Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Tag: Mid-Market

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Purpose-Led Brand Strategy Optimizes Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-led Brand Strategy that Masters the Intangibles, Masters Markets

A purpose-led brand strategy has the power to optimize the present and future value of your business. When your brand actively embodies all the true and meaningful aspects of your corporate decisions, policies, and actions, it not only brings new energy to your current competitive efforts, it also signals a brighter and more energizing future to the people vital to your company’s success.

Your brand houses your company’s intangible value

Everyone knows there’s a link between the perceived value of your “intangible assets” and the market value of your company. Your brand is one of the many intangible assets in your company, and it serves a very important role. In fact, your brand is the house in which virtually all of your other intangible assets tend to live.

This is because your brand is the place where customers, employees, and investors store all the information, data, experiences, and collective good and worth they attach to your company. This collective good and worth can be seen as a positive energy that propels your brand forward, based on the trust and confidence that energy builds.

Value builds as the energy grows

The opportunity is to bring all that energy together through a meaningful purpose that not only increases the value of the goodness your business does now, but also inspires your organization to pursue new avenues of meaning. A meaningful purpose helps rally and align your people so they create more meaning within and outside of the organization. These efforts, which make your organization a more rewarding and gratifying place in which to work, have a compound effect on the value that flows from your intangible assets.

Don’t leave your intangible assets to their own devices, proactively manage them for greater success.

Smart leaders strive to optimize the value of their intangible assets. The most credible way to do this is to make stronger and more pervasive contributions to the collective well-being through individual, social, and environmental initiatives. These efforts will signal both social responsibility and a long-term view for the brand. They will energize your organization, and empower it in new ways. They will help you forge stronger connections with customers, attract new prospects, make the work of your employees more meaningful and gratifying, bring in the new talent your organization needs, and give investors the confidence they need to stick by your brand over the long-term.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Img credit: Motherbird

Is Your Company Primed for Sustained Growth?

Posted on by Taylor Standlee

Growth is always good. But sustained growth is always better.

It’s not just a matter of a stronger will or more ambition. Sustained growth companies are more agile, more resilient, and more innovative. Our work with a group of mid-market clients, along with a growing body of academic research, indicates the companies who enjoy sustained growth have embraced their purpose, and have built a culture and a set of practices that “live it”.

Purpose sharpens vision, inspires teams, and empowers people. Purpose helps every person find fresh ways to think differently, to see how market dynamics can be used to their advantage. Data show that people, teams, and whole companies working with purpose outperform in the present even as they build for the future.

Purpose is incredibly powerful when it is integrated into strategy and inculcated into culture. It enables companies to overcome three essential challenges to growth in turbulent times.

Optimizing for Now and Next

Purpose helps companies refine the present,move past old ideas, take action, and reshape the markets of tomorrow.

Getting the Best Talent and the Best from Talent

A strong and visible purpose helps find and retain new top talent while inspiring existing team members to out-think, out-do, and outperform the competition.

Building a Mid-Market Brand that Attracts and Retains Customers

Purpose helps companies own more relevance and achieve greater resonance in the minds of their target markets. It links rational attributes and benefits to the brand’s positive impact on people, society, and the world.

We’ve captured our learnings and observations in a white paper entitled Purpose: The Pathway to Sustained Growth. We hope you’ll discover more about why purpose matters and how you can leverage your authentic purpose to grow your business.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm helping the mid-market CEO’s and their business thrive.

Purpose-led Brands and the Role of the CEO

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Purpose-led leaders lead thriving businesses.

If you are a marketer faced with the task of re-branding or leading a brand strategy for your business, think about the person most influential to its success. Wondering who is essential to be part of the team? Ask yourself:

  • Who has the greatest insight into where your business needs to go?
  • Who can make sure that the company’s brand strategy embodies, and brings to life, this vision?
  • Who sees how the people, processes and policies of the business need to evolve to address future issues and opportunities?
  • Who is the best person to lead the organization forward in a focused, unified and purposeful manner?
  • Who do you need to ensure is on the team and willing to lead this project by your side?

The CEO

Yet, how many CEOs play a vital role in the development of brand strategy – that is, to the point where they achieve real feeling of ownership of the strategy’s ambition? Going further, what does this mean to the successful deployment  and socialization of the brand strategy across the business?

Unfortunately, all too often, branding is seen as a subset of the business, a line-item in the overall business strategy, and the responsibility of a team (and their agency) reporting to the CMO.

In many cases, the resulting “brand book” invariably features an introduction from the CEO, in which there are a series of predictable, jargon-filled and corporately-safe comments. It may have the signature of the CEO below it, but few honestly believe the CEO has written, or even read, this letter.

Delegated activity, not a transformative business strategy

Indeed, for the CEO, the “brand” often is a mystery and something better left to others. It is something to be delegated and not to be owned. As such, to the CEO it is more of activity resulting in a document, than a key element of a transformative business strategy.

This state of affairs leaves any brand strategy, however meaningful, out on a limb. While the brand team will be passionate advocates of the strategy, everyone else in the company will, like the CEO, think of the brand as “someone else’s job”.

And this, sadly, is where many brand strategies crumble to pieces.

  • A brand strategy becomes a new logo and guidelines.
  • A strong brand promise is created, but it is not clear what it means or why it matters.
  • The brand strategy, while the right one, lives in a file cabinet drawer, or on the wall as a poster.
  • Or worse yet, a brand strategy is developed, yet never fulfilled on.

The brand strategy fails because it was neither truly “top-down” (it came from another “department”, not from the big honcho), nor “bottom-up” (because employees beyond the brand team didn’t see it as their job to do).

