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Tag: Rebrand

Uncovering the True Dynamics of Strategy + Design Synergy: A Conversation Between Robert Saywitz and Giovanna Blackston Keren

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Our recent work rebranding Topstep—a financial trading platform based in Chicago, IL—shed light not only on our belief in the power of simplicity and clarity for our client but also on internal agency processes that helped us create an authentically differentiated brand. I sat down recently with our Director of Strategy, Giovanna Blackston Keren, to have a candid conversation about our roles in this process and why agencies seem to talk about the relationship between Strategy and Design more often than it comes together successfully in real life. We used our work on Topstep as a prism for this discussion because, in many ways, the project typified how we seamlessly crafted a strategy + design experience from start to finish. Giovanna asked all the right questions.

Why are agencies always talking about the collaboration between Strategy and Design? If it really happens so seamlessly, and if it’s the norm, then why are we all still talking about it?

The truth is, a seamless integration of the two is the ideal but not all agencies are able to pull it off. With Topstep, as with other clients, we were able to bridge the gap by bringing designers into the project early and keeping strategists involved throughout the process. Inviting designers to the initial kickoffs and key meetings helped them absorb the full brand story, informing their creative development. Inviting strategists to provide quick gut-checks throughout the creative process also kept things moving forward while also voicing moments when design needed to shift or even stand down and let the strategy come through more prominently. Extending involvement in both directions is often a problem of bandwidth, but well worth it in the end.

Why do you think that Strategy and Design often seem to be on such different pages, that actually finding a way for us to be talking the same language is challenging?

There is often a natural divide between the expert skill sets of the Strategist and the Designer but, here at Emotive Brand, we bridge that gap in a few ways. One is by having designers involved in Strategy meetings and vice versa; we have also started to share knowledge within our teams through skill-sharing workshops so that Strategists and Designers understand what each other do and literally begin to speak the same language. It also helps that we have specific roles for Creative Strategists—strategists with design/writing backgrounds and steeped in design but performing as a high-level strategic thinker and, at times, a copywriter for the designers and presentations. Their role often transcends boundaries and is the connective thread between strategy and design processes, as well as the articulation of creative thinking to the client. Specifically, with Topstep, this seamless dialogue between Strategy and Design allowed us to focus on the inauthentic, dry, and confusing nature of the language of most financial institutions. Our designers utilized this insight to tap into something bespoke and authentic—cutting through the clutter with radical honesty and a bold, language-driven typographic system.

So often throughout my career, I’ve felt like when I’m finally sharing the strategic blueprint with designers, they tend to see it as shackles rather than a wellspring for exploration—even though the strategy platform is usually built upon months and months of research, interviews, and insights. Do you see Strategy as a constraint in your process?

I actually find that the right kind of constraint can function as a creative accelerant to get you to the strongest ideas much quicker, but perhaps guardrails is a better word than constraints because, without the guidance of the strategy, you’re often jumping around in different directions, exploring far too many ideas that don’t have the grounding of the strategy. I have a fine art background so I know all too well that stepping up to a blank canvas with no plan in mind is much more of an overwhelming challenge than when I have my sketchbook full of notes to guide my process. When you have strategic limits in place, it creates much more freedom and opportunity for a deeper exploration rather than wider, and in this sense, the rules can actually set you free. When we started our initial ideation for Topstep’s new brand identity, we cast a wide net with 20-30 different mood boards, but the strategy helped us efficiently narrow our focus to 5 of the most relevant and resonant options that embodied the strategy and the kind of brand that Topstep wanted to be.

Ultimately, we’re not creating just brand strategies, and we’re not creating visual identities. We’re creating brand experiences, brand worlds, and those worlds have to be built out of Strategy and Design.

Yes, the success we enjoyed with Topstep came from the constant conversation between designers and strategy along the journey—using the strategic platform as a foundational road map for creative exploration. We were very purposeful in bringing the client along on the journey as an active participant and everything we presented to them was met with a very open discussion about our rationale for design decisions—no feedback or pain point was too delicate to unpack between us, which is often a missed opportunity between agency and client. I think that level of honest conversation from the very start of the strategy process through the end of design helped build a foundation of trust and respect between us and the client that allowed us to move much more efficiently and make great decisions together. Ultimately, it helped a great deal when it came time to sell in a radically simple design direction.

The final design direction for Topstep was directly inspired by one of the territories that we brought to Topstep in our Strategy Workshop “And the rules shall set you free.” Traders often feel that the rules hold them back from really being able to be the successful trader they think they can be but, in reality, it is these very rules that keep them on the right path to ultimate success. Seems like a meaningful parallel here with our conversation about the relationship between Strategy and Design?

