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Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading, this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors; and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Emotive branding isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and sets you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans – From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves – Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands – In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments – B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding – All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

How to Hire the Right Branding Agency

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Business Case for Hiring a Branding Agency

In all the years of working with tech companies, we have heard the same story time and time again about the trials and tribulations of VPs and marketing executives trying to secure a budget to invest in hiring a branding agency with limited success. On top of that, how to hire the right agency can be just as confusing.

We hear about them making strong and compelling business cases to invest in the brand to leadership teams and hitting a wall. It happens at every budget cycle, management meeting, and discussion around disappointment in growth, differentiation, and lead gen that fails to meet expectations. And still, there’s no investment in the brand.

When so many founders and CEOs of technology companies don’t yet see the value in investing in brand strategy, it’s often because they are deeply invested in building a product and often feel that the product will sell itself, until, well, it doesn’t. They try and fix the things that are easy and seem obvious, but oftentimes it takes more than that. They don’t know what you know: investing in the brand is investing in the business. Yes, it’s frustrating. We feel your pain.

Investing in brand strategy is not easy for many founders and CEOs to wrap their head around, but when they are ready to pull the trigger, you need to be ready.

How to Hire the Right Branding Agency

Hiring the right agency is critical to your success, the success of the business, and the agency’s success. So, how do you hire the right agency when it’s finally time? Very, very carefully.

Some things to consider:

Do your homework to see who are the top agencies. Tap your network, do your research, check the rankings to see what firms measure up.

Be incredibly clear about the goals and objectives of the project. Map them out to get sign-off from the leadership team.

Set appropriate expectations about timing so they are clear what their time commitment is on the project.

Be realistic around what budget is required to engage an agency to do great work, and the reality of how long it will take from start to finish. Set this expectation with the leadership team so they know from the outset.

Tap your network for strategic agencies. Find agencies that have relevant experience, a strong portfolio, and a great reputation, but offer different approaches to solving the problems you are looking to address.

Choose three agencies to prepare proposals. Cast a wide net at first and bring the top three back to go through the process with you.

Be very clear about what you are asking help for. Help each agency understand what you are trying to accomplish—big picture—with this project, what the dynamics of the leadership team are, and what you personally are trying to accomplish. If you set the agency up for success, you’ll be successful too.

Compare apples to apples. Give each agency the same project to scope so that they can prepare a proposal, timing, team, and budget for you to be able to compare each agency to the same scope.

The pitch. Once you’ve kicked the tires of each agency and checked references, invite your top two agencies to come in and pitch.

Trust Your Gut

This is where you should sit back and watch the dynamics of each pitch. Which agency fires up your leadership team about what is possible? Which agency enables the work to begin even within the pitch? Which agency provokes a meaningful dialogue? Which agency feels right?

Once you’ve checked all the rational boxes, this decision becomes an emotional one.

So, how do you hire the right agency for your brand project? Choose who you feel can help you manage your leadership team and this project, deliver a meaningful brand strategy that delivers the results you need, and who you can imagine working side by side with for the next few months—because you will be spending a lot of time with them.

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

Sales: The Critical Element of a Growth Company’s Brand

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Sales and Brand: A Connection Worthy of Discussion

Sales teams exist to grow revenue and keep customers happy. They’re also brand builders and the face of the brand to many customers.

They hear what customers want and keep a pulse on the market. When it’s easy for sales to share their observations with product development and marketing, their feedback spurs product improvements, brand definition, and growth. The first step in this process, though, is for sales to provide a clear explanation of the problem their product solves.

Recently we caught up with Pier Barattolo, a sales leader with decades of experience in technology companies, to learn how he makes sure the market understands what he’s selling and why they need it. 

Interview with Pier Barattolo, CRO at Density.io

First, can you tell us a bit about your previous roles and your current gig?

