong, and the insurance industry is no exception. Hyper-personalization may be the key to success. People are demanding care, assurance, and insurance that is more customized to their individual needs than ever before. Whether it’s offering a fuller range of pricing, products, and services or using data or new tech to drive personalization, if you want to compete, you need to figure out new ways to better tailor your offerings and experiences to the people who matter to your business.

3. Meaningful Experiences

Since customers must engage and interact with insurance companies at several touchpoints along their customer journey (some expected and some unexpected), there are many moments that can go wrong. There are also many moments that can go right. Looking at the customer journey as a whole is integral for any insurance company looking to create a meaningful experience. It’s not just about how one person interacts with a customer on the phone, but how the customer feels the first time they visit your site, log in to your online portal, receive their first bill, decide to sign you up for their business, etc. Mapping customer journeys can help identify important opportunities for more meaningful connections. Strategic mapping can also make sure you are living up to what you promise your customers at every moment.

Seizing the Opportunity

Now more than ever, insurance companies have an opportunity to take their business strategy and digital strategy and map these closely to their brand strategy. Recently, we helped position a company in the insurance industry. When our client gained clear alignment around the experiences they wanted to offer, it ensured that they were promising the right thing to the right people and delivering on that promise each and every day. For those insurance companies that can get this right, the benefits are endless. You will be able better connect in meaningful ways that will enable both your business and your consumers to thrive.

Reach out to learn more about our client work and how we can help situate your business for success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design 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.

More information fromHavas Media on the subject of meaningful brands, check out their latest global insights

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 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 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.

The Next Wave of Brand Strategy

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

The role of brand strategy

What makes your brand unique? How does it stand out in your category? What “significance” gets people flocking to your brand? What “stickiness” keeps people coming back to your brand?

We wouldn’t be surprised if these questions keep you awake at night. After all, it’s clearly getting harder for brands to differentiate themselves. Categories are becoming commoditized as competitors mimic each other in both products and communications. Brand advantages based on innovation are short-lived as others rapidly copy technology, benefits, and promises.

Add to these challenges the myopic view that prevails within most enterprises. Within a company there tends to be beliefs that the world revolves around their brand, that their brand is truly unique, and that to make obvious and superficial claims is sufficient.

What’s a brand owner to do?

The first step is to move beyond the obvious and traditional modes of branding, and to embrace the new wave of branding that is based on deep, emotional, and differentiating brand connections.

This means stepping out of your usual and familiar approach to brand strategy. It means putting human needs at the center of your brand’s universe. It means shifting from promoting your outputs, to embodying the meaningful impact of the personal, social, and environmental outcomes your brand generates.

This is not business-as-usual. But it is necessary business.

This is certainly a different way of thinking about, planning, and executing brand strategy. Mindful and purposeful leadership is required. Organizational flexibility and patience are necessary. Individual persistence and fortitude are required.

The next wave of brand strategy will bring its own challenges to the business world. But at the same time it will deliver what every brand wants and needs: a meaningful difference that generates business by resonating deeply in the hearts and minds of all the people vital to your brand’s success.

Surf’s up! Get ready to ride the wave!

Looking for a more in-depth view of how to engage in this new wave of brand strategy? Download our white paper on Transforming your brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Meaningful Brands evoke “Of Course” Moments

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

Meaningful brands make people feel good.

We came across a reference to Christian Lindholm, of the design firm Fjord, and his “of-course principle of design”.

“Most companies, he said, are looking to ‘wow’ with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an ‘of course’ reaction from their users.”

We’re not opposed to brands creating a “wow” sensation, at least when there is a genuine reason to make people feel that way.

Continue reading “Meaningful Brands evoke “Of Course” Moments”

Bridge the Meaning Gap and Watch Your Brand Soar

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

We believe there’s a growing gap between what your brand needs and what people want.

Your brand needs to have a stronger presence today and be a better fit for the future.

This means the people in your organization need to work better together to help you achieve your goals – but, we’re guessing they aren’t as motivated and collaborative as you need.

People want more meaning in their lives and are more discerning about the products they buy, who they buy from, and the companies for which they work.

This means your organization has to reach out to people in ways that truly matter to them – but, we’re guessing your way of being is more corporate than human.

To bridge the meaning gap, your brand needs to step back and see its rational business needs through the eyes of the emotional people who will help it succeed.

By translating your brand’s business needs into human ideals, your brand starts to matter more to people.

When people start to see your brand as personally relevant and emotionally important, they change their behavior toward your brand for the better.

People get what they want: more meaning in their lives.

Your brand gets what it needs: stronger presence today and a better fit for the future.