Definitely. Just as Strategy provides guardrails, it also allows you to explore freely without feeling like you’re staring at that blank canvas, reaching for any idea that may be well-executed but has no relevance with the business or what it is we’re trying to achieve, and in that way, the rules really can set you free. For Topstep, we harnessed this strategic freedom to move against the grain of the natural instinct for many clients to add as many elements into the composition as possible to tell their story and opting for being utterly clear, simple, and to the point, and in the financial world, that becomes quite radical.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hofmann

Click the link to see our work for Topstep: https://www.emotivebrand.com/topstep/

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

Making the Case for a Rebrand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Rebrands are for Firebrands

Not everything in the branding world is relatable. For the average person, chatting about go-to-market strategies or employer brands isn’t exactly scintillating dinner party conversation. But there is one thing that ignites fiery debate and criticism, even from those without any skin in the game, and that is the curious case of the rebrand.

I’ve had multiple conversations with people who, though they have never expressed an interest in any other aspect of branding before, suddenly discuss the latest logo change, mission rewrite, or app redesign with a passion normally reversed for movies or sports.

And I think that’s because there’s something inherently emotional and human at the heart of a rebrand. It’s a vulnerable desire to reinvent yourself, shed what’s holding you back, and reenter the world with a clean slate. Who doesn’t want that? Plus, for better or worse, people wrap their own identities into the brands they love. When a brand changes without your consent in a strange direction, it can feel like a personal attack.

Standing Still Is Not an Option

For a business, this heightened emotional state can be a blessing or a curse. People are either going to cheer on your transformation, or feel offended, cheated, manipulated, or worst of all, bored. And like all things, executing a successful rebrand takes a considerable amount of time and money. So, why would a brand roll the dice on a high-risk, high-investment bet? Because in life and business, the only thing worse than a misstep is standing perfectly still.

Too often, rebrands are only discussed when a business is trying to disassociate itself from a negative image. And with the ubiquity of Wells Fargo’s apology tour, we don’t blame you. But the truth is, even well behaving, top performing brands constantly have to ask themselves questions, like: Is our story still relevant? Do we need to streamline our services under one cohesive identity? Are we still attracting top talent? If not, it’s time to make the case for a rebrand.

Telling the Whole Story, Example: WeWork

WeWork, the co-working startup that launched in 2010, is known for renting out office space on flexible terms, but co-founders Miguel McKelvey and Adam Neumann clearly have ambitions far beyond the co-working craze. In 2018 alone, they opened a private school called WeGrow and a physical store called WeMrkt. Neumann has even expressed a desire to one day have entire WeWork Communities, where everything from your apartment to the school your children attend is brought to you by WeWork.

As their service offerings change over time and their brand story becomes larger and more meaningful, they have rebranded to match. The “We” in “WeWork” has become a parent brand of sorts, encapsulating all of their different products – and what a perfectly fitting container. For years, they have been driven by the power of community. As stated on their mission page, they are a place where “you join as an individual ‘me,’ but where you become part of a greater ‘we.’” Now, that “We” is a flexible support structure to hold all of the new product developments they will drive in 2019 and beyond.

Making the Case for a Rebrand, WeWork

Reaching a New Target Audience, Example: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Politicians tend to be in touch with graphic design and branding about as well as they are with how most Americans actually live their lives. Considering how blunt, clunky, and meme-driven the political discourse has become, it’s easy to forget that each politician is essentially a unique brand under the larger umbrella of their party.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory over Rep. Joseph Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District was stunning for a variety of reasons. For one, her campaign’s radically designed posters and buttons were actually stunning, designed by Maria Arenas of Tandem NYC.

Ocasio-Cortez, representing the 192-year-old Democratic Party, faced a challenge that many legacy brands must deal with: how do you deal with a rapidly changing target demographic? Her grassroots campaign sought to speak to a different voter base and audience – and that required a different visual language. One that embraced visual text-framing devices styled as speech bubbles, symbolizing a vocal, pluralistic approach to politics. It immediately conveyed a more diverse racial, cultural, generational, and ideological representation in the face of career politicians.

Making the Case for a Rebrand, AOC

Keeping Up in a Brutal Landscape, Example: Toys “R” Us

After 70 years in business, Toys “R” Us stores across the U.S. shut down last June. For many, it was an oddly heartbreaking moment when the last vestiges of childhood went officially bankrupt. And while you can certainly blame Amazon, Walmart, and all the other one-click delivery monoliths, the guiltiest party of all was us. For one reason or another, we fell out of love with the brand and lost the magic that we kindled as children.

Toys “R” Us is a particularly interesting case study because we actually have a glimpse of where the brand was heading before they closed. In the liminal space between bankruptcy and liquidation, Toys “R” Us CMO Carla Hasson and Creative Director Lee Walker enlisted the branding and design firm Lippincott to reestablish their relevance for a new audience: parennials, or millennial parents, that grew up in the aisles of Toys “R” Us. Along with a series of delightful animated videos, the firm honed in on the backward “R” as the piece of the brand with the most equity and nostalgic affinity.

