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Tag: Research

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products—they back winning business models.

So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he defined it simply as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Product-Market Fit Is Startup Nirvana

Sounds easy enough, but the little description belies its massive business implications. This is the sought-after point at which you have identified the best target industries, buyers, and use cases for your product. Sales and marketing strategies become easily repeatable and, more importantly, scalable. It’s the great chasm between the “10x” investment return companies and the ones you’ve never heard of.

These days, most startups don’t fail because of the strength of their idea. It’s because they burn through cash without carefully planning for the crucial moment when customers actually want what they are selling. Achieving product-market fit is nirvana, and there are no shortcuts to nirvana. Fortunately, thousands of companies have gone before us, and there’s something to learn from their trials and tribulations.

Research, Personas, and Segmentation

Everything, and we mean everything, begins with an effort to understand the market landscape and key pain points. In researching the various industry verticals and potential buyers, you are on the hunt for your target customers. After all, they ultimately decide how well a product meets their needs.

Call us old fashioned, but we’ve long believed that the best way of conducting market research is actually talking to your potential customers face-to-face. Sure, you’ll get more data if you use online surveys, but the quality of that data will always be diluted. Especially at the beginning of your journey, you need to hear how a real, emotive conversation about your product evolves in real time. If you put in the work, your customers will tell you exactly what would make their lives substantially better.

We’ve talked before about the importance of using research to develop personas and market segmentation. As a reminder, segmentation is the partitioning of the full market into digestible parts—hopefully with customers that share similar behaviors and needs. Defining the attributes and characteristics of various target users is a great way to make sure everyone on the product team understands exactly who they are designing, building, and sweating for.

These personas aren’t set in stone—they should be revised as you learn more and more. After forming and reiterating on these personas, the next step is understanding their underserved needs. If you can address customer pain that is not adequately being soothed, you’ve stumbled upon pay dirt. In terms of market opportunity, pain is gain. All of this information is driving toward the creation of your value proposition, or how your product will meet customer needs better than the alternatives.

Prototyping, Iterating, Optimizing

Equipped with this information, you should be ready to create what’s sometimes called a minimum viable product. With the help of prototyping tools such as inVision, it’s never been easier to show your customers an interactive, high-fidelity version of your product—without actually having to build the whole thing.

This is a safe space for experimentation, feedback, and a low-risk way to glean deeper insights. The biggest disservice you could do to your product team is asking leading or closed questions that trigger a yes or no response. Engage your sense of curiosity and ask open-ended questions to encourage insightful responses. Only then will you be able to identify genuine patterns and refine the initial prototype into something that is delightful and addresses customer concerns.

Take It to Market

As any creator knows, you can get stuck in the spin-cycle of revision forever. The only real way to validate your hypotheses is by eventually taking your product to market. That’s when the lessons come fast, hard, and uncensored. Suddenly, you’ll have access to conversion funnel metrics, marketing economics, product engagement levels, utilization rates, and lost customer churn.

It will feel like trying to repair a bicycle while currently riding it downhill—but rest easy knowing that you don’t have to fix everything at once. It’s just about optimizing what you can control to make your sales process repeatable and scalable in your established vertical.

Things to Remember

  • Seek insights from your employees, especially those out in the field. Your operations team sees all the problems with the product and hears all the complaints from your customers. Set yourself up for success early by creating a frictionless process to get those insights to senior management.
  • There will never be one way to determine product-market fit. You need to embrace the mentality of a scientist by testing, tinkering, and questioning every data point. Use A/B testing with messaging, try different price points, and push everything as far as your conversion rates will allow.
  • There are so many useful tools out there, like how to calculate your total addressable market size. David Skok, the venture capitalist at Matrix Partners, wrote a great blog on this topic as well. It includes a list of the key questions you need to be asking yourself along each step of the product-market fit process. In addition, it has a calculator template to see how you can score your product-market fit.
  • Trying to be everything to everyone will result in you being nothing to everyone. Especially for startups, who are often working with a limited budget, it’s always better to have a narrow focus to start. Then, you can go dive deep in that one vertical, making you the clear industry expert in your domain.