The value of CEO ownership

When a CEO is urged, encouraged and, if need be, prodded to take a lead in the brand strategy process, a different result is experienced. It’s not at all that the CEO develops or writes the strategy. Rather, the CEO comes to see how his or her vision is embodied in the brand strategy, and how it can be used as a tool to transform the organization so that it can be stronger today, and better fit for the future.

When a CEO is seen as the chief proponent of, and supporting voice for, the strategy, employees throughout the organization see the strategy as more core to the business, and what they do within that business. They pay attention to strategy (assuming its delivered to them in a personally relevant and emotionally important way) and absorb it’s intent into their work practices (again, assuming they are shown how to do just that).

The value of across-the-board brand activation

Truly purpose-led brands stand out because they not only enjoy top-down support starting at the CEO, but because the brand strategy doesn’t stop at communications to the external world.

In this bottom-up mode, purpose-led brands take an holistic role in transforming how the brand is experienced, both inside and outside the business. No one in the business is left behind, as the brand strategy is deployed and socialized in a way that makes it the company’s “way of being”. Where employees are taught what it means to “Live the brand” each and every day.

When they feel purpose-driven, focused and gratified, employees work individually and in teams to create an energy that attracts the best customers, the most talented recruits, the most potent partners and the right investors. And your business thrives.

Top-down, bottom-up brand purpose-led strategies for better results overall

Brand strategies that embrace this “top-down, bottom-up” thinking aren’t relegated to the sidelines by the organization. Rather, as CEO-empowered forces, the relevant ambitions of the strategy become ideas which shape employee attitudes and behavior across the business.

Being based in the CEO’s vision, these purpose-led brand strategies work harder to point the business in the right direction, move it ahead with greater speed and agility, and lift it to a higher, more meaningful level in the hearts and minds of people.

Interested in learning more about a purpose-led brand strategy? Curious how to transform your business with a brand strategy? Download our white paper below.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand works with CEO”s to help create purpose-led brand strategies that transform business.

Fast Forward Your Startup: Agile Strategy for High-Growth Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

A new approach for supporting high-growth companies

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 on high-growth companies and brands to evolve and implement strategies in shorter and shorter time frames.

As a brand strategy firm, we discovered that many of our high-growth companies, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, needed a much more agile approach to addressing the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a four-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. Step one is Immersion: a week-long intelligence gathering and analysis phase. Week two is On-site : our team working in partnership with your core team to diagnose your key challenges, selecting the most pressing needs to focus on, exploring  options, and then aligning around and work collaboratively to refine strategies, actions, and communications to achieve those objectives (it is intensely iterative). Weeks three and four are focused on producing the deliverables, which are finished at the Emotive Brand studio.

At the end of the four-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.

Print

The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process during the On-site Phase.

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 a high-growth company looking to make an immediate impact?

Contact Tracy Lloyd, Emotive Brand Co-Founder to discuss how it we can help your business thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

Brand and Marketing? What’s the Difference?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brand and Marketing?

Leaders are sometimes confused about the difference between brand and marketing. This is not surprising, because they are not mutually exclusive ideas. They are interdependent strategic activities that feed, inform, and drive each other. The important distinction to make is in the intent – and desired outcome – of each area.

Brand Strategy

Brand strategy defines how people should ideally feel about your business and products. It strives to find how to optimize belief in what you do offer, and what you stand for in the world. It is an abstract idea held in the hearts and minds of people who have a connection to your business, either as customers, partners, suppliers, or employees. One way to think about brand is as a “promise delivered”. As such, brand strategy is about defining that promise and explaining how it can come to life.

Marketing

Marketing is about identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably. It defines the market to be served and the best routes to that market. It informs product development. It defines the price of the product and how and where it is to be promoted. As such, marketing strategy is an assembly of tactics that are very rational and tangible in nature, and highly measurable.

And the difference?

There is overlap between the two disciplines, because the best brand strategies are informed by strong marketing strategies, and the best marketing strategies are driven by strong brand strategies.

Another distinct difference between brand and marketing is their relative scope. Marketing is a highly focused activity that is principally outer-directed. Brand is a broad concept that conceivably touches everyone connected to the brand, both internally and externally. Indeed, the brand’s promise is realized when product development, manufacturing, finance, customer service, HR, and marketing are all being inspired and driven by the brand promise.

The best leaders appreciate both the differences and the synergies of brand and marketing. They recognize the outcome of their brand strategy as a promise the organization will strive to keep, that will help create a brand that is respected, admired, and valued. They see the outcome of their marketing strategy as a set of tools that will actively turn that promise into profits through interest, appeal, and differentiation.

When dealing with brand and marketing strategies, remember it’s not a case “either/or”, but of “both/and”. One cannot work without the other. Each needs to be developed in a focused way, while being fully aware of, and respectful to, each other.

For additional information emotive branding — our brand strategy methodology, please click below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

When you spend a lot of time working with people in the C-suite, you’re exposed to C-sized business problems. Those larger strategic issues that can’t be solved by the CEO alone, or by existing resources. When changes in your industry push you to shift business strategy, it’s a sign that your brand strategy needs to shift in a synchronized way to reposition for success.

Example: We’ve surveyed C-level executives about the number one desire they have for their brand strategy. Know what they want? Differentiation. A competitive advantage. A defensible position. Differentiation is tough. When your competitors are howling like wolves at the door, how can you stand out from the pack? If your company plays a supporting role in a complex ecosystem, how can you stand out from the crowd? Brand strategy can help.

Continue reading “Your Business Problems Might Have a Brand Strategy Solution”