The work is fascinating because you can actively see the firm working to solve the problems of a legacy brand that waited too long to make a change. Questions of retaining brand equity, maintaining relevance, and creating a memorable impression that will stick with your customers are all being tested. The work is a cautionary tale and a reminder of the power of rebranding.

Making the case for a rebrand, Toys R Us

Rebranding Is Problem-Solving

As Aiden Cole, co-founder of NTuitive.social, says, “Rebranding for the sake of rebranding is a waste of time and energy. Understand what problem you are trying to solve and figure out if rebranding will fix it. If your customer base has changed, new customers are coming back and you are altering your entire business, then yes, rebrand. But if you are simply having a slightly off year, don’t spend the time.”

Rebranding is no slight thing. But if you’re looking to revamp your products, focus, or reputation, it just might be the answer. To learn more, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What Got You Here

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences – prospects, customers, and recruits – who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business – inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team, but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy – making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and may even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture

For many high-growth companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate for tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing

Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many high-growth company will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning

Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience

Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For high-growth companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what are they looking to solve, and how can you create messaging to speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why

It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition

In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition – inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Corporate Narrative

Investing in developing a corporate narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your corporate narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets

Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically lead redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency. 

Brand Is the Best Foundation for Growth

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Experts #6: Kelly Morgan

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.

Kelly Morgan is Head of Marketing at Lyra, a startup that’s transforming behavioral healthcare. We’ve been working with Kelly to rebrand Lyra, and they just launched their new brand last week. In addition, they’ve secured their next series of funding! Kelly spoke with us to discuss key learnings from the rebranding process.

What was the catalyst for the rebrand?

When I joined the company, I was overseeing designers, communication teams, and marketing assets. It became very challenging to do all that without real brand guidelines. Of course, we had some things, but not the mature and robust set of design tools you need when you go to market. We were inventing everything from scratch. We had a core that we loved, but the look itself wasn’t that modern and it didn’t reflect what Lyra is all about.

When you think about what we’re trying to do, we’re bringing technology to a space that is somewhat tech-averse and not that sophisticated in terms of modern convenience and simplicity. We felt as though our look didn’t accurately reflect that we’re a high-tech and a visual company. As I dug in further with other stakeholders and the management team, it became clear that there was a real appetitive for this. Not just a new visual identity, but for equipping our team with the right tools – messaging, positioning, a unified elevator pitch, and a cohesive way to describe what we do as a business.

What were some early successes in the process?

I found myself a great executive sponsor. We developed a solid business case not only for “Why?” but for “Why now?” We’re a relatively young company, and before we start investing, it’s great to have a solid foundation to build on. These things are easier when you’re smaller. It’s not as disruptive or confusing to the market. The overall timing was a big part of making that case. Having an executive sponsor can help garner alignment internally when people are having a hard time seeing the bigger picture. Change is hard. It’s difficult to imagine how it’s all going to come together when you’re only seeing pieces at a time. It’s challenging to understand the impact of those decisions when you’re so comfortable with something you already have.

What would you describe as the biggest challenge of a rebrand?

I think it comes down to educating your team on what brand really is. You hear those hallway conversations of, “Oh, new logo, new colors,” but it’s so much more than that. This is something that’s going to align with your business strategy and make it easier for you to sell, to communicate, to stand out – brand is everything. That misunderstanding can manifest itself in different ways throughout the course of the project.  It could mean that someone is not investing enough time in reviewing something until it’s already live on a website. A rebrand involves soft skills — feelings, emotions, perceptions. Everyone has a different function in the organization and so it’s sometimes hard for people to see why the brand will matter to their piece of the business. A rebrand also has a fair amount of feelings and emotions, something that not everyone easily connects to in how they approach work. It took me a while to understand how important it was to get everyone aligned, but more so, how much time I needed to dedicate to education, understanding different perspectives, and gaining consensus. It could mean someone not investing enough time in reviewing something until it’s already live on a website.

A personal challenge for us was that we don’t have a team of in-house designers or Creative Directors. Representing Lyra in the rebrand discussions, I found my own limitations and wished that we had someone who had a visual design background. That’s where the value of bringing in an outside agency comes in. Contractors and freelancers can get you pretty far, but an agency has the talent and insight you’re missing. Plus, they can see the life of the brand over time and evolve and implement everything seamlessly.

To make things even more interesting, you are also in the process of changing offices during this rebrand. How is that going?

It’s true! We’re moving in June and building out a new workspace tailored to our employees. I think it will make a great impression and help employees feel even more tied to our mission and our values. To carry the brand to the employee experience, we will have vinyl decals of our mission statement, powerful testimonials from people whom we’ve helped, and wall art that showcases our creative marketing campaigns, monitors displaying business analytics and KPIs.

You only just launched your new look last week, but have you noticed any behavior change as a result?