My first quota carrying job was in 1996. My current job, Chief Revenue Officer at Density, is my third CRO position. Our sales team is small, handpicked, and focused on building the foundation for high growth and scale. As CRO, I am responsible for partnerships and business development and although I do not directly own marketing, I have a strong voice and influence on all marketing related activities.

When you join a company, you tend to be a founding member of the sales team. Tell us where you start.

Yes, I’m usually one of the first—if not the first—sales person at a company. I work very closely with the founder / CEO to establish product-market fit and put in the processes to scale the business. I start by thinking about the critical messages we need to develop and then what will get prospects to talk to us and, eventually, purchase. I ask myself, “Who should care about us?”

It’s about keeping things really simple. At a previous company, I didn’t take the time to really define our reason for being and this left the sales team to do their own thing and had to figure it out on their own. It did not work out very well for us. Now, I always work to identify and focus on the problem we solve and put it in simple terms so that everyone can articulate and explain it.

Messaging is, obviously, easier when the problem is familiar to people. But it isn’t always. Have you ever worked at a company that was in a new product category?

Category placement is really important. You have to be really clear which category you’re in so others can place you. It’s hard to sell something to a company that doesn’t have any budget allocated to that product/solution. I’ve found that when a category is particularly new, education is really important. This is often a big issue for platform companies.

So how do you create a platform brand?

You can’t depend on the enterprise to understand the power of the platform. It’s the selling company’s job is to educate the enterprise on the platform’s potential, the specific applications and how it solves a specific problem for a specific executive / buyer.  Unless widely adopted, companies do not go out and look for platforms.

At my current company, Density, our technology allows enterprises to measure occupancy by counting people passing through a doorway. We position ourselves as an analytics platform, driven by occupancy data. On its own, that doesn’t mean much to most people! We need to define the platform and also give examples of the things the platform can do and the problems it solves.

So how do you do that? How do develop a value proposition for each customer?

You need to get clear on what you do, how you do it, and begin to develop the proof points as quickly as possible. At Density, we have a device we install above a door that measures people going in and out of a space. The problem we solve really depends on the customer. When we talked to our initial customers, we looked for underlying trends and recurring problems. We identified initial applications that were common and valuable to our target audience and focused on those “use cases”: security tailgating, office space wastage, facilities management, and conference room and cafeteria planning.  We give executives the necessary data to enable them to make better decisions.

Let’s talk more about brand. You’re in a very early stage. Do you focus at this point on the brand?

Brand recognition and brand awareness help potential buyers understand who you are as a company. You’ve got to invest when you can. When I join a company, I first focus on the problem we are solving and then how we solve it in a way that is differentiated and valuable to customers.  That might not be the flashy brand stuff people see but it makes a big impact on the sales cycle. The better you define the problem and the solution, the easier it is to sell and the stronger your brand becomes.

Speaking of sales, what’s your approach to scaling the sales team?

I tend to make sure that I have a strong foundation that can withstand high scale—but at the right time. It doesn’t make sense to scale before you have a clear and repeatable product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. Although our technology is applicable to every Fortune 1000 company we’re targeting companies that align best with the use cases we are focusing on today.  Once we see a repeatable process, we will add reps and allow them to apply the recipe many times across many accounts.

How can the sales team impact brand building?

First, arm them with what they need. Content is king. We make sure sales has the content – data sheets, pitch decks, case studies – they need right away. The content doesn’t have to be perfect but they need something. We iterate on and refine this content over time.

Speaking of iterating, our reps are key to our ongoing learning process. They are out there hearing about how customers see our brand, how they use our solutions, and how we can make it better. You have to use every customer interaction to learn. Then you bring that feedback back inside and adjust. And then you go out again.

Any closing thoughts?

I’d just say that when you start to think about how your brand matters to people, it’s overwhelming.  I really try to stay focused. If we can do everything, it’s hard to do anything. Take it step by step and get straight on fundamentals first.

