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

Hello!

Tag: San Francisco Branding Agency

Mind the Gap: Bridging Strategy and Design

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Here’s a simple truth I’ve learned working at both design-led and strategy-focused agencies. Strategy and design work best when they work together – from beginning to end.

The problem is that strategy and creative are often regarded as separate instead of complementary disciplines. They have separate teams, separate processes, different skillsets, different client interactions. They approach problems from different angles. They may sit on different floors, different buildings, or even different firms. And, typically, the biggest communication between the teams is a handoff from one to the next.

Great Strategy Doesn’t Always Lead to Great Creative

Sometimes, strategy is too cerebral. Sometimes, it tries to appease too many business needs. Sometimes, it just isn’t bold or incisive enough. And if strategy doesn’t strike a strong emotional chord, it often ends up sitting on a shelf­ as an academic exercise that people don’t know what to do with.

But when creative lacks strategic direction, although it may be beautifully designed and visually stunning, it risks addressing the wrong problem, the wrong audience, or the wrong objective. And if designers can’t find inspiration in the strategy, they will search for it somewhere else.

A Collective Endeavor

Bringing strategy and design together means thinking of it as a collective endeavor, not a linear process. It sounds easy in words, but putting it into practice takes commitment from everyone involved. As an agency who has been fusing design and strategy from the start, here’s how we do it.

  1. Bring design and strategy together, from the outset.
    We involve our design team in client interviews, workshops, and presentations, even when creative is far away from starting. Being integrated into early-stage strategic work helps designers understand the project and the process deeply. Our strategists work side by side with designers on creative – brainstorming, concepting, and elevating the design with on-strategy copy.
  2. One table, one team.
    We bring the entire team together around one table throughout the project. Each mode of thinking informs, respects, and challenges the other. A difference of perspectives and backgrounds elevates all of our work and challenges us to push our limits.
  3. Strategy guides, creative expresses.
    There’s a yin-yang to the process. Even when the two are in balance, we designate clear roles for everyone. We play to the strengths of each individual and build the team around people, not necessarily roles.
  4. Enjoy the journey.
    One of the great joys of a project is seeing a brand come to life strategically and experientially. Understanding how strategy and design build off each other to create that magic is energizing, and what ultimately brings us into work every day.

Smart Clients Want Both

For our clients, the results of this approach are energizing and empowering. Campaigns have a greater impact because they connect strategically and emotionally. Brands have a cohesive expression and articulation across every touchpoint. Identity projects, websites, and product launches are smarter because they tie together rationally and emotionally. When strategy and design both emotionally connect, great brands come to life in new, exciting, and surprising ways.

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

How to Bring in a Branding Agency (And Still Thrive as a Creative Director)

Posted on by Chris Ames

Agency or Enemy?

If you’re a Creative Director, chances are you’re some lovely mix of imagination, diplomacy, market knowledge, and damn good design sense. You bring focus to every project. You know how to communicate across disciplines and departments. After all, that’s why you were hired. So why in God’s name would you ever need to bring in an outside branding agency? And if by some cruel twist of fate you’re forced into this position, how do you avoid effectively hiring your replacement?

If You’re Reading This Creative Brief, We’re Already Behind Schedule

Here’s a common scenario. You’re the Creative Director of a small design team. You’ve been tasked with a top-to-bottom rebrand with aggressive deadlines and even more aggressive stakeholders. There’s so much day-to-day client work that your team is stretched super thin.

It’s normally here, somewhere in-between the third revision and the second missed deadline that a decision maker mandates we need fresh eyes. The team is apprehensive to bring in outsiders and start from square one, but no one has any real bandwidth to argue against it. By the time the outside agency is brought in, everyone is exhausted, the work is stalled, the printer is out of ink, and someone keeps stealing your phone charger. Who’s ready for a design kickoff?

An Extension, Not a Replacement

When it works well, an outside branding agency is a natural extension of your design team, not a replacement.

“Ideally, you get an external agency that’s smarter than you are,” says Robert Saywitz, Senior Designer at Emotive Brand. “You’re looking for a true collaborator and extension of the team. No one wants to be manhandled, and no one wants to hear just tell us what to do. They should have an informed perspective and deliver creative ideas beyond the obvious solutions. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just hire some freelancers?”

So, how do you set yourself up for success? It’s all about education.

The Outside Branding Agency Checklist

  • Rally as an internal team. First things first, by the time you hire an outside branding agency, chances are you’re battle worn. Take a breath, rally the troops, and view this as an opportunity to get back on track. We’re all on the same team and we’re fighting for the same thing.
  • Educate the agency. No one knows the intricacies, politics, obstacles, personalities, and past iterations better than you. The more you embed and educate your agency, the faster, better, and more invaluable they’ll become. No one will benefit from keeping them in the dark.
  • Educate the decision makers. Get your decision makers aligned, informed, and available. Nothing is more frustrating than uncollated, contradictory feedback. Everyone needs to have a say, but at the end of the day, there should be one voice making the final call.
  • Set expectations early. If you’re going to set design guardrails, do so in the very beginning. Everyone must have clear delineations of what to keep, what to kill, and what can be reimagined.
  • Realistic deadlines. This one speaks for itself, but unless you want your external team to get sucked into the same whirlwind of chaos, they need time to operate and produce amazing work. If the rebrand was due two weeks before the agency was even hired, it’s time to rethink the schedule.
  • Turn the Creative Director into the missing link. No one is better suited to the needs of the internal company than the Creative Director. They can work as a bridge between designers, marketing, and the C-suite.

“When you’re the link, you’re the best way to facilitate what’s happening,” continues Rob Saywitz. “You speak the same language, you know the process. You know where the silos are and have the best chance at breaking them down. No one wants to enter a room excited to pitch new ideas only to discover the direction was already decided in a private meeting.”

Partners in Crime

Outside branding agencies can be a phenomenal tool to bring in fresh perspectives, accelerate projects, and spot the glaring inefficiencies that you’re too close to see. But without a champion on the inside, there’s a very real possibility that their best intentions will be mistranslated, misheard, and only add to the cacophony. Agencies don’t replace Creative Directors — they are a vibrant new dictionary for the Creative Director to read, take inspiration from, and translate to the internal team.

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

On Design, Branding, and Where the “Brand Magic” Happens: Interview with Emotive Brand Creative Director

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Interview with Jane Brown, Creative Director

Jane joins Emotive Brand with over 20 years of experience developing corporate and brand identities ranging from global corporations to startups – bringing both agency and client-side, as well as print and digital media expertise to the table. Jane has built a reputation around delivering high-level thinking and design systems that enable new brands to compete in crowded marketplaces and venerable brands to deepen their relevance.

In this interview, Jane shares her point of view on branding challenges, client-agency relationships, collaboration, and what gives brands that extra “magic.”

What drew you to Emotive Brand?

There are a lot of different understandings of the term “brand.” I’ve been following the agency for a long time and I think the way Emotive Brand defines brand is so smart – and completely aligned with my thinking.

Emotive Brand gets it. Brand isn’t just about customers, it’s also about employees. It’s built from the inside out. It isn’t just about a logo, it’s about the people who work within the company. That’s where it all starts – getting to the heart of what the company stands for and why it matters.

I admire the attention Emotive Brand puts on process. The agency has created a very smooth, buttoned-up, articulate, and clear methodology. And they’ve worked hard to build a culture of collaboration with the client where this methodology works.

What excites you most about your role here?

To assist EB’s understanding of our brand and our place of differentiation. I’m excited to build upon what’s already been created.

What inspires me the most about my job is the utilization of design to explain transformative ideas. My goal is always to leverage this power, and I’m excited to do that with Emotive Brand.

What do you bring to the table that is unique?

I bring an understanding that can fill the gap between agency and client. I can pivot. I understand the pain points and cultures on both sides, and I know how to negotiate the two so that Emotive Brand, as an agency, delivers what is going to make our clients most successful.

Speaking of your in-house experience, how does that inform your agency-side work today?

In a lot of ways, in-house and agency-side are often contradictory worlds. There’s a lot of pressure that internal teams face daily to get work done – now. On an in-house team you’re valued for your collaboration, cooperation, positive attitude, and ability to get things done.

In contrast, in the agency world, we tend to be valued more for our skills and aesthetic. Agencies create the highest aesthetic standard.

There’s a sweet spot. I’m known for delivering delight to clients, and everything I do is always implementable. My in-house experience has taught me that you have to create tools that clients can actually use.

So what do you believe successful design systems should enable for clients?

Transformation – for the employees and the business. The brand must support and align with business goals.

For employees – to live that brand. For customers – to truly understand who the brand is. And that the brand can live up to the standards we’ve defined at every brand interaction.

Visually and verbally, the brand must ring true. It must be authentic. Authenticity is super important to me when measuring success.

What are the biggest challenges you see brands facing today?

The web created a lot of possibilities, but also, a lot of challenges. I see the danger when you look at the heap of templates available online. As a result of this mass availability, everything is starting to look and behave the same. Developing a unique and proprietary brand is a lot more challenging now and more important.

Is that where the value of bringing in an external agency comes in?

As an outside agency you are paid to be critical. It’s easier to diagnose and solve problems because you aren’t living them every day – internal teams can be too close to potential issues.

What does collaboration mean to you?

Shift from me to we-centric. Collaboration means we are all on the same team. You just want to create the best work – together. And on the agency side, this is all about creating the best solutions for the client. It has to be what’s right for the client.

What do you believe defines great, meaningful brands today? Where does the “magic” happen?

How does the brand make you feel? The magic has always been there. Emotive Brand was founded on the idea that feeling is transformative for brands. And I’m right there with them.

When teams pivot from logic to feeling and begin to reimagine and visualize what is possible, that is where the magic happens and where I get super excited.

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

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.

Why It’s Frickin’ Hard for Organizations to Brand Themselves

Posted on by Carol Emert

The need for a branding agency is hard to determine sometimes.

Many of Emotive Brand’s clients come to us after failed attempts to develop their own brand strategy. Just last week, a client sent us some themes they’d identified in an internal brand survey, along with a frustrated note: “We’ve gotten this far. We’re stuck. Can you help?”

Why is it so hard for organizations to brand themselves from the inside? Aren’t the people who live and breathe a brand every day the most obvious choice to articulate it?

That’s a logical conclusion, and clients who have tried often feel frustrated that they couldn’t move the ball. Invariably they are smart, knowledgeable and passionate about their organization. So why do their efforts fall short?

We think there are three reasons:

1. Proximity

Insider status seems like the ideal place from which to observe a brand – and that’s true. Insiders are crucial keepers of their organization’s values and meaning. It’s important that their knowledge and passion inform their brand strategy. But the fact is that inside is too close in this case. A certain distance is needed to see the big picture.

If I’m standing against a wall, I see bricks. If I back up, I can see the entire building and if I take a helicopter, I can see its context – the creek that’s about to overflow, the neighbor whose buildings are getting closer and closer to its property line, the customers who love it and the ones who are looking for the building, but can’t find it.

Branding requires an aerial view to understand not only what the brand is about, but its competitive landscape and its audience. To understand a brand and a business, context is mandatory, and that generally means an unbiased third party – with a helicopter.

2. Influence

Related to proximity are two powerful influences: corporate culture and company insiders.

In any organization, certain truths are simply in the air, binding the organization together in a common viewpoint. But those unspoken truths are hard to see from the inside and even harder to evaluate objectively. And they’re almost impossible to buck, even if they are getting in an organization’s way.

An even greater influence are the viewpoints and beliefs of the CEO, founder and other leaders. By definition these people have strong ideas about what their company is about – and they are critical for informing a brand strategy. But only an outsider is well-positioned to evaluate these ideas objectively and perhaps rethink them, or even recommend setting them aside.

3. Insight

The marketers who undertake branding projects for their organizations are highly skilled in communications and management. But probably they don’t spend every waking moment honing their insight muscle.

Every great brand idea has insight at its core, but very few people know how to unearth or articulate insights. That’s where our client mentioned above got stuck – they had assembled the pieces, but couldn’t put them together into an idea that was simple and true and inspiring.

Invariably, the branding attempts we see from our clients are completely logical and accurate, but they fail to go beyond the obvious. The effort gets stuck at 1 + 1 = 2, whereas a great, insightful brand strategy will get you to 3.

Admittedly, a branding agency’s recommendation that you hire a branding agency is more than a little suspect.

But here’s a secret: Even Emotive Brand had a tough time articulating our own brand when we re-evaluated it a few years ago for a website refresh. In the end, we pulled it off – we are a branding firm, after all! – but we certainly feel for anyone who has gone through the exercise and had it fall short of their hopes.

Emotive Brand is a branding agency

Co-Founders On Brand Strategy Today

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Co-founders, Bella Banbury and Tracy Lloyd, weigh in on what matters in brand strategy today.

It’s important to remember that, in the end, the age-old question is always the same. Client needs all come down to “How do we differentiate our brand?” It’s just the way people ask the question and the way we answer the question that evolves. Here’s what we’ve been seeing more specifically in the market:

1.Heightened attention around data security:

Since 2016 was all about using data, now it’s all about safely storing and accessing that data. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 50% of business ethics violations will be related to data. There are lots of questions and doubts about how brands are collecting information and keeping it safe. People are distrustful and worried about privacy issues. Smart brands are focused on security and smart storage. And those brands that can keep data safe, and their users even safer, are winning.

2. Even greater demand for trust:

Companies with a culture of trust have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of three, and high-trust companies are more than 2½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations than lower-trust companies. Nothing is as important as trust for any brand looking to make an impact moving forward. In 2016, we saw a lot of brands lose people’s trust, both internally and externally, in banking, in technology, in the automobile industry, and in the food industry. So this year a lot of brands are working on building and keeping trust this coming year. And this effort always comes back to brand strategy – helping brands make promises that they can keep to both build and keep the trust earned. That’s what we do.

3. Purpose divides:

The conversation around purpose-led business continues. There is more and better research coming out that supports the ideas of purpose-led business and the research supports our belief. When companies articulate and embrace a meaningful purpose or vision, their people naturally pay more attention to all the elements that drive sustainable growth. Brands that want genuine purpose to fuel innovation, culture, and business need to make sure they live authentically by it and communicate it clearly.

4. It’s all about disruption:

It’s clear that people are drawn to brands that are challenging the status quo, saying something new, and making a splash today. Whatever is it –disrupting a category, challenging the way we pay for things, changing the way we get healthcare, the retail experience – it’s all about disruption. Industries we’ve been most excited about are insurance, healthcare, wellness, and education because of this same reason. Brands that reimagine what is possible and deliver new ways of behaving will gain momentum over their competitors who remain stuck in the same thinking.

5. Digital health, on the rise:

There are many changes afoot in wellness and digital health. Last year, we saw more investing in this space and we imagine brands will need to start working harder to differentiate themselves in the next year. Right now, the future seems exciting and yet somewhat vague. This space will require digital health brands to clarify, differentiate, categorize, and tackle shifts head on. The digital health market is huge, and those brands that can figure out how clearly articulate why they matter and deliver on that promise could very well become Wall Street darlings.

6. Role of the CMO changed for good:

The role of the CMO is almost unrecognizable to five years ago. CMOs are now expected to deliver against P&L metrics, grow the top line, and drive the brand forward. Steering the brand in the driver’s seat means delivering on the brand promise. It also means ensuring all customer experiences are aligned to the brand purpose. It’s about understanding the customer journey and embracing customer experiences across all channels. So in order to compete, the CMOs of 2017 need to be brand focused, technically savvy, and data driven. They need to deliver better customer experiences and use insights to strategically deliver business growth.

7. All about brand experience:

Because expectations of brands are continually rising, smart brands are uber-focused on creating meaningful experiences. The real challenge is creating cohesive, connected experiences that resonate across platforms and at every touchpoint. These experiences drive engagement, build loyalty, and drive ROI. And brands need a clear strategy for succeeding in creating the right kind of experiences for the people they are trying to reach. Developing strategies to outline brand behavior has become more relevant for brands looking to deliver something people can count on – whether it’s B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.

As a San Francisco branding agency, we are excited to continue to help our clients develop the right brand strategies to transform brands in order to transform business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Why Bring in an Outside Branding Agency?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

In-House Mentality

The age old question of determining if you need to bring in an external branding agency is still relevant today. Whether it’s because of tight budgets, a hesitation about letting outsiders inside your business, or a general ‘we can just do it ourselves’ mentality, many companies look internally to tackle even their largest branding projects.

But whether it’s a repositioning, a new visual identity, or an all-around brand turnaround, this might be a mistake for businesses who really want to position themselves to thrive in a fast-paced, highly-competitive market.

What Value Can a Branding Agency Bring?

There are many benefits of bringing in an outside branding agency.

A fresh perspective: 

It is easy to get stuck in old models of thinking. And those close to the business often have blinders on about what’s not working and what can be improved. As a result, an outside perspective is often key to fostering  innovation, creativity, and problem solving. New questions arise. The conversation changes. People get unstuck and realigned. And key business problems are solved with efficiency.

Expertise and skill:

Agencies bring to bear a diverse array of experiences from many different industries. And this broad perspective is invaluable. Agencies have proven frameworks and methodologies to solve problems and uncover opportunities. As such, they can prescribe the best approach based on your specific situation and needs. And they have a team of professionals that have tackled all kinds of different business, brand, and culture challenges and bring that knowledge to the table for you. And it is this kind of expertise that guarantees a better positioned, more meaningful, effective, and impactful strategy.

The ability to move with speed:

Speed is key to competing today. So if your brand can’t move quickly, adapt dynamically, and fast forward itself towards the future, your business won’t be able thrive in today’s competitive landscape. A branding agency brings a dedicated focus to your project that is just not possible for an internal team that is already balancing a full plate. Also, financial investment in a project makes it more of a priority and guarantees the attention of executives that it needs to get it done.

Readiness for change:

Change is hard. And it’s often difficult for those inside your business to convince others on the inside that the change is right. The external perspective an agency brings along with proven experience could be what is needed to help your team take that strategic step forward. And once the strategy is approved inside the C-Suite, it is time to once again lean on the experience of the agency to develop a plan to successfully socialize it through the rest of the organization.

An understanding of the value of brand strategy:

Investing in a brand strategy means investing in your business. There’s great value in making a purposeful, meaningful brand strategy a core driver of an organization. But key players inside the organization might not hold the same opinion. There is much value to gain well beyond the marketing team. As a result, guidance communicating the value of investing in a brand strategy to everyone within your business is key to the projects success.  Sales, product, human resources, customer success and engineering can all benefit greatly. An agency can help assure that you have the right level of support for it to pay off.

A long-term partnership:

A top branding agency engagement should bring value beyond just the current project at hand. It’s hugely beneficial to have a group of people outside of your organization. These people already understand your business inside and out. And as business progresses and important decisions arise, they are there to seek out for guidance.  A strong relationship with an agency can help build a valuable network that can grow and grow.

Some things are better done together. And building a strong, impactful, and meaningful brand requires all the people key to your success coming together. Invest in working with a branding agency and you will add an entire team that can work alongside yours. Invest in your brand’s success and position your business for greatness.

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

 

Strategy for the Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Strategy from a strategist.

When I started my career, I had some mentors who warned me that my world was going to be different from theirs. The main change was that due to downsizing, client companies no longer had people on staff to manage creative agencies. Instead of working with people who knew communications and branding, I would be working directly with vice presidents of marketing or human resources who had only vague ideas about how they work.

That was good advice. But it missed an even bigger change. My mentors believed the clients would have a strategy, and it would be my job to execute it creatively. But that changed, too. Most clients don’t have a strategy, only a need. And that has become more prevalent, not less, over the years.

Downsizing has continued, of course, and now few corporations have communication experts to help work with creative agencies. A number of industries that need communication assistance have gotten younger, like high-tech, healthcare, and media. There simply isn’t enough resident experience to know how to work with a branding agency or a creative design firm.

The funny thing is, I used to be impatient with clients who didn’t have their strategy all lined up. I grumbled about having to do the equivalent of preparing for the party before I got to have it. Now doing strategy is the party, and executing it sometimes feels like cleaning up after the party.

So here’s some advice for anyone who’s getting ready to work with an agency on a strategy for big branding, employee engagement, or an employer brand project.

Know Your Need
I learned a lot from a former agency owner, Bill Cahan, who would always ask clients some key questions at a kickoff meeting. One of them was “What does success on this project look like to you?” At first, I thought the question was too open-ended and too personal, because clients would talk about the success for them, or their boss, or the intended audience, or the marketplace – there was no one answer. They were all over the place.

Then the light bulb clicked on: success means all of them at once.

So dream big. Make a long wish list of everything the creative project is going to do for you, your boss, your team, your company, your industry. Know why you need these things. Know what you will do with them when you get them. Then demand that your agency deliver on most or all of them. The agency folks might blink, and then start telling you about implications for schedule or budget, but they will come up with a strategy that no one imagined beforehand.

Know Your Speed
Some projects have to go slow, and some have to go fast. When you’re the client, you have to have a feel for this, and communicate it to your strategist. I’m not talking about deadlines, which force fast work or allow slow work. The issues here are need, political capital, and organizational readiness.

Sometimes one of your needs is to leapfrog a competitor. Then your strategy has to allow fast execution and create maximum impact and surprise when the project lands. Beating someone to the punch with a lousy punch doesn’t work. You gotta have both.

Sometimes you have political capital to do something radical, because your department can do no wrong with the CEO, or a senior vice president tapped your team for a special project. In this case, you can’t let your project run longer than the honeymoon, and you have to keep “radical” within the tolerance of your champions. This makes them believe in you even more, and you get another stock of political capital. Play each round of this game well, and you’re knocking on the C-suite door before too long.

Finally, sometimes you need a strategy that wins management over through the very process of reviewing it, thinking about it, and approving it. Branding and values projects are like this, as well as codes of business conduct, because they must have broad consensus. You can’t surprise anyone and succeed, because there’s a strong chance the surprised person is upstairs from you and can blow up a lot of hard work. Allowing these projects to proceed slowly and methodically without frustrating anyone is actually part of the strategy.

Know Your Agency
One of the strangest phenomena in business is companies hiring agencies they know almost nothing about, getting work that doesn’t quite satisfy, and then being surprised at that result. Would you invite someone you don’t know to move into your apartment, and hand them a big part of your household budget? You wouldn’t. But companies do the equivalent all the time.

Many clients are amazed when I say that agencies don’t mind a long courtship, even one that doesn’t include any paid work. “Oh, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time,” they say. “I don’t want to raise their expectations.”

It’s not a waste and our expectations will not run away with us. Those of us on the agency side enjoy talking to you about your business and your challenges because we’re in business too, with many of the same issues. We like going out for lunch or coffee, because we’re usually in the office more hours than you are. (Occupational hazard.) Most importantly, we will do better work if we already know you, your needs, and your speeds.

Heck, we might even have a few strategies in mind.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Photo credit.

Using Values to Build Engagement and a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Fifth in a series.

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

The goal of employee engagement is to drive employee attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics in such a way as to improve their productivity, morale, satisfaction, and usefulness within the organization. However, many companies have struggled with converting their proclaimed values into compelling, work-changing experiences for their employees.

Often, the problems have been that the values are typically expressed with meaning-neutral (if not meaningless) corporate-speak, or that the values aren’t of a first-order nature. That is, they don’t touch on what truly constitutes the “good” for people inside and outside the organization.

Getting employees to live company values

As such, employees simply haven’t been able to internalize the values. If asked, they may be able to repeat the values verbatim, but their recitation will not be heartfelt. Furthermore, too often their conscious knowledge of the values does not lead to the desired changes in attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics.

There is a way businesses can get employees to live the company’s values. Ironically, it is by never using the word “values.” Rather, it is by bringing people to the company’s values through feelings.

This is a new way of engaging employees in corporate values. It doesn’t ask employees to buy into potentially bland statements crafted in corporate-speak. Instead, it prompts employees to think about how they want themselves, and others, to be left feeling by the business.

To make this work, the business determines a set of higher-order feelings based on their ambition. These feelings are selected based on their ability to help propel employees in their pursuit of the ambition and their ability to serve as an employee-friendly way of deploying values through employee engagement initiatives.

Engagement built around feelings

The business then engages its employees around these feelings, using them to shape, change, improve, and make more consistent, the employee’s attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics as it drives them forward toward the ambition.

For example, employees can be engaged in a process by which they explore how the business can better make them feel the selected feelings through changes and additions to the company policies and procedures.

At the same time, employees can affect change within by questioning how they, and the policies and procedures they control, can be changed or added to in order to make their superiors, peers, and reports more likely to feel the desired feelings.

By focusing on feelings rather than traditional value statements, a business instantly forges a fresh and new emotional connection with its employees. By using feelings as the platform by which it instills its values, businesses discover a better way to engage their employees and to get them to internalize both the business’ ambition (purpose) and its feelings (values).

Did you miss the first four parts of this series?

Read Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees, Getting Employees to Respond Positively, Why Workplaces Aren’t Meaningful Now, and The Meaningful Workplace: It Takes New Ways of Thinking, and Acting.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Purpose Beyond Profit – A Shift in Perspective

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

At Emotive Brand, we’re big on the concept of Purpose Beyond Profit. Apparently, people interpret this phrase in interesting ways.

Some jump to the conclusion that it means “purpose instead of profit.” That’s a valid approach for B-Corps, perhaps, but most companies – including this one – would prefer to make some money.

Some people think the phrase means “profit plus being good to the environment.” We’re okay with that definition, but it’s still too easy for many brands to dismiss for one reason or another.

The deeper definition applies to all brands, if they can make a simple shift in perspective.

There’s a teaching story about perspective used in the field of psychology. A Buddhist psychologist and a Freudian psychologist meet at a conference. The Freudian asks the Buddhist to explain how their approaches could be different. Aren’t the things that make people unhappy the same everywhere, and don’t psychologists have to deal with those things to get people back to normal?

The Buddhist says, “Yes, with one difference. In Buddhist psychology, the goal is not getting people from negative 5 back to zero. The goal is to go beyond zero to plus five, to plus ten, to a hundred.”

The point of this story for psychologists is that they can do much more than undo deficits.

The point of this story for us is that most people in business would say that their goal is the same as the Buddhist. They want to get their profit beyond zero to plus five, or plus ten, or whatever the target might be.

They would be half right, like the Freudian. The shift in perspective for brands is recognizing that the customer is still stuck at zero.

Most of the time, we pay for things and get what we consider equivalent value. We trade money for something else we need, like food or clothing or travel. We take a chance that we’re getting roughly equal value for our money, and if we do, we’re even. Zero-sum game.

In other words, no brand loyalty. Nothing for the brand beyond the profit.

The best brands generate loyalty – and higher profits – by getting us way past zero, so far that we feel like we won a prize.

Think of a brand you identify with, one that beats zero for you personally. (This may take a moment.) When you identify them, there are almost certainly two reasons. First, the brand means something to you because of who you are. Second, that “something” is not about a product or service. It’s the way the company approaches its products or services.

People who love Southwest Airways love it because of how democratic it feels. Actually flying an airplane safely has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. But it does make customers feel that they are treated equally, by their equals, without a lot of pretenses. People who value those qualities feel good about themselves when they fly Southwest.

People who own BMWs used to drive me nuts the way they talked about the cars – until I got stuck with one as a rental. It hit me with physical force that people were not talking about the car. They love driving itself. A company that gets who they are, and makes them feel more alive behind the wheel, gets their love for life. Turns out I am one of those people. After I drove the car, I bought one. I went from sneering at BMW snobs to thinking of them as my brothers and sisters.

Again, you don’t have to love driving to build a car. But to make your customers feel something meaningful beyond the machine, you have to approach that engineering in a particular way.

To take the best-known example of all, look at how Apple relentlessly changed the emphasis in IT from technology to us, the people who use it. We humans don’t love technology, or technology brands per se. We love expressing ourselves, and technology that magically, invisibly makes us more expressive is beyond price.

It’s also beyond profit, even if Apple makes a ton of money. Steve Jobs’ legacy is a company that doesn’t care how hard something is, doesn’t take its cues from what other people are doing, doesn’t let conventional thinking limit what it does or where it goes.

And that’s only partly because he studied Buddhism. It’s also because we all want to be like that at some level.

We all have a best self we know we want to be and express. We want brands to recognize and speak to that best self — not just to the zero-sum consumer who needs to put food on the table and keep a roof overhead.

Purpose beyond profit means reaching into people’s hearts for where their sense of self lives, and lighting it up.

If you have your own examples – brands that take you past zero with what they mean to you – let us know and we’ll share.

Download our White Paper on Purpose Beyond Profit to learn more.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.