It is early, but next week is the HLTH Future of Healthcare conference in Las Vegas, which will be the first real test of our brand. Needless to say, we’re super excited. Our new brand makes us look more polished and mature, but still has that fun, vibrant startup feeling. It brings us much more confidence in delivering our elevator pitch, as well as unifying the marketing and sales teams together around the same story.

What key advice would you give to other companies about to embark on a rebrand?

Well, the first real challenge is, “How do you evaluate an agency?” The best advice I got was that I needed to directly meet the people I would be working with. That sounds obvious, but many agencies have a great portfolio – impressive customer list and endless examples of nice looking things – but often that’s the sales team or some top-level Creative Director. You need to understand the difference between who is selling you and who you are going to be working with. You must meet the project managers, the copywriters, the people who are going to bring this thing to life for you.

The second challenge is rallying your own internal team, and that’s the part that often goes to the wayside. In that whole project planning phase, you need to carve out time to get internal feedback, but also to keep enthusiasm up throughout the entire process. We had an internal kickoff with a catered lunch, which served as a great opportunity to explain what brand really means to the company. I wanted everyone to understand what it was, why it mattered, and how they are a part of it.

This isn’t just a logo. When you’re at a cocktail party, when you send an email out, it’s all an expression of the brand. This isn’t just a marketing thing, this is about behavior. Of course, the first question anyone will ask will be about swag, but those little delighters are important, too! It takes a lot of effort and energy to do a rebrand, and the success of the whole thing can come down to enthusiasm. There is bound to be friction and bumps along the way. If management sees that their employees are excited, they will hold up their end of the bargain.

What’s next?

Having completed the brand project, the exciting thing now is how poised we are to refocus on our growth strategy. We’re in such a good position to move forward. Not only did we launch a new brand, but we launched it on a new website, on a new platform, with all sorts of robust marketing tools built in. We’re ready for whatever comes next.

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

Early Warning Signs You Need a Brand Refresh

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Brand Presentation Counts

Presentation is everything. It’s the way a gourmet meal looks on the plate, what you wear for a job interview, or the tidiness and odor of your hotel room when you open the door.

The same rings true with a corporate brand.

Your brand is who you are. When your brand presentation is clear, people understand who you are and what you stand for in the world. On the other hand, when your presentation doesn’t make a great first impression, you must prepare to deal with the fallout.

This is why when we work with clients, we often need to stress that how you present your brand externally is different from what you say internally. Externally, you speak to shareholders, partners, and customers.

We believe external messages must address these four questions:

  •      Who are you?
  •      Why do you matter?
  •      What do you do?
  •      How do you do what you do?

You communicate these same ideas to your internal audiences — your employees, foremost, and, secondarily, your board of directors. But you have to tailor them for each audience. Not only does the way you communicate your brand connect your stakeholders to your strategic goals and objectives, it also affects your ability to be a sought-after employer and great place to work. You’ll attract and retain great people when you socialize and operationalize corporate strategy in a way that employees can understand and relate back to why it matters to them.

So how do you get to a place where you can communicate simply, strongly, and boldly?

You create the right message for the right audience and the right message for the right time.

Recognizing The Need for a Refresh

First, ask yourself, “Can we easily articulate who we are and why we matter?” More specifically:

  •      Is our story simple?
  •      Is it externally focused? Internally focused?
  •      Is it easy for people to know everything we offer?

Or try some more tactical, capital investment questions:

  •      When is the last time we invested in a brand campaign?
  •      How is our lead gen?
  •      Are we investing in content?

Maybe the easiest question to answer is this one:

  • “Can everyone in the company, even outside of the sales organization, give the pitch with confidence? Can they do it in 10 slides? Would it be consistent overall?”

Time for Change

If you don’t like the answer to these questions, you need to change how you present your brand.

It’s time to bring someone from the outside in to freshen up your story and your presentation so you can to start the new year in full alignment.

We’re here to help.

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

Branding Is the Heart of Demand Generation

Posted on by Chris Ames

Demand Generation for B2B Marketers

In the dark old days of 2012, the process of tracking a lead through a sales cycle was a slow, manual process. With the rise of automation platforms and integrated CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, our pipelines are now routinely filled with promising leads. The only problem? Everyone else has access to the same toolkit. What might have been considered a competitive advantage is now table stakes. Demand generation might fill the barrel with fish, but it’s the strength of a brand that hooks the lead. 

Refresh Your Brand

According to Forrester Research, 68 percent of B2B marketers said refreshing a company’s brand was the most important step to take in 2017.

“If your prospective customer doesn’t know your company or solution – or worse, your company or product value proposition messaging doesn’t resonate with them – it doesn’t matter how savvy your demand strategy,” says Scott Vaughan, CMO of Integrate. “There’s a resurgence underway to refocus on brand and positioning, baking these necessities into the demand marketing effort.”