Pier makes it sound easy. But finding product-market fit and defining your value isn’t always simple. If you’re struggling to articulate the problem you solve or develop the use cases that communicate your value proposition, we want to hear from you. Emotive Brand understands the connection between positioning and messaging and sales. Let’s talk about how we can help you make your product more relevant to your customers and drive revenue.

Emotive Brand is a B2B brand strategy and design agency.

How to Help Your Startup Thrive Internally

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Finding for the right strategies to help your startup thrive

It’s an all too familiar startup sight. Your technical co-founder and engineering teams have their eyes glued to screens of scrolling code as their fingers fly across keyboards and music blasts through their earbuds. They are driving hard toward the launch date or new product release, losing themselves in their work and consuming Red Bull like there’s no tomorrow.

Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO of WorkableHR.com, sets the following as one of ten helpful tasks non-technical co-founders should undertake:

“Nurture good spirit, keep everyone intellectually stimulated. Your technical co-founder may spend long stretches of time focused on some particular technical detail or problem. This focus is good from a development standpoint, but takes his mind off the big picture for a while. You need to engage him, and let him participate in the intellectual conversation about what it is we’re building as a whole – not burden him with the work of execution on “everything else”, but enriching his big picture with knowledge and contemplation about it. There is a joyful and highly motivating emotion that comes from the sense that your vision is coming all together, customer development is progressing, investors are interested, numbers can be achieved, feedback is positive, market is missing what you’re building, etc.”

We agree wholeheartedly. A time out from the day-to-day pressures can remind hardworking team members of why they are doing what they do, renew their energies around doing the work needed to complete the product, and focus their attention on creating a quality product.

Toward a product that matters.

At the same time, as a non-technical partner, you need not only the energy and endurance of your technical co-founder and team, but also the ability to keep them focused in ways that push them to create a product that matters right out of the gate.

That is, a product that not only works, but helps people lead better lives in some way (e.g. more productive, healthier, more enriching, etc.).

Mattering is the great differentiator today. People who are looking to create more meaning in their lives are being more discerning about the products they buy, whom they buy from, and the places they work. When you strike a chord of meaning, your product and business earns the admiration, respect, and support of people looking to do things that matter.

Three ideas to change the conversation

1.  Going beyond the vision.

Just as the dev team is knee-deep in coding, you are busy keeping on top of everything else that is needed to ensure a successful launch.

Most think the driving force of a startup is its vision. However, many startup “visions” are technology-centric, emotionally neutral, and lacking in meaning. They tend to be very internally focused and bereft of perspective. They are often generic in intent, written in corporate-speak, and hard to relate to on a human level.

So, step one in creating meaningfully refreshing conversations with startup dev teams is to go beyond your vision and to adopt a Purpose Beyond Profit. This is a statement that elevates your startup’s reason for being – its “why”- and the way it will matter to people both rationally and emotionally.

Going one step further, when using this statement as a platform, consider how your startup should make its employees, customers, and partners feel when they deal with your company and its product, your advertising and promotion, your website, your sales and investor presentations, your customer support team, etc.

2.  Now it’s time for a workplace conversation that matters.

With a solid Purpose Beyond Profit and a set of feelings to focus upon, you are able to construct a break for your dev team that brings these two factors to life.

Start by leading a conversation on what it means to matter in today’s world – the value of getting people (including themselves) to have specific feelings – and what all this means vis-à-vis the product you have in development. Then, follow up with whatever “good news” you can share about the market opportunity, the investor interest, the team’s progress, any feedback you’ve gotten, etc.

By letting your team feel the “joyful and highly motivating emotion” that comes from doing work that truly matters to themselves, to the company, and to the world, you help them deliver a product that matters right out of the gate. As Nikos put it, “Nurture good spirit, keep everyone intellectually stimulated.”

3.  Matter inside and out.

Finally, use your new Purpose Beyond Profit and set of feelings to guide how you bring your product to investors, partners, and customers. Help people outside the firm see your product as one that comes from a company that aims to do well by doing good through an emotionally meaningful Purpose Beyond Profit. Strive to be a company that stands out not only for what its products do, but also for the way the company makes people feel. Be a company that people are proud to be associated with and support because it does stuff that truly matters.

Learn more on how to help your startup thrive by making your brand matter.

The Meaningful Workplace explains how this change effects the dynamic between businesses and employees.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency that works with high-growth startups.

Is an Agile Strategy the Right Approach for Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Dynamic Times Require Agile Strategy

We have seen a a large rise of requests for our proprietary agile strategy methodology for brand strategy. More than ever, sudden market changes, disruptive business models, rapid-paced technology, and ever-evolving competition demand agility. As customers change, new competition enters and new categories emerge, so businesses must be able to flex and adapt with the times.

Without Agility, Less Impact

Agility is becoming more and more of an expectation. And being agile doesn’t mean being hasty or impulsive. In fact, it’s the opposite. Agile strategy should help businesses and brands make better, smarter decisions faster and enable teams to get to the heart of key business problems, prioritize goals, and stay true to their purpose.

High-growth companies who aren’t able to move fast and work in sprints face potential complications. Projects that get stalled lose impact. Slow deliberation leads to decision-paralysis and can deter leaders who simply need to put a stake in the ground and stick to it. And doing incremental parts of a strategy, over a long period of time, can render that strategy irrelevant by the time it’s actually brought to life. Agile strategy is all about quickly getting to the heart of the problem at hand, and creating smart, efficient, maximum-impact solutions.

Accelerating into Brand Strategy

High-growth companies need new ways to adapt their business, product, culture, and brand with an agile approach to brand strategy.

An Agile Approach to Brand Strategy

1. A Sprint Mindset

Framing brand strategy as a sprint allows a business to be more agile and able to effectively flex and adapt. There is great value in condensing what normally would occur over weeks or months into a single day or series of days. A sprint structure demands that everyone really focus and give their full attention. It allows people to really dive in and not be distracted.  Even if the strategy occurs over a longer period of time and takes multiple sprints, developing a sprint mindset can help people be more dedicated, focused, and productive.

2. Flexibility

Digital disruption and the fast pace of markets today requires a brand strategy that can flow and flex with change. An agile brand can’t be thought of as a logo or image – because it isn’t. It’s a system. It’s a way of living for your business and should be felt, understood, and brought to life by every member of the team. In order to be able to intelligently and powerfully adapt and flex, the strategy must be have a clear, directed brand purpose that allows for flexibility without losing clarity.

3. Collaboration

Agile brand strategy hinges on collaboration. And this often requires a mindset shift. People have to hold confidence in the idea that working together helps create better solutions faster. It requires being open, listening to new perspectives, taking outside advice, and coming together to be more imaginative, innovative, and creative in order to help your brand and business stand out in a competitive landscape.

Fast Forward

Last year, our agency honed in on how to solve our clients’ more pressing business challenges via an agile approach. We developed the Fast Forward program to empower learning and accelerate implementation – a much better approach for high-growth companies.

We also embraced the practice of working in sprints, both strategically and creatively. We found it encouraged a higher level of collaboration with our clients and enabled us to meet the many demands of leadership teams managing high-growth companies. We believe sustainable growth depends on this type of agile brand strategy. High-growth companies looking to succeed in 2017 will have to evaluate and learn to embrace agility, or face irrelevancy.

Visit our case studies to see how we put Fast Forward to work.

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

Your Startup’s Growth Strategy Starts with Brand Strategy

Posted on by Carol Emert

You’re running a startup. When should you invest in brand strategy?

Put another way, when do you need to grow? When do you need to acquire new customers, build your culture and recruit the right people?

For a startup whose primary job is growth, brand strategy can be a critical tool. So the answer to the question about when you need brand strategy is: Not at the very beginning, but probably earlier than you think.

We recently branded a stealth-mode software startup whose CEO is a highly successful serial entrepreneur. He has worked with Emotive Brand several times. This time, he brought us in earlier than ever, because he has seen how brand strategy can power growth.

When his startup leaves stealth mode and launches into growth mode, as it is poised to do, it will be powered by the right customer insights, the right value proposition and the right messaging to succeed.

Too Early v. Too Late

That doesn’t mean you need brand strategy on Day One. Startups are right to get their products built and tested before worrying about anything else. If you don’t have a viable product, you have nothing to grow a brand or a company on. So early on, tunnel vision is good.

The next stage, the growth stage, is where brand strategy can have meaningful impact. Brand strategy can power your growth strategy by identifying who your best customers are and clarifying what you do better than anyone else to address the pain points they face every day.

Brand strategy defines your company’s unique brand experience, the voice with which you will speak to the marketplace and the messaging that will get you leads with the right people.

If your brand isn’t clear, your growth strategy will have a tough time defining both long-term goals and the short-term tactics for getting there.

Avoid Stalling Growth Before It Starts

We worked with a startup client a couple of years ago in exactly this position. The company had a great team and top-notch venture backing. It enjoyed a successful run with its initial friends-and-family customer set – but when the time came to implement its growth strategy, it hit a wall.

The company was trying to build its business with a tech-heavy product story rather than directly addressing the challenges it solved for its customers. Its venture firm sent the startup to us.

Three months after engaging Emotive Brand, the startup was ready to relaunch with a fresh story – and quickly started hitting its goals. The same startup has engaged us on a number of projects since, to keep its story relevant amid shifts in its competitive landscape.

As your startup prepares for growth mode, your team will be growing too. Brand strategy that clarifies who you are and what you believe can help internally as well as externally, helping you recruit the right people and build a strong internal culture.

Whether your startup is poised to grow internally, externally or both, brand strategy can make your growth strategy smarter, clearer and more successful.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm working with high-growth B2B companies.

Disruptive Technology: Paving Cow Paths or Breaking New Ground?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

What is disruptive? Is it the company that reinvents a category, or the one that creates an entirely new category? In the case of cities, London’s road system was based on paving ancient pathways, while Washington D.C.’s grid was laid out in advance of breaking ground. Both are great cities today, but their structures came from entirely different ways of thinking.

The same is true of companies and brands.

Innovation is swirling around the financial sector today with companies reinventing ways to buy, sell, get paid, lend or borrow money, and finance companies. But for the most part, they are bringing their new thinking and technology to incrementally improve existing mechanisms. Even virtual currency is a new take on an old idea.

The practice of medicine is as old as civilization, but ongoing innovations in pharmaceuticals, medical technology, and data mining are enabling new predictive insights and treatment options that did not exist before.

Cloud services that leverage the connective tissue of the Internet are replacing old-school paper and obsolete digital records in every industry, speeding the availability and quality of information. Is this disruptive enough to stand out?

How can you stand out?

Of the roughly 6.3 million patents filed in the U.S. between 1999 and 2013 (2,481,795 granted), 53% were in computer technology, digital communication, telecommunications, semiconductors, electrical machinery, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, biotechnology, and measurement sectors.

But 47% were in a category called “other.” So innovation is everywhere.

With that many innovations pouring out each year, how can a company differentiate its technology enough to stand out? Brand strategy can help.

Brand strategy and branding can help

Brand strategy is a process that helps business people identify what’s important about a new technology, product, or service. Why it matters, who stands to benefit from it, and who might stand in its way.

Brand strategy, especially emotive branding techniques, also defines how to communicate the most important facts about a new concept to people in a way that connects on a deeper, more emotionally meaningful level. It helps companies scale and grow product lines, penetrate new markets, and spread globally.

No matter what you’re inventing or reinventing, brand strategy can put it into a meaningful context that people can understand and identify with. It works for incremental advances in existing categories – paving the cow paths – and for brand new ideas that don’t fit into a conventional category.

See how we’ve helped many disruptive technologies launch, grow, and thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency

 

Consider This Before Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Preparing to Develop Go-To-Market Strategy

Developing a strong go-to-market strategy (GTM) is hard to get right – especially for any startup in high-growth mode. The right GTM requires bringing together all of the strategic assets that address your business and growth strategy: sales, marketing, product, channel, brand, and vision. The benefits of developing this kind of strategy are huge, but a lot of pieces have to come together in order to properly prepare and ready your organization for investing in it.

Bringing in experts to help create a GTM strategy brings both a strategic and a valuable outside perspective to the table. It can also help evaluate if you have all the necessary strategic components in place. And also extremely important, that those components are tightly aligned to each other, laddering up to your business goals and objectives.

Evaluating Required Critical Components for your Go-To-Market Strategy

Most times, when a company looks to develop a go-to-market strategy they are pressed for time and looking to execute now. They don’t want to take any detours to evaluate readiness. But this kind of evaluation is a critical step — one that separates a winning GTM from one that falls short.

Developing a GTM strategy requires an evaluation of readiness of the following strategic assets:

1. Category:

What category are you in? Are you developing a new one?

2. Customers:

Who are you selling to? Who is your target customer? What markets are you considering?

3. Positioning:

What unique value do you offer in relation to your competitors?

4. Brand Promise:

Why does your brand matter?

5. Messaging:

Does what you are saying to each target audience to ensure your brand resonates and connects to the business problems they are seeking to resolve?

6. Narrative:

Do you have a strong story that articulates what you do, how you do it, why you matter, and what people can expect from you in the future?

7. Channels:

Where do your target customers buy? Where will you promote your products?

8. Product Offering:

What product/service are you selling? And what unique value do you offer to each target customer?

9. Pricing:

What is your pricing structure? Are you offering a SaaS model? Do you price differently for different customer types?

Methodically evaluating each component of a successful go-to-market strategy is hard. It is often an emotional process. Leadership teams feel like they’ve addressed these many times. From their perspective, all the elements are interconnected and built upon each other. But taking the time to address each one singularly and allowing outside help to bring them together more cohesively can deliver even greater value and stronger ROI, and actually save time.

Getting it Right

Timing is everything. The biggest mistake we see startups making when they go to develop a GTM strategy is two-fold:

  1. Not having all strategic components articulated and strategically aligned
  2. Not allowing enough time to develop a strong GTM strategy that ladders up to your growth and business strategy

Whether you’re developing a go-to-market strategy internally or working with outside help, allow enough time to systematically and methodically go through the process of evaluating each of the components described above. Evaluate them with an open mindset. More likely than not, some of those components might need adjustments and tweaking. Each are critical individually and work even harder for you as a set. They are hard to get right. And it does take time. But when they are truly working together, you are really ready to develop a rock solid and winning GTM.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.

For further ready, try: https://www.emotivebrand.com/demand-generation/

 

Creating an “On-Brand” Community for Developers

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Value of an Online Community

Building an online community is a great way for companies to encourage deeper relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and most especially – developers. Technology companies are particularly adept at leveraging active participation, good will, and sheer word-of-mouth power of the cloud crowd.

Many sponsor technical communities for developers like teaching, customer support, and newbie coaching. People flock to well-structured, well-run forums for advice, problem-solving, and to share their work and ideas.

Some communities spring up of their own accord, sparked by a lone enthusiast trying to solve a problem who attracts people with similar interests. But more likely, communities are created by companies willing to prime the pump and get things rolling. These communities can be of great value for companies looking to build loyalty, engagement, while sustaining relevance. So how can a company build a thriving, self-perpetuating community that’s aligned with company goals?

Here’s why a purposeful brand can help you create and run a vibrant online community:

1. Objectives

Define the goals for your online community from the beginning. What are you trying to accomplish? Set clear objectives and expectations that are consistent with your company’s business and product strategies.

Business strategy and brand strategy are inextricably linked. Since the brand is the part of your company that customers see, your Brand Strategy is an essential part of any community initiative.

2. Audience

Determine who are you talking to. Who are they exactly?  What do they need, want, and believe? What do you want them to do, think, or feel? At Emotive Brand, when we develop a strategy, it starts with deep understanding of all stakeholders, target audiences, customers, and yes, the community.

Persona Maps and Persona Journeys are extremely helpful here. Persona Workshops cast a wide net and then probe deeply into the key people your company wishes to influence. It’s easy to map their demographics, industries, job roles, responsibilities, and influencers. More important, you can discover their needs, pain points, beliefs, and feelings so you can match messaging and/or product solutions to answer the specific needs of specific types of people.

3. Content

What topics do you want to cover in your community site? What content do you want to host? What message do you want to send?

Brand Strategy helps here, because it includes Positioning to define your company offerings and the Messaging needed to target the right strategic messages to the right people, as defined in your Persona Maps.

4. Quality

Quality matters. Developers will spend a lot of valuable time on your community site researching problems, asking questions, posting solutions, studying documentation, and downloading code. So the least your brand can do is to create a clean, well-lit place that’s usable and attractive. Use your brand to guide the brand experience you want people to have when engaging with your community.

The Brand Promise that’s at the heart of your brand will give you the charter to invest in a high-quality community site.

5. Design

Developer sites are frequently created by engineers for engineers. But they shouldn’t look like freeware, even if running on an open-source platform. There needs to be a consistent, symbiotic relationship with the corporate brand, even if you’re hosting the community site separately from the corporate website.

Brand Guidelines will specify acceptable designs and prohibit unacceptable designs that might damage the corporate brand.

6. Tone

Geekiness is cool. We love geeks. Almost 97% of our CEO clients are engineers! We honor them. We make them heroes (check out our work for VMware). But that doesn’t mean that your community site needs to go overboard with geek-speak or drown in abstruse jargon. Simplicity, directness, and clarity are always the key to good communication.

The Brand Voice defines the way the brand speaks, and how it should not speak. It also sets the tone for the community discourse, which is crucial if you want a brand-appropriate site that grows because it’s inviting for people to join.

7. Style

The Brand Promise – the promise your brand makes to the people who matter – helps crystallize the brand’s role in the community. You can choose the proximity to the community that’s most comfortable for your brand. Branded communities fall into four camps:

Full engagement – with active participation by designated company brand ambassadors to provide technical support, ideas, postings, documentation, code, and site moderation.

Moderate engagement – company staff is involved for editorial purposes, policing member postings to prevent bullying, remove trolls and keep things clean.

Low engagement – built and then run with a let them come-to-me mentality, basically hands off, allowing community members to run the show.

No engagement – companies who channel customer support into static lists of FAQs, better than nothing, but it sure isn’t a community.

8. Dialog

There’s no better way to understand people who are important to your brand than by paying attention to the community. Communities are built to encourage dialog between interested parties in two-way or multi-party conversations. Your brand has the opportunity to participate and listen.

Brand Strategy can help you listen attentively and respond appropriately. Empathy should be the guiding light for any community, and rooted in any Brand Strategy.

 9. Care and feeding

Once you start a community, it’s up to you to keep it going. It’s like a garden. You till the soil, plant the seeds, water and fertilize, pull the weeds, and encourage growth. You welcome the bees and birds, too. And you do it every single day. Only then can you enjoy the fruit.

How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community. A Brand Strategy specifies both the strategic shifts a brand is trying to make, and the behavior necessary for people to live up to. How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community.

Your online community may turn out to be a genial collection of like-minded enthusiasts or a contentious battleground trolled by argumentative egomaniacs. Either extreme can be valuable as long as you have them under your tent. When you build a community that’s aligned with your Brand Strategy, you can enjoy the benefits of reduced customer support overhead, loyal and interested long-term users, a rich environment bursting with good ideas, and a vast team of de facto ambassadors willing to spread the good word about your brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.