To learn more about how to find the right product-market fit, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

How to Prepare for Successful Business Transformations

Posted on by Joanna Schull

There’s a well-worn saying in business that the only certainty is change, and these past few years have proven that to be true by exponential levels. Entire industries have found themselves faced with the need to plan and transform their businesses in the face of tremendous unknowns including COVID-19, rising inflation, and a troubled economy. Now, as we enter September of 2022, with the world still in flux, what does it mean to look ahead, and begin planning for the future?

Business transformation matters now more than ever and agility and forward-thinking scenario planning have never been more important.

Building a Roadmap for the Future in Times of Uncertainty

Taking steps to significantly shift—or transform—a company’s business can be either proactive or reactive. Ideally, it’s the former, but external events, whether created by competitors, shifts in customer needs, governmental regulations, or global events can cause the latter to be true. At a high level, the process for either is the same. Here’s the overview:

  • Begin with fact-based strategic planning, competitive research, and situational analysis to create the essential foundation of data about the status quo.
  • Next, based on this foundation of data, leaders need to identify and analyze potential future states for the business.
  • Based on this analysis, leadership aligns with the agreed future state and begins the work of determining the specific changes and sequencing that will be required.
  • Evaluate the brand and business—are they aligned with each other, or do they need to be recalibrated to make sure that the brand is supporting the new business direction?
  • Finally, it’s essential to keep employees informed as the process unfolds, not only so they are kept in the loop, but also as a source of feedback and information.

Let’s go into more detail on each step:

Set the Foundation

Successful transformations—or sometimes, evolutions—need to start with a clear-eyed understanding of both the current state of the business, as well as upcoming external forces that will have an impact. It’s good to approach this phase of the process with a structured set of internal and external research aimed at uncovering the business’s strengths and weaknesses, competitive threats, and unmet customer needs. In addition, it’s important to have a good understanding of known external impacts that can be anticipated—things such as regulatory changes and general business trends and market predictions.

Identify Your North Star

Armed with this foundational set of information, it’s now time for a business’s leadership team to identify potential paths forward. Oftentimes, these will exist along a continuum, starting with slight shifts to the existing business, then growing in ambition to encompass more ambitious pivots and expansions. Each potential direction is then analyzed to understand its implications: How will it impact revenue? Do we have the right talent to execute the direction? How will it change our customer base and competitive set? How does it impact our product roadmap? How will analysts and investors react? After assessing the options, the leadership team needs to discuss, align, and set a direction.

Create An Execution Plan

The next step is the planning phase: What changes need to be made in order to begin making the desired shifts? In what sequence do they need to occur? What are the potential ripple effects of those changes? It’s important to do this work in a cross-functional manner, giving all parts of the organization insights into the changes occurring. This helps to eliminate overlapping efforts and activities that could compete with or contradict each other, in addition to providing an integrated roadmap that ensures everyone knows how the change efforts fit together and combine to achieve the end result.

Align Your Brand

When making a shift, it’s essential to make sure that your brand is supporting and reinforcing your new business strategy. This starts with making sure that your brand positioning supports your chosen direction followed by your messaging and external expression of your brand: digital touchpoints (web, social, etc.), sales support materials, PR, AR, IR, and all external-facing communications. Don’t neglect the visual expression of your brand. Many companies, especially former startups entering their next phase of maturity, find that they have outgrown their previous look and feel and need to evolve into a more ‘mature’ level of design sensibility.

Bring People Along on the Journey

The most successful transformations are inclusive, and while it is important that leaders lead the process, it is equally important to involve perspectives and participation from across the organization. This includes involving different divisions, geographies, functions, and levels within the company as part of the planning process in order to get their input as plans are developed. This not only ensures that critical details aren’t overlooked but also builds engagement and buy-in to the process.

A Shared Understanding Speeds Execution

Ultimately, change is about disciplined execution and dedication to doing the work required to make change stick across multiple parts of the organization and ensuring that the people of the organization understand what the change is, how the business is going to adapt, and why it matters because organizations with a shared understanding about the reasons behind change are more likely to move forward with certainty, even in uncertain times.