As the role of demand generation evolves alongside technology, how we utilize this information should evolve in tandem. It’s something that Vaughan calls “brand plus demand,” a layered approach that combines the strengths of a strong brand with the tools of great tech.

A Brand Is a Promise Delivered

Not all salespeople are religious, but every sale is an act of faith. The best way to build trust is with a purposeful brand promise. A brand promise is not a slogan or an advertising headline, it’s a natural extension of your mission, vision, and values. By establishing clear and consistent value messaging, potential customers can quickly determine if your solution is the right one for them.

Your brand promise provides more than just an appealing narrative – it can act as your company’s North Star for how you communicate, who you communicate with, and even the look and feel of your design. When it’s working right, your brand promise should filter and refine your demand.

Make Your Brand Experience Delightful

So, demand generation has led hundreds of new eyeballs to your brand. What do they see when they first land? More importantly, how do they feel? All that awareness and relevance will be wasted if your brand experience isn’t a positive one.

Thoughtful brand experiences and communications not only build trust – they win business. From your website design to your blog posts to the contents of your white papers, every experience is a chance to demonstrate a sense of authenticity and purpose. Make every inch of your brand work to create demand for your unique offering.

The Power of Personas

Typically, B2B decision makers are a team of buyers, not a single person. As such, the one-size-fits-all lead doesn’t work anymore. Create unique brand personas to discover what your audience needs, wants, and feels. What makes them anxious? What makes them feel fired-up? What’s the worst part of their day? Can you fix that?

As Paul Graham of Y Combinator says, “The hard part is not answering questions, but asking them. The hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them, the better the odds of doing that.”

Brand + Demand = Success

So, maybe everyone’s pipeline is overflowing with leads. If you want to win business, you don’t necessarily have to say it first – you just have to say it best. Differentiate yourself with a compelling brand promise, go after your personas, and make every experience emotive.

“The reality is that sustained demand marketing success relies on brand strength and differentiations,” concludes Vaughan. “It’s not brand versus demand. Rather it’s brand with demand.”

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

Mistakes to Avoid When Preparing for a Branding Project

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

All Signs Point to a Branding Project

There are a lot of common signs that indicate it may be the right time for a branding project. Maybe your business has experienced high grown and you are ready to reposition to prepare for your next round of funding. Or maybe it isn’t growing fast enough and you need to find a way to differentiate your brand to compete more strongly. Perhaps your competitive set has changed and with it, the industry has evolved opening a new category for you to shift into. With markets and categories shifting so quickly, many organizations are left feeling lost as to how to capitalize on those shifts and changes. A branding project can be a great way to re-energize perceptions about who you are, what you offer, and how you do it better than anyone else.

However, a branding project is no small undertaking. It requires commitment, dedication, and large-scale planning.

Before you launch into a branding project, consider these common mistakes.

1. Poor alignment around objectives and expectations:

If your business is considering investing in a branding project, it’s integral that you create alignment and clarity around the objectives of the project. Why is now the right time for an updated brand? What has changed? What can you expect as a result of this work and investment? And most importantly, how will you measure success?

Without clear objectives, time is wasted moving towards ambiguous goals. And time is of the essence. A rebrand won’t happen overnight. So plan ahead, anticipate the needs of the business, and determine what you need to be successful in the future is key.

2. Underestimating the power of planning:

Resource management is vital to the success of large scale projects like a rebrand. Too often organizations fail to see beyond the early planning stages and end up without the necessary resources to see a project through and beyond the launch. Don’t underestimate the time or financial and human resources that will be needed to do the job right. With an appropriate budget in place, a project of this scale then requires consistent planning, dedicated scheduling, and a team that is going to fuel the project forward.

A solid project plan is critical. Highlight major sales and marketing events to ensure you will have what you need when you need it. Block out Board Meetings and other critical business meetings. And if you have an upcoming conference and major events, block those too on a project plan. Meetings need to be nailed down. Clear timelines need to be established, people need to be held accountable, and strategies should be developed for keeping things on track. Once you allow a project to fall behind schedule, you’ve set the precedent that the project is not important and people will fail to treat it as a top priority. As soon as that happens, you start to waste those precious resources you worked so hard to put in place at the outset.

3. The wrong drivers:

Businesses often make the mistake of putting a team in place to manage a project like a re-brand without fully understanding the demands on their time. A project of this size can’t be something that your people do in their spare time or something that requires senior executives to sign-off on every single aspect before things can move forward. This means identifying and empowering someone internally and realigning their current responsibilities or consider bringing in an outside resource while designating a smaller internal team to help support this lead. And this internal team should not only represent marketing – sales, HR, and product teams can also be valuable drivers as long as the people you choose are clear on the strategic vision for the business.

Above all, make sure your project team is prepared and empowered to make smart, fast decisions. Getting hung up on small things and trying to please everyone is only going to stall the project and dilute its impact. It’s about making the agile, strategic decisions that position your business for success.

