Convincing minds by capturing hearts: the new brand-building approach
What comes first? The rational decision to take the next step on the path to purchase, or the emotional trigger that gets them started on that path?
Aren’t we humans cool?
We pride ourselves on our cognitive skills, our ability to weigh pros and cons, and our decision-making power. After all, these factors separate us from other life forms.
Continue reading “Win by Going Beyond Features and Benefits”
Purpose-led branding is hot topic in 2016.
Cartoonist Hugh McLeod addresses this topic in his post, “Meaning Scales, People Don’t”.
By this he means that the size of an endeavor doesn’t matter as much as how meaningful it becomes to you.
This is a reminder to purpose-led brands that they don’t have to be the complete answer to everyone’s problems.
They simply need to ensure that the small, modest and in-the-scheme-of-things, insignificant things they may do for people should resonate with as much meaning as possible.
If you want your purpose-led brand to evoke its true reason for being and connecting on a higher level, it is critical to ensure your brand is living authentically by its purposeful ambition. Every brand moment matters. The opportunity lies is making sure your brand behaves in ways that meaningfully resonate with people in everything it does, big and small. This is how meaning scales.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco purpose-led brand strategy firm.
Purpose does more than make brands appealing to people – it makes money for the businesses that embrace the concept. So claims the chairman of Deloitte, an active evangelist for the “squishy business attribute” called purpose.
Innovation. Everyone wants it. But what is it? Where does it come from? What’s the best way to shape a culture of innovation? What best aligns, inspires, and motivates people to innovate? What role could a new brand strategy play in transforming your organization into an innovative powerhouse?
Continue reading “Sparking Innovation Through a Purpose-Driven Vision”
John Mackey is a capitalist. He founded Whole Foods and turned it into a massive operation, with over 350 stores. Along the way, he came to realize something about business: its purpose goes beyond profits. This idea is about building meaningful businesses.
As the founder of Conscious Capitalism Inc., and the author of Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, John Mackey is a fierce proponent of a new and more meaningful way of doing business. Conscious Capitalism is “an idea, a movement, an approach to conducting business, and an organization dedicated to advancing all of these. Conscious Capitalism exists to elevate humanity. Conscious Capitalism comes to life as it is applied to businesses, non-profits, and organizations that practice Conscious Capitalism.”
Continue reading “An Industry Leader’s Perspective On Meaningful Businesses Strategies”
Deloitte is the world’s largest audit, tax, and consulting firm. They have done extensive research on purpose-driven companies and the role of purpose in them. And according to their report, companies at which people agree there’s a “strong sense of purpose” perform significantly better than those that don’t.
Specifically, these purpose-driven companies have:
• Excellent financial performance
• Distinct and differentiated brands
• Strong workplace cultures
• Highly satisfied customers
1. Create a Purposeful Culture
Invest in making your purpose a mainstream and actionable idea across your workplace. So work on aligning everyone to your purposeful ambition by making it relevant on an individual level. Show employees how they will benefit from helping make your purposeful ambition a reality.
2. Exude a Purposeful Presence
In order to succeed, ensure that every level of management and staff is included in the process of training and engagement around your purpose. So don’t only talk the talk, walk the talk. Make sure to acknowledge, celebrate, and reward the purposeful behaviors of individuals, teams, and departments. Shift your brand and marketing messages to better reflect your purposeful ambition.
3. Adopt More Purposeful Behavior
In order to change the way your brand and its people interact internally, and with the outside world, make sure every interaction reflects and amplifies your purposeful ambition. By examine processes, policies, and procedures and amending as needed purpose will drive your business.
Purpose isn’t simply a “nice to have” business attribute. Purpose-driven companies positively impact virtually every measure of success. Why? People connect to purpose and they change the way they think, feel, and act when they embrace a purpose that truly matters to them.
For additional reading on driving business through purpose, read Pathway To Sustained Growth
Check out some of the companies driven by purpose we have had the pleasure of doing work with.
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.
Strategies for addressing the energy of your business in good times and bad:
We came across this interesting insight by John P. Kotter in his post entitled “To Create Healthy Urgency, Focus on a Big Opportunity” on the Harvard Business Review blog.
“There are two basic kinds of energy in organizations.
Many of our clients are burdened by problems and issues that are holding their business and brand back. Declining sales, unclear vision, an under performing workforce, lack of differentiation in the marketplace, the list goes on and on.
Continue reading “Is Your Brand Working to Positive or Negative Energy?”
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.
Purpose helps companies refine the present,move past old ideas, take action, and reshape the markets of tomorrow.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
Emotive Brand works with CEO”s to help create purpose-led brand strategies that transform business.
A B-Corp is a newer breed of businesses that is founded on an amazing set of principles.
B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.
Today, there is a growing community of more than 1,600 Certified B Corps from 42 countries and over 120 industries working together toward 1 unifying goal: to redefine success in business.
“The B Corp movement is one of the most important of our lifetime, built on the simple fact that business impacts and serves more than just shareholders—it has an equal responsibility to the community and to the planet.” Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia
If you are curious, here is a great place to start. How does your business measure up to the B-Corp “Declaration of Interdependence”
You may not be a B-Corp today, but every step you take toward living to these values and ambitions will bring you closer to people looking to live lives that matter. Brands that are purpose-led and authentic in how they behave, are brands that perform better.
Continue reading “How Being a B-Corp Truly Matters in Business”