Take a deep dive into our most recent B2B transformations: Coast, Snow Software, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies

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

The Role of Research to Develop Personas

Posted on by Chris Ames

New Year, New You

It’s January again, and as with every year, many people are seeking to better themselves. The blank slate of a new year is full of endless possibility. Brands are not immune to this pursuit of self-improvement either. Equipped with a renewed budget and a clear head from the holiday break, many businesses are wondering what’s the best way to save time and money, turn insight into action, and find a meaningful place in their customers’ life. If you’re not already, it’s time to unleash the power of personas.

Too often, brands are created, products are developed, and campaigns are launched seeking to be everything to everyone. Casting the widest net possible, brands target nameless, faceless users – defined loosely by obligatory data points that lack any meaningful context. And that’s a shame because it results in a ton of wasted energy being shot into the void.

Know Your Customer, Know Thyself

At their best, personas are like vividly illustrated dictionaries of your customers, based on a combination of real data and insights about your customer demographics, behaviors, motivations, goals, and any other information you find useful. In full color, they give you something to aim at, aspire to, and hold yourself accountable. Perhaps most importantly, personas remind brands that they are, in fact, making things for real people. They provide a beating heart for your products, messaging, and design.

If you know that your ideal customer is a 27-year-old business woman named Sage who has one child under five, regularly listens to podcasts, bikes to work, and primarily shops through subscription services, you’re much better suited to craft a resonate visual and verbal identity than if you launched a campaign broadly aimed at “millennials.”

Start with the Truth

When crafting personas, Daryl McCullough, CEO of Citizen Relations, believes the best place to start is with the truth. “Truth is not marketing speak or brand attributes,” he says. “Instead, it is the pure reason for a consumer or customer to care. Consumers today expect that a brand persona is honest, human, and true.”

Your brand truth is the backbone for all your experiments in messaging and targeting. It’s the focal point around which you can begin to ask questions, like what circumstances triggered your customer to start looking for a solution like yours? What results were they seeking? What risks were they avoiding? What were the barriers to purchase? What do they believe your competitors do better? What has been the impact of using your solution, at a business and personal level? How does using your solution make them feel?

Keep it Human

The folks over at New Kind have a very simple rubric for guiding personas. First, your personas must be built on research. Second, you should be able to count all your personas on one hand. And third, everyone in the company should be able to recall all your personas off the top of their head. It’s a great reminder that no matter how deep you go with your research, you still need to be able to condense and communicate it in a memorable way for your team. As you examine website and social media analytics, customer interviews, and market research, the end result needs to be translated into something human and actionable.

Types of Research

These days, we are blessed with a plethora of tools for getting to know our customers. We know what keywords they are using, what websites they visit before and after, their behavior on social, how they respond to ads, and what kind of content generates the most engagement. By comparing this to specific user data, such as gender, relationship status, and so on, brands are able to create a frighteningly accurate portrait of their audience.

Alongside data-driven tools, customer personas can be shaped by surveys, feedback, and one-on-one interviews.

Find Your Way With Empathy Mapping

Data collection is one thing, but the ability for a brand to truly step into the shoes of a customer – and sustain this perspective over a long period of time – is far more difficult. Brands are always in danger of losing touch with how people really think, speak, and feel. The relationship between people and brands is like that of locals and tourists. Appearing fluent in a foreign country takes rigorous, relentless practice, and locals are always going to be detecting invisible signals you can’t see.

Empathy mapping is a fantastic way to maintain long-term customer perspective, create a shared understanding of user needs, and aid in decision making. It can reveal also reveal less obvious insights, like obstacles in the customer journey and new opportunities for communication. Dave Gray, Founder of XPLANE, has created a very helpful empathy map canvas to improve customer experience, navigate organizational politics, design better work environments, and a host of other things.

Never Forget Your Sales Team

As we’ve discussed before, your sales team are the ones on the frontlines selling your products and services every day. If you don’t include them in the conversation, they are going to ignore your materials or create their own – which only leads to an inconsistent brand experience for your clients and customers.

There are dozens of way to strengthen your brand, but money spent on better understanding your audience will never be money wasted. To learn more about how your brand can make 2019 the year of the persona, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Customer Journey Mapping: The Key to Delivering on the Experience You Promise Customers

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Everyone’s Offering ‘A Great Experience’

Today, brands that aren’t focused on the entire customer experience simply can’t compete. Every touch point counts. Every interaction matters. Brands are expected to live up to their promise at every moment. And to do so, everyone within a business must behave in ways that help make this promise ring true authentically.

We see a lot of brands today differentiate themselves on “great experience” or “unparalleled service.” But in order for businesses to truly commit to creating unrivaled customer experiences, they have to fully align their value with what people truly care about and need – at every brand moment. This requires getting to the heart of what these pains and gains are and when and why they are happening. How? Customer journey mapping.

Customer Journey Mapping, A Different Type of Research

When conducting consumer research, the mistake a lot of businesses make is framing themselves as the stars and consumers as the extras – how can consumers fit into our story? Customer journey mapping, on the other hand, flips the script. It asks: how do we fit into consumers’ lives? Their cognitions? Emotions? Social realities? Priorities? What’s going on in peoples’ lives and how can we better fit into them? How can we shift and adapt to consumers’ needs and desires?

Through this approach, customer journey mapping can uncover what role the brand plays in peoples’ lives and optimize the whole customer experience to a certain set of emotional and situational circumstances. 

Customer journey analysis examines the entire journey people go through with your brand – even before they make any kind of contact with you. It’s an approach that yields a full understanding of what your business does, and doesn’t, fulfill for people. It offers a more sophisticated way of looking at how connections are built with your customers.

Customer journey mapping can help your brand connect more meaningfully with people. Here’s how:

1. Alignment

Journey mapping fosters alignment by bringing organizations into sync with the people they are looking to serve. By analyzing the physical maps, businesses gain a holistic picture of how their purpose, intention, and investment can be positioned to be the most powerfully differentiated from their competition. By uncovering what moments really matter in a customer’s entire experience, the whole team can get aligned around how to connect, behave in line with the brand purpose, and evoke the right emotional impact at every moment during a customer’s journey.

By getting to the heart of what customers are thinking, feeling, and perceiving along their whole journey, your organization can better align the way it does business with customer needs.

2. Respect

Customer journey mapping looks at the entire customer experience: every interaction and every moment of contact. For a lot of employees who may struggle to see the ways in which their role matters, seeing this kind of map can be an a-ha moment. The importance of their work really sets in.

Seeing the journey from start to finish, people discover that everyone is a key player. Everyone within the organization contributes to the way customers perceive their experience. As such, people start to recognize the roles of those that are less visible in a customer’s experience. They recognize that everyone (receptionist, project manager, sales person…) contributes in essential ways.

Because it reveals the contributions of teams and individuals, it can help people celebrate what they are doing well. People across the board feel more valued and more important. They feel more empowered to contribute and shape the way people experience the brand.

3. The Whole Picture:

Some research can be confusing or misleading because it only offers a single segment or chunk of data or meaning – a piece of the puzzle. However, customer journey analysis is unique because it provides the whole picture, even before the brand enters the scene. By unveiling the shape of the entire overall experience, journey mapping gives a unique view of what you do and why you matter – from the outside in, not inside out.

The maps themselves offer helpful mental models for everyone across the organization – helping people to understand what they are trying to accomplish with every interaction and at every brand moment. With this whole picture view, interdependences are more easily seen, and you can be more strategic about your areas of focus, as well as figure out where the real opportunities lay.

This kind of shared visualization can also be of great value for businesses today who may be stuck in a siloed way of thinking. People can contribute their own insights to it and the maps can shift and flex as business does. Embracing the whole picture is the way to create a compelling, consistent, meaningful, and differentiated customer experience today.

Qualitative Data, Back it Up

At Emotive Brand, when we do customer journey mapping it means in-depth interviews that help people bring us into their world. We take the time to build rapport and spend an extended period of time with the people we are interviewing. This kind of qualitative data gets to the what, why, and the how.

However, qualitative data always needs to be validated. That’s why we always back up our findings with quantitative data – often in survey form. This quantitative data helps answer the question: to what extent are our findings valid and true? The combination of quant and qual is key and helps ensure the usability of the maps.

That being said, customer journey mapping is meant to be a living tool. It should be updated and used as something you can measure against. It’s important that people don’t just see it, but that they use it too. Keeping it up-to-date can help ensure that it is being used in the most powerful, impactful ways.

If you want to enhance the power of your customer experience, look to customer journey mapping. Investing in this kind of mapping and strategy will ensure you deliver on the great experience you promise and connect more meaningfully with the people who matter to your business.

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

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Emotive Data: Designing Quantitative Research for Emotional Insight

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotive Brand may not seem like a green eyeshade kind of place. After all, we’re in the business of creating emotional connections between brands and people. You may ask, “Why use quantitative research at all? Isn’t qualitative better for emotional insight?”

In fact, we find quantitative research very rich – and extremely useful for building our clients’ brands and businesses. Qualitative insight is important too, but whenever we can, we start with quant. It helps us move the needle on both functional and emotional measures. It also provides a baseline from which to measure change.

We recently completed a major quant project for a client in the education space. Our client had run a successful business for decades, but revenue growth was stalling as its primary audience matured. Executives came to Emotive Brand for both brand strategy and a growth strategy to jumpstart the business.

Here are some of the techniques we used to get emotional insight from the quant.

Quant Should Test Hypotheses

Every quant vendor has a standard methodology, but cookie cutter survey instruments yield cookie cutter findings. You have to know your client’s business and brand inside and out so you can enter the project with a strong set of hypotheses to test. That means the agency needs to be deeply involved in questionnaire development.

Working with our quant partner, we designed the questionnaire to include all the information needed to craft a growth strategy. We wanted to understand not only the brand and its competitors, but also the perceptions, attitudes, motivations, behaviors, and aspirations of each of five key target audiences toward the brand and the category.

We baked in other questions about the mechanics of the business to inform channel strategy and product development.

In the end, some of our hypotheses were right and some were wrong. But all of the findings were directly useful to helping us understand how to help our client grow.

Quant Should Elevate Emotional Insight

When we asked our target audiences why they engage in the category, their top answer was functional; they had to fulfill a professional requirement. But their second highest answer was rife with emotion; it empowered them fulfill their highest career aspirations.

Guess what we did with the first data point? We ignored it. You can’t build an emotive brand on a functional requirement. But the aspirational nature of the category became central to our brand strategy.

Next, we asked our target audiences to rank the attributes of the client brand from high to low. Their top choices were all functional; the client was doing a good job delivering the basics.

A few notches down the list, they ranked the brand’s ability to enable the same career aspirations that were identified as important for the category. BINGO. Connecting the dots on what drives these audiences was a key emotional  insight. It gave us a powerful territory in which to start positioning the brand.

Quant Connects the Dots on Growth Strategy

Finding these sorts of insights in quantitative analysis can be time consuming and eyeball wearing. But the fact is that it takes a human mind – specifically a human mind that is holding the hypotheses ­– to see meaningful connections.

It’s not a function that can be automated, at least not at this point.

One of the most important findings from our quant project was the identification of a new priority target audience. Looking at any one fact about this audience in isolation wouldn’t have bubbled it to the top as a priority. But looking across the data, we put together seven data points that, combined, told a compelling story of opportunity. Moving forward, this audience will be key to our client’s growth strategy.

That’s why we love quant. This one piece of research armed us with insights to help drive a new target strategy, brand strategy, primary and secondary messaging, as well as channel strategy and product development. Our client now has a baseline from which to measure the success of all of these efforts moving forward.

Done right, quantitative research can be great for the business and great for the brand.

For us, that’s something to get emotional about.

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

Thoughts on Creating a Strategic Narrative: Interview with Strategist Sara Gaviser Leslie

Posted on by Chris Ames

At Emotive Brand, we’re blessed with an incredibly diverse pool of talented individuals. Our team comes from the management consulting world, branding agencies, technology industry, advertising and everything in between. Each of these viewpoints brings something new to the table. In this post, Sara Gaviser Leslie discusses how her background as an analyst makes her a better writer and the importance of creating a strategic narrative  for brands.

You’re a bestselling author, executive communications consultant, strategist, analyst, and storyteller all wrapped up in one. Can you walk us through that journey?

I started at a small consulting firm, where I’d go to companies and help them develop their business. It was right of college, and though I didn’t exactly love the work, I loved going to companies. Being able to observe different environments and see why people do what they do was fascinating.

I did that for a couple years before working with a venture fund in Tel Aviv. It was a busy time in the country when the technology center was exploding, and tons of businesses were based in little apartments and garages. Again, I loved discovering what people we’re doing and the energy of those early stages.

I got involved in finance and public equities in San Francisco. In managing portfolios for institutions, you start to become very good at selling the story of the company. You learn the difference between what makes a good company vs. a good stock. You get to go behind the curtain and see how they work.

Seeing so many different environments in a short amount of time, I just started asking tons of questions — Why are some successful? What makes a great management team? How do they make money? What contributes to their successes?

How does being an analyst help you be a better writer and strategist?

It was at Stanford that I started to connect these different fields in my head. It all comes down to how to structure a great story. I remember seeing a colleague who was supposed to give a 30-minute presentation and she had this 280-slide deck she wanted to run through. As an analyst, so much of your job is trying to figure out what’s happening in this big market and then distill that down in a way that resonates with an audience. It needs to be clear and memorable. Storytelling is the same thing.

For me, it boils down to three things:

  1. Who is your audience?
  2. What do they believe?
  3. What do you want them to believe?

Once you have that, you can start to create a strategic narrative.

What do you think the corporate strategic narrative today needs to address?

The big thing we always need to address is: Why should we care? It sounds simple but it’s easy to forget. You get so focused on your own company and messaging that you forget to create that emotional connection with the audience. People won’t buy if they’re not listening, and they won’t listen if they don’t care.

What are the most common problems businesses have in telling their story?

When beginning to develop a strategic narrative, I’d say the biggest problem is trying to appeal to everyone as opposed to saying, “This is a specific market we’re going after.” Don’t try to do everything, try to build out a small market. That type of thinking poses a risk that companies don’t want to take. There’s so much sameness out there: people have their brand and they think they are living the brand and that’s enough.

I believe in questioning assumptions. For instance, when State Street Global Advisors commissioned the “Fearless Girl” statue in front of the “Charging Bull” statue on Wall Street. That’s an amazing example of showing who you are that takes a risk.

Is there such a thing as story overload? Do even practical, utilitarian products need to tell a story?

We don’t have to know the full story behind everything, you only need to see the top of the iceberg. When you see a billboard for a product, you’re not seeing the internal messaging exercise, the brainstorming, the revisions, the creative tension — you just see the top. Every brand doesn’t need to have an exhaustive narrative, just some flavor or manifestation of their story to cut through the noise. Every company needs to have something they agree on, some reason for being. Your core values are your story.

Given your varied past, what’s your future look like?

I’m constantly reinventing myself — that’s what makes life interesting to me. I have a background in speechwriting. Once I needed to write a 20-minute eulogy for a partner to deliver about his late colleague. The process was fascinating and I enjoyed getting to know this person, what they cared about, the stories they told. In a way, It’s tied to everything else I’ve done as an analyst and storyteller. I love the process of capturing someone’s personality and sharing that in a meaningful way.

To learn more about developing a corporate strategic narrative, visit our client case studies.

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

Discourse Analysis: A Powerful Tool That Ensures Your Strategy’s Success

Posted on by Taylor Standlee

Missing a Piece of the Picture

A powerful brand strategy that drives business forward requires more than an understanding of what customers say motivates them to engage with your brand or your competitors. It requires understanding the larger cultural forces at play that shape those same motivations and comparisons. That’s where discourse analysis enters the conversation.

For example, in our work with a major cyber security company, analyzing the discourses at play revealed shifts in the larger security conversations happening in our culture. We discovered we were moving from conversations of protection and attention, to those of proactive prevention and accelerated detection, shifting the security landscape from technical to more strategic.

By understanding the larger cultural shifts at play, discourse analysis can help marketers and branders tie their brands to something larger than just products or offerings. What they are really buying into becomes apparent – something more meaningful and resonant in peoples’ lives.

So What Is Discourse Analysis Exactly?  

People’s knowledge of a brand is constructed through the discourses – conversations and communications – that surround the brand, the category, the competition, and the larger cultural context. When these discourses shift, so do assessments of brands and their relevance.

Discourse analysis isn’t a new concept. It’s a proven approach from anthropology and media studies that brand strategists have refined and honed to support brand strategy today.

At Emotive Brand, we use discourse analysis to shed light on how and why people think and feel the way they do about your brand, products, category, and competitors. With a clear picture of the discourses at play, no-go areas are revealed, promising possibilities are uncovered, and teams are infused with renewed energy.

The approach is focused on understanding the ways your brand, your competitors, and your category builds meaning and resonance in people’s lives. In the case of cyber security, we learned that the opportunity to reach consumers wasn’t just about offering walls that provided protection, but presenting an entire immune system that could strengthen, flex, and prevent attack before it was even happening. Here you see how discourse analysis can be an ideal method for uncovering fresh and powerful ways to help enhance your brand’s strength.

Discourse Analysis Delivers

Discourse analysis creates a complete and mapped understanding of how your brand – within its competitive landscape – can sustain relevance, stand out, and mean something more significant to the people who matter to your business.

1. Keeping pace with change

Understanding the changing landscape is hard for any business – but failing to understand it inevitably results in missed opportunities. Discourse analysis helps our clients visualize the emerging patterns and existing norms of their category more clearly, while providing a map that can be updated in the future.

The evidence allows brands to see their possibilities in a new light and understand their competitors – perhaps better than the competitors understands themselves. The approach makes the journey easier for brands and businesses today – helping them chart potential directions, realize a vision, avoid pitfalls, and ensure the brand is ready to seize promising opportunities on the horizon.

2. Standing out

Brands and businesses today can’t just say something different, they have to stand for something more significant. This requires understanding both the status quo and the best ways of meaningfully challenging it. And changing the character or intensity of the conversations a brand leads or takes part in can power it in a new direction.

Discourse analysis builds a deep understanding of what the norms are, and why those particular ideas, practices, and values are meaningful to people in the first place. Once people understand the origins of these meanings, they can better tap into their power – challenging today’s norms in inventive ways that help your brand stand above the competition and go against the grain, while not forgetting why you matter to people in the first place. For our cyber security client, they were able to stand out by offering security that meant something different – something more. 

3. Becoming more meaningful

When you have a clearer understanding of the discourses that surround your category, competition, and brand, you can more meaningfully position your brand to compete. Your meaningful aspirations will be better articulated to the people you want to reach. Your culture will come to life. Values you align with will get lived and confirmed every day. And what’s authentically unique about your brand will shine true.

Your business will be positioned to thrive because your brand will reach a new level of meaning that resonates in all the domains that matter to your success. With more authentic meaning, people will be more engaged, more loyal, and your brand will be more trusted.

Discourse Analysis, Here’s How We Do It

Step 1: Identify the basis of competition in your category

This first phase establishes the scope of the analysis. It usually includes key competitors, the larger cultural context for the category, and key target audiences at play, as well as the brand itself.

Step 2: Collect data and organize evidence

This stage is all about gathering the naturally occurring data – the real world evidence needed to analyze how people and groups talk about what’s important to them with regard to your brand and its competitors. This evidence can come in the form of social listening, news and media coverage, consumer reviews, individual conversations, primary research, ads, packaging, promotional materials, etc.

Step 3: Conduct the analysis and uncover patterns  

In this phase, we use a set of proven tools from social science to identify recurring patterns in the evidence. This includes similarities and differences between the ways people relate to key brand benefits, needs, and desires that surround your brand, the competition, and the category.  The key question at this step is: what are the values and perspectives the category, competitors, and brand rely on to construct meaning and how have these developed over time?

This is the stage of deep pattern recognition and mapping. We reveal insights that help your brand discover the biggest opportunities at play – uncovering which ideas and values are not just culturally of the moment, but show the greatest promise for the future.

Because of discourse analysis, our client was able to promise more than just short-term security. They could offer a long-term, sustainable, proactive, accelerated solution for the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design 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 everyday, 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 everyday. 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.

The Power of Good Research for B2C Businesses: Interview with Emotive Brand Strategy Director

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

As Strategy Director, Taylor Standlee is an expert at identifying business challenges, creating strategic solutions, and driving business growth. Taylor offers thoughts on the changing landscape of good research for B2C businesses today.

How is consumer research evolving?

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways of understanding, reaching, and connecting with the people important to their success. This includes customers, consumers, investors, and employees. And we’ve never had so many tools or so much data at our fingertips. The challenge, as always, is to be smart about how we go about gaining the information that will help a business make better data-informed decisions.

Data is an essential requirement for successful business today – but not all data is created equal. It’s about getting research right.

So how do you get it right?

Getting research right means meeting the research objectives in the most efficient and effective manner available.  This begins with clear, focused research objectives.  The objectives dictate the methods, not the other way around.

There’s a tendency to obsess over the growing streams of real-time data – coming from sales, CRM, social listening, and customer satisfaction surveys – that help businesses identify patterns indicating what’s happening. However, these largely quantitative streams of data are just not as good at answering the critical question of “why”. In the famous words of sociologist William Bruce Cameron:

“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”

Smart businesses are coming to understand the strengths and limitations of these quantitative tools and we’re seeing a revival of interest in modern qualitative methods as a result.

Can you talk more about the resurgence of qualitative measures happening in research today?

I think we are in a classic ‘lurch and learn’ moment. We see a resurgence of interest among our clients in qualitative methods that are designed to get at the ‘why’. This means depth interviews, ethnographies, and even focus groups that capture rich data on people’s behaviors and emotional needs. These methods help us come to terms with the ‘why’ – generating an understanding of the emotional and rational drivers of engagement, connection, and the behaviors those quantitative measures are so good at tracking.  Since people now demand brands to act more humanly and authentically, while seamlessly integrating into their lives, qualitative research holds profound value today. This is why there’s increased interest in taking new-school informed approaches to old-school methods like ethnographies, focus groups, shop-alongs, and IDI’s.

So what we advocate for is approaching research holistically.  Using all available methods in order to achieve your specific objectives in a way that empowers decision making and coordination with the organization.

What are some best practices for good research?

1) Use research to help align your organization.

Make the findings accessible to non-research experts. When only specialists see it and understand it, you undercut the value of the research. By being transparent and open, findings can help create a shared understanding of the situation. They can also fuel both creativity and collaboration.

2) Socialize the findings in an immersive way.  

Research is most valuable when businesses build a living way for people to interact with the data. The experience has to be authentic and as real as possible. At Emotive Brand, we are creating highly immersive environments for presenting research findings. These environments allow people to interact with those findings in meaningful ways.  Decks and reports just don’t cut it. By allowing people to really immerse themselves in the data, they are better able to embrace the findings and apply them to their own work. They can grasp brand moments, and get into the hearts and minds of the consumers they are building and designing for, marketing towards, or working to connect with and reach. This means higher functioning marketing materials, better designed products, and a business and brand tailored for growth.

What’s the overall payoff of good research for B2C companies?

Good research is efficient, accurate, and acts as an aid to decision making.  It captures the essence of both what’s happening in the market and, critically, why it’s happening.  Success hinges on a rich understanding of people’s lives and decisions. You can’t get around that. Smart businesses are constantly thinking about how and why they matter to the people who matter to their business, specifically consumers. Businesses need to embrace a holistic approach to research that includes qualitative measures and a heightened emphasis on how they present and share findings in order to find success today.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.