4. Thinking it’s all about the website:

A rebrand is not just about a new website. A project of this scale represents a much deeper, and extensive move in a different direction for your business that will impact all aspects of what you do and how you do it. The brand has to be embraced in the hearts and minds of the people who work for you and who embody what it means to do business with you. Any change has to start on the inside before you can expect it to be felt on the outside.

So yes, the website is an important touchpoint for the brand and often the first brand experience a prospect or customer might have with you, but your branding efforts can’t start and end there. Your new brand strategy must guide all of your marketing efforts, every interaction people have with your firm, as well as influence the way you do business.

5. Leaving people behind:

Change is difficult for people to digest. Most importantly, in order for change to work in your favor, you need to get people behind your new strategy. Pacing out how you introduce the new brand can make it more digestible to people. As well as help align everyone behind the direction your company or firm is taking.

In the end, people – no matter what role they play – want to know what a rebrand means to them. What changes should they expect and when? How do these shifts impact their own work? Daily and long term? What are the new expectations for them?

With shifting expectations, you need an infrastructure in place to internally manage performance. Figuring out how you are going to hold people accountable for shifting behavior is key.

Keep it Going

So you’ve decided on a rebrand. You’ve allocated time and resources. You’ve assigned a team. You’ve created a strategy and strategic materials. You’ve rolled the new brand out internally and externally with success. But the branding project isn’t over.

In fact, you’ve just started. Launching a brand is one thing, but maintaining it and keeping it doing its job is another. Make sure you are dedicated to building on your brand strategy overtime if you want your brand to do the work it needs to moving forward.

When you commit to the cost of a branding project, you must also commit to investing in your new brand in the long-term.

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

5 Things Executives Need to Know When Embarking on Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Investing in brand strategy is a big decision for executives to make today.  Plunging into an ocean of the emotional, strategic, and intellectual dimensions and depths of your brand is not what executives often want to spend time and budget on. Preconceived notions about ROI, doubts about the actual value of it, and the more obvious budget concerns to evaluate brand strategy are hugely challenging.

Many companies don’t even make it to this place – the place where they accept and understand they actually do need to invest in the brand to address their business problems. But for those that do, it can create amazing results — internally and externally.

There are a handful of important things we believe executives need to know before beginning a brand refresh or investing in a new brand strategy.

1. Strategy is only the first step

The task of creating, socializing, and implementing a brand strategy is not a one-step process or an endeavor that can be achieved overnight. The brand strategy is just step one – albeit a big one, that requires strength, endurance, thought, calculation, and time.

Here at Emotive Brand, before we begin work with a client, we want the C-suite to understand that their work does not end once the strategy is complete. The role of the strategy is to unearth what kind of terrain they are building on and to help build the foundation for the brand, but it’s up to them to build a structure for it…to maintain it…and to sell it. The brand strategy we create together will have no impact unless both employee and brand behavior changes as a result. Brand strategy without meaningful implementation is next to useless.

The creation of a brand strategy demands budget, time, and dedication. The socialization and implementation that follow the creation of a brand strategy demands more budget, more time, and even greater dedication. We urge clients to invest accordingly from the start. We want clients to bring a long-term commitment – forward-thinking and future-looking – to the work.

2. Schedule your time in advance

A huge part of commitment is time. It is essential to schedule time at the C-suite level from the onset. We work with clients to allocate and plan the appropriate time needed for every meeting and for digesting and responding to our work at every point of the process. Executives should understand the time requirement needed and be sure they can commit to it. The best way to do it is to schedule the entire project at the onset.

3. Approach the challenge with openness, honesty, and trust

Because we are trying to understand your business, and unearth emotions, meaning, and deeper purpose, we take a particularly in-depth approach. Often, the issues that prompt a brand strategy effort are just symptoms of a deeper problem. We help discover these problems where they exist. Our approach is detailed, thorough, exhaustive, and sometimes even personal. It is our job to see how teams work together and understand  each of their leadership styles so we can facilitate and align them to enable progress. We dive into company financials. And we speak one-on-one with each executive to ensure we understand their personal perspective. This is what allows us to align and facilitate change.  On every project we work hard to uncover what is happening internally and externally. The productivity of our relationship with executives thus hinges on openness, honesty, and trust. It’s essential for the C-suite to be clear and candid about the strengths and weaknesses of all aspects of the company. If we are clear where the business, culture, and growth is challenged, we can create new paths forward. Trust that you hired the right agency and their power to create positive change; your brand strategy depends on trust to push beyond where you’ve been.

