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Tag: Startup

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

 

Positioning Strategy for High-Growth Tech Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

High-Tech Companies Have Banished the Word Brand Strategy

I’m not sure when it happened. I only know it has. Brand strategy is no longer something the tech world is asking for. Well, let me be clear, they are still asking for it, they just aren’t using the term brand strategy. Positioning strategy is the new brand strategy, at least for high-growth companies where time is of the essence.

I’ve felt the shift first hand. As a co-founder of an agency, I’m the person who takes the incoming calls from prospects looking for an agency. It used to be that I would patiently listen for the words “brand strategy” to qualify a prospect. But over the past three years, I’ve heard that term less and less. Instead, prospects are using other terms to describe their most pressing business problems. It just took me a while to really understand what was happening and why.

The Factors I See at Play in a Desire for Positioning Strategy

1. Agile has become a way of doing business. Marketers need things fast. They want quick wins as they look to test new ideas in the market, prove that they work, and implement them quickly and successfully.

2. Competition in technology has never been as fierce as it is now. The rate of disruption and innovation that is happening is amazing. But with that comes the difficulty of keeping pace. It comes down to differentiating, getting to market first, and, if you make it, staying ahead.

3. Data drives everything. If you can’t prove a project has a strong ROI, it won’t happen. Iterating and testing strategy and ideas has never been more important. There is no harder role than being a CMO right now. And any CMO or marketer in today’s world needs to prove a strong ROI in the work they are doing, especially when outsourcing to an agency.

4. Valuation is critical to any high-growth company. Being in the wrong category can derail even the best tech company from achieving their vision of a successful exit. This is top priority for almost any high-growth business, whether it’s a startup or a publicly-traded technology company.

5. Positioning has never been so top of mind for leadership teams. It is where the rubber hits the road. Every successful brand needs to be strongly positioned in the market to thrive.

6. Strategy is no longer enough to shift a business or brand. Marketers are looking for strategy AND the assets needed to implement in market ASAP. They just don’t have the team or the time to figure it out internally. They need both strategy and activation.

These are the factors that have shifted the landscape of what leadership teams and marketers are looking for to help their business thrive, to help their brand be more meaningful, to hire and retain top talent, and to realize their purpose and vision.

What are high-growth businesses looking for today?

High-growth businesses are looking for ways to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. It’s about strategies  to help scale their business. Quick wins that can prove ROI for larger investment. And strategies gain better valuations. They are looking for the magic bullet.

I believe that in B2B and high-tech, brand strategy has now become the following things:

  • Defining the right category – developing a new one or moving to a different one
  • Positioning Strategy to ensure you are perceived in the right space, associated with the right competitors, envisioned by your target audience in the right ways
  • Creating a narrative to align your corporate strategy, vision, and why you matter to all of your stakeholders, internal and external
  • Messaging that resonates, that blends the rational and emotional in ways that differentiate and support both marketing and sales teams as they drive revenue and build brand
  • Websites that deliver the value proposition, convert leads, articulate the story, differentiate, and help any prospective buyer or employee see why you matter

Positioning Strategy

So, while marketers are not asking for brand strategy in the way they used to, they are still asking for it. In many ways it’s easier because they are asking for it in ways that address their most pressing business issues. Demanding it in sprints, delivered in ways that are actionable. They need strategy and the tools to launch that strategy in market, but it is still brand strategy.

It doesn’t matter what terminology is being used it. Whether it’s brand strategy or a small component of it, being a good partner is being able to adjust to the needs of prospects – meeting them where they are at, delivering what will impact their business. When they win, so do we.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

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. 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.

 

Entrepreneurs — Why You Need This Advice for Your Next VC Pitch

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Entrepreneur Pitch

Every day, in offices up and down Sand Hill Road, founders meet with venture capitalists to make their pitch. For entrepreneurs, these aren’t mere meetings. They are defining moments, perhaps life-changing ones.

Only the truly clueless would be unprepared for meetings of this magnitude. Rock-solid business plan? Check. Technology road map? Check. Go-to-market strategy? Market analyses? Financial projections?

Check. Check. Check.

And yet…despite all that exhaustive effort, many entrepreneurs are not truly ready for what might one of the most important meetings of their career. They aren’t prepared with an answer to the most basic question of all: Why?

What VCs are looking for

VCs have told us and told the world that the key question they want answered is not “What do you do?” but “Why are you doing this?”

The answer is never “because we think it’ll make money.” Of course the plan is designed to make money; that’s a given. No one writes a business plan without believing their idea can make money.

So the answer to the question “Why?” must be something else entirely. The best answers contain a belief. A conviction. A heartfelt desire to do something great, something meaningful, something compelling.

At the very least, the entrepreneur should want to make an impact — and believe doing so is not just possible, but inevitable.

Why?

The successful entrepreneur must be able to articulate this why along many dimensions: Why this product? Why now? Why does the market need this solution (even if — especially if — the market doesn’t yet recognize or understand the need)?

But most important, successful entrepreneurs will need to be able to explain why their product or solution or company matters. What difference will it make in the world? Why does this idea excite them? VCs are looking for something that aligns to a bigger idea — perhaps even a noble one.

So: Don’t forget to talk about “why this matters” in your pitch to VCs. Most entrepreