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Tag: San Francisco 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’s lot 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.

When Is the Best Time to Revisit Your Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Align business and brand strategies for greater success

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

Orientate your brand around meaningful outcomes

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

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

Meaningful brands are built out of more than just brand communications

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

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.

Your Emotions Are Shaping Your Thoughts

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

I can imagine two ways you might be feeling as you read this.

If you’ve never before heard about, or experienced, the thinking of Emotive Brand, you may feel a tad skeptical as you read this. After all, you have no reason to trust what you’re about to read.

On the other hand, if you do know about us, and have perhaps worked with us in the past, you probably feel more comfortable as you read. Deep down you probably have some expectations about what this experience will be like, and the hope that the connection you feel will be strengthen as a result of the time you invest with us here today.

Why is this? Quite simply, your feelings about who we are, what we stand for, and how we matter to you, shape how your absorb, distill and internalize these words. If there is a positive connection between what you’re looking for and what we’re all about, you come into a new interaction in an emotionally-predisposed way (more accepting, tolerant, interested), and if we are true to our brand’s emotional space, you will leave this interaction even more emotionally gratified (and feeling more closely aligned to us).

So, rational thinking isn’t driven by totally random emotions, but rather it is driven by a set of emotions directly associated with the topic at hand.

What this means for brands

A core element of our consulting practice is the creation of a brand’s “emotional impact”, a set of distinct emotions we encourage our clients to evoke across their interactions with people. The goal is to create a defined and own-able emotional aura around the brand that is attractive to newcomers and gratifying to people close to the brand. We see these feelings as bonds between people and the brand, which prompt these people to think, feel and do more on the brand’s behalf.

The idea of brands explicitly evoking emotions came to me several years ago when I thought about the (few) brands in my life that had accrued any level of meaning. In other words, the brands I preferred, regularly patronized, and which I happily told my friends about if I saw they were interested in a category which that brand addressed. For example, at the time I was a regular user (and fan) of Virgin Atlantic Airways; I would always promote their virtues to the frequent fliers I would met from time to time.

I spent time consciously thinking about these “important” brands in a way that most people would never bother to do. But I had a dream to help brands thrive in new ways, so I looked deep inside myself to see not so much for what my favorite brands did for me, but how they left me feeling. I dwelt upon the experiences I had had with Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, and saw that (either consciously or unconsciously) they consistently evoked a set of feelings that made me feel “good”. Digging deeper, I could see that I could, in fact, arrive at a short list of specific feelings that I felt were regularly evoked across the range of interactions I had with Virgin (at check-in, in the lounge, in-flight, on-line, etc).

Altogether, these feelings made my experience with Virgin something quite rich and remarkable. I not only insisted on flying Virgin whenever possible, I was noticeably perturbed if for some reason I had to settle for a “lesser” airline. I was full of stories that I would share as I pitched the airline to other frequent fliers I’d come across. Even today, years since I’ve moved from the UK (and therefore don’t find Virgin a convenient choice), I would not hesitate recommending the airline.

For some brands it’s natural, but not for all brands.

Now, let’s be clear. I don’t think Virgin explicitly set out to evoke these feelings in me. I don’t believe that they had a systemized way of analyzing what happened between their brand and people like me, and deliberately choose to “inject” specific feelings along the way (as we now do through emotive branding).

I also believe Virgin is not your average brand. Like a select few of notable brands, the Virgin experience is driven by a broad set of people-centric principles (directed at both customers and employees) promulgated by a charismatic leader. The interactions I experienced (and valued) were prompted by a company culture driven by these principles. Nonetheless, when I made the effort to look back at my experiences with Virgin, I was able to discern a distinct, if unintentional, pattern.

Of course, when a brand is passionately driven by people-centric principles defined by a strong leader – as is the case with Virgin, Apple, Zappos, and some others – distinct emotions are quite naturally and organically embedded in its interactions.

What if your brand isn’t truly people-centric by nature?

I wondered about all the brands I knew (and had worked on) that made little or no difference to me, and which I would never think to talk about with friends. All those brands that had entered my life, but that had evoked little or no emotion, either in their workplace, or in the marketplace.

What could this insight do for them?

Could this idea of transforming into a more people-centric entity help make these emotionally-barren brands more attractive and important to people? Could being more meaningful make them more likely to get more (and better) customers, recruit the best employees, and earn increased profits?

Could they do this even if they didn’t have a charismatic leader or a natural people-centric orientation?

Most important, I asked myself what would be the best way to transform brands that don’t have the natural tendency to be people-centric.

The result is the brand humanizing discipline of emotive branding.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Transforming Business: An Empathetic Approach

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy.

Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own.

Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position, to one that is robust in meaning and purpose.

Empathy as a driver of brand strategy

When you’re close-in to a business’s daily operations it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful and purposeful dimension for your brand requires you to step out of your own perceptions of what’s good and valuable about your brand. It forces you to look at your brand – and everything it represents – through the lens of human needs, values, and aspirations. Through an empathetic approach, it’s easier to see the meaningful outcomes people experience based on their interactions with your brand. As such, empathy leads you to the deep-rooted, emotional connections that can be forged to create strong and enduring bonds. You won’t reach this point without allowing yourself to take the necessary steps back to the most common and fundamental needs, values and aspirations of humanity.

Empathy as a cultural ethos

Your business is a set of policies and procedures that have been conceived and designed to produce desired metrics (e.g. productivity, efficiency, profitability). Empathy can be used to elevate how well these functions not only produce the desired metrics, but do so in a way that aligns to the needs, values, and aspirations of the people involved. Empathy helps you create a more human-centric culture, by encouraging you to rethink and reconfigure the nature of your policies and procedures. As such, empathy helps you better engage and motivate employees. This means they’ll be far more likely to listen to, appreciate, and follow your leadership.

Empathy as an engine of innovation

If your business, like many, is struggling with hyper-competition and increasing product commoditization, innovation will be a primary focus. Nothing inspires innovation better than empathy. By encouraging your development people to “walk in your customer’s shoes”, either literally or through sensed experience, you bring them closer to what’s really important and valuable to the market. An empathetic attitude sheds new light on what’s needed now and how to best address that need or opportunity.

Empathy as a leadership practice

We’re all born empathetic. As babies we all had the capacity to perceive how others were feeling and what they were experiencing. Sadly, over time, we lose this skill. However, it is remarkably easy to revive and put to good use. Mindful leadership is the goal. All it requires is that you adapt your leadership presentation and style based on an understanding of your follower’s needs, values, and aspirations. You don’t necessarily change your management objectives, you simply radically improve your leadership performance by forging more meaningful connections with your followers.

If you are looking into the future, and have questions about your brand’s ability to navigate the rough seas ahead, you’ll want to carefully consider your own, and your organization’s, capacity for empathy. The strongest businesses going forward will be known for how their meaning and purpose-led behavior enhances both individual and collective well-being. They only reach this strong position by embracing empathy every step of the way.

—

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

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 pretense. 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.

The Meaning Gap and What it Means for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Your business’s performance suffers when people don’t do what your business needs them to do. So why aren’t they doing what you need them to do? The meaning gap represents the distance that’s growing between your business and the people vital to it’s success. As your business becomes more sophisticated, measured, and managed – in other words, less human – it moves one way.

As people, acting as customers, employees, social media users, and citizens, become more mindful, concerned, and discerning – in other words, more human – they move in a different way.

Unless you act, this gap will keep growing wider and wider.

  • Your business will become more and more distant from people.
  • People will stop seeing why your business matters to them, and therefore, change their behavior in ways that work against your interests.
  • Your customers will become more and more dissatisfied and start searching for more meaningful alternatives.
  • Your employees will work with less vigor and unconsciously thwart your efforts to innovate and provide superior customer service.

Going deeper into your business, the people who are you partners, suppliers, distributors, and investors are also looking to align with businesses that matter beyond profit. As the meaning gap becomes more evident to them, they will be less likely to support you, work with you, or invest in your business.

This is all because we have moved on from the days of mindless consumerism and working-for-a-paycheck, to a time when people seek to create meaning in their lives and in everything they do.

They no longer just buy or work or stay silent or think only of themselves.

They want to do more with their lives, do things that matter, and feel they are making a positive difference through their decisions and actions.

Most important, they want to associate with businesses that help them do all of this in ways they admire, respect, and value.

The goal is to bridge the meaning gap by reaching out to people in new ways that engage them on an emotionally meaningful level.

Curious? Read our paper, “The Meaning Gap: What it Means to Your Business.” You may also find our paper, “The Age of Meaning” helpful in understanding the drivers behind the emerging values, attitudes, and behaviors of the people vital to your business’s success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Is it Time for Your Business to Embrace the Purpose Economy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

According to Aaron Hurst, we’ve moved from the Information Economy to the Purpose Economy. He states that this is a natural evolution, which is taking us from the first levels of human organization, the hoe-and-plow Agrarian Economy, through the smokestacks of the Industrial Economy, to the data farms of the Information Economy, and now to the human-centric Purpose Economy. Each of these economies been built on top of the proceeding, and represent evolutions more than revolutions.

In his book, Hurst states:

“When I say purpose, I mean more than serving others and the planet. Service is certainly at the core, but in speaking with hundreds of professionals and reading thousands of essays, I’ve discovered that there are two other key sources of purpose people seek: a sense of community and the opportunity for self-expression and personal growth. In other words, they pursue personal, social, and societal purpose.”

Continue reading “Is it Time for Your Business to Embrace the Purpose Economy?”

The Value of Hiring a Brand Strategy Firm

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

When might you need a brand strategy firm? Your business is an intricate machine that leverages people and processes to generate profits. Until now, your way of doing this has been satisfactory to both you and your shareholders. But obviously there is something in the wind telling you that some changes are needed. This has you thinking about how to best deal with this situation, and to determine what partners, if any, you need to make these necessary changes.

What drives your need to change?

There are many reasons why a company would need to change what it’s doing. Maybe competition and disruption are inhibiting the growth potential of your business. Attached to this, your business may be having a difficult time creating growth through innovation.   Continue reading “The Value of Hiring a Brand Strategy Firm”

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and Continue reading “How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design”