4. Have the right mindset for change

You don’t embark on a brand strategy just to create a strategy. You embark on a brand strategy to transform your business; to help you reach your goals and objectives. In order to solve business problems, you must accept that things do need to change, and those changes will go much deeper than just a simple logo alternation. The strategy that we help you create will almost undoubtedly change the way you communicate externally and internally. It will alter how you and your employees behave. But, it may also force you to question if you have the right team to execute on the strategy. It may even alter what products or services you sell, or what the entire future of the company might look like. These changes may feel drastic, risky, or scary. However, with the right strategy, these changes can be momentous, far-reaching, impactful, and often times exhilarating. Transform your brand. Transform your business.

5. Be willing to be led

Executives are often hard-wired to lead, not follow. It is a naturally difficult adjustment to entrust power to an outsider. However, we ask executives to prepare themselves to allow us to do just that: to direct, to organize, to manage. This is our job and expertise; this is what you hired us for. So listen, trust, and follow our lead. We promise it will steer you to great and exciting places.

Emotive Brand works with high-growth executives to address the business problems they are experiencing by quickly evaluating the most pressing needs and developing a right-sized project that delivers quick wins though an agile brand strategy process.

Find out more about the outcomes we’ve delivered for our clients here.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Building the Business Case for your Rebrand Project

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Recognizing the Need for a Change

Why build a business case for your rebrand? You know when your business needs one. There are lots of warning signs that indicate the need for a new brand. Whether it’s new, high-performing competition, an outdated look and feel, uninspired employees, dropping engagement and productivity within the workplace, trouble recruiting or retaining top talent, or a brand that’s simply fallen behind its own positioning, you need a change. Often those in HR and marketing are the first to notice the need for a change. The current brand is just no longer doing the work it needs to do to move your business forward, outperform competitors, and attract the best-fit talent to your company. And your business is faltering as a result.

Gathering Support from Leadership

But the fact is, in order to change your brand, you need backing and leadership support. The top of your organization is only going to invest in a rebrand if they are confident it will pay off for their business. And tight budgets and an uncertain economy make it even harder to make the case. That means it’s even more important to build a strong, clear case that persuades decision-makers that the investment in a new brand will, in fact, position the business for success.

Often, people don’t realize the true connections between brand and business – that the way the brand lives and functions changes customer perception, shifts behavior, and impacts the overall financial performance of a business. At Emotive Brand, we understand that a thriving brand = a thriving business. But how do you communicate this value and persuade the decision-makers in the room to get on board?

Building a Strong Business Case For Your Rebrand

Because this is a large decision with large impact, there are a lot of questions surrounding the potential impact of a new brand. Questions like: How can we position the brand for long-term success? Will the brand architecture shift? How much do we need to invest? What’s the value for customers? For employees? How does the brand change impact brand behavior? Revenue? ROI?

Of course, every business is different and therefore demands a different case to answer these questions. So make sure you tailor your case to your business’ specific concerns, visions, goals, and objectives. Internalize where your business is struggling, where it could go, and how it could get there. Here is some general advice for building a strong business case:

1. Identify what’s at stake.

Clearly articulate the need for a new brand. Quantitative and qualitative measurements are not mutually exclusive. Use both to paint a picture of the current state, where the brand is faltering, and where it could go. Often, mapping the current brand to business goals and objectives can demonstrate how off kilter the two really are. Don’t forget to inject an emotional appeal as well. Since the people you are speaking with also work at your company, they will empathize and understand the story you are telling.

2. Do your research.

Identifying competitor companies or other organizations with previously similar problems can help bring the value of a rebrand to life. Show how a change in brand has transformed like-minded businesses to demonstrate how a new brand could do the same for you. Using your potential brand strategy agency’s case studies might be particularly useful here. Point out untapped audiences your brand might help you capture, or draw attention to outdated brand behaviors that are stalling business. Make sure to do internal research as well. Listen to people’s concerns and internalize top leader’s greatest worries. Make sure you focus on these concerns and explain how a new brand might address them.

3. Spell out connections.

Like we said, for many in the room, the connections between brand and business may not be clear. When building a business case, you have to make sure that the brand’s potential impact on business is explicit. Communicate and demonstrate how the two are not mutually exclusive or hardly connected. In fact, they are interconnected, each driving the other, and potentially thriving as a result. Brand strategy is mapped directly to business strategy. Help people understand the ways in which a brand can change things like purchase behavior and customer perception and how these shifts then ladder back to business performance.

4. Look to the future.

Although current obstacles and problems should be addressed, your business case must also look forward. The potential future of your business is what will inspire and motivate. A new brand is a step forward for a company and should be addressed as so – a fresh start, a new opportunity, untapped territory for success. So get people excited about the future.

5. Outline the payoffs.

Even though you are making a business case, it’s not just about hard ROI (although this is most definitely a large part of the story). Focus on every way in which in the brand might add value.

Increased ROI:

A strong, emotive brand will lead to increased sales and revenues. Marketing and advertising will be better positioned to increase the lifetime value of customers in your target audience. And you will waste less money on marketing to customers who do not connect with your brand. Examining how your brand impacts financial results is important to maximizing your business value, maintaining competitive advantage, and increasing profitability in the long-term.

Successful recruitment and retention efforts:

Employees should be your greatest brand champions. Building a brand that everyone can rally behind, makes top employees less likely to leave and the right employees more likely to come to your company.

Aligned leadership:

Brand strategy is one of the surest ways to identify where leaders are misaligned. These discrepancies might be stalling business and keeping you from moving forward in pace with a competitive market. Getting leadership on the same page with a shared vision, and a way of getting there, is one of the best things you can do for your business.

A stronger and more meaningful culture:

If your employees live your brand promise every day, the brand will shine from the inside out, and your business will, in turn, thrive. This is because meaningful culture leads to more inspired leadership and employees, higher levels of engagement, productivity, creativity, and innovation. Businesses that want to compete need employees who believe in their brand and business, and feel validated by their workplace culture every day. As result, these are the people who give your business the momentum to advance with the times.

Increased brand awareness:

Brand recognition, connection, and engagement are key to a thriving business. When people recognize your brand, your brand is able to grow. And increased awareness of a brand that can emotionally connect with people means increased loyalty, as well as a higher lifetime value for customers.

Big Impact

Building a strong, persuasive, and clear business case that appeals to the worries, concerns, objectives, hopes, and dreams of the decision-makers in the room can help gather the investment and support your brand needs to move your business forward.

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

When Is the Best Time to Revisit Your Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

There are many triggers for evaluating when is the right time to revisit your brand strategy reevaluation. These can include:

  • When there’s a shift in corporate strategy
  • When it’s been a long time since you’ve evaluated your brand
  • When you’re in the midst of a growth spurt
  • When “what you’ve got won’t get you there”

Brand strategy can and usually does address many business problems that result when brand strategy is left “for later”. The brand becomes irrelevant and static, and this has a negative impact on the organization:

  • Corporate and brand strategies become misaligned
  • The organization loses its sense of purpose
  • Employees disengage
  • Merger or acquisition
  • Culture wanes
  • Innovation stalls
  • The customer value proposition weakens
  • Customers lose interest
  • New CEO on board

Two further – and highly critical – brand strategy triggers to consider 

Going beyond the when, there’s also the how. We believe there are two additional reasons to reevaluate your brand strategy:

  1. If your business strategy and brand strategy are misaligned strangers, they end up working against each other.
  2. If your brand strategy lacks a meaningful purpose and an emotional kick.

Clearly it makes sense to reevaluate your brand strategy; the real question is how best to do so

Before you rush off to rework your brand strategy, please take a moment to think about what didn’t work with what you have now. After all, there’s little point in going through the branding process only to end up in a similar place (a place that will prove vulnerable before you know it).

Align business and brand strategies for greater success

If your brand strategy isn’t developed with a clear understanding of your business strategy, product road-map, exit strategy and major shifts you are looking to make, it won’t be as supportive as it can be as you pursue those goals and objectives. Without a clear sense of the “there” you’re trying to reach, a misaligned brand strategy will never take you there.

Orientate your brand around meaningful outcomes

It’s better to invest time and energy in moving your brand-thinking into a new realm. More and more brands are making the move toward meaning and purpose. They are leaving behind the classical approach, and adopting a far more human-centric way of branding.

They are doing this because they recognize that connections built on meaning are stronger and more enduring, both internally and externally. As such, they view their brand through the lens of core human needs. They see how the meaningful outcomes of what their business activates impact the collective wellbeing. They then build a strategy that brings that meaning to life for all the people vital to the brand’s success.

Meaningful brands are built out of more than just brand communications

Another important approach to modern brand strategy is to see workplace behavior as a core pillar of the strategy platform. This means seeing how the attitudes and actions of your employees, and the policies and procedures of your organization, can be evolved to embody the meaningful principles and ambitions of the brand.

Often overlooked, such internal manifestation of the brand’s meaning is a powerful and enduring flame that not only turns the workplace into a more gratifying place, but also creates an appealing light that draws in customers and prospects. It creates an energy that flows through every interaction within the company, and with the outside world.

It’s time to reevaluate, align, and make your brand meaningful

Whatever cycle your business is in today, your brand will benefit from the injection of meaning, purpose, and behavior. Such a brand strategy can pull your business up when things are down, bring your business together when things are flying in all directions, or help your business go through a big change.

Our methodology is based on mapping brand strategy to business strategy, and then clearly understanding where the business is trying to go. We then add a welcome dose of energy to the process by injecting your organization with a meaningful purpose and ways to make people inside and outside your organization change the way they think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

Don’t simply “redo” your brand strategy. Align it closely to your business strategy. Strive to make it meaningful. Focus on the behavior changes that will resonate internally and externally. Change the feeling that surrounds your brand. And win, not only today, but in the long-term too, with a robust, adaptable, and enduring meaningful brand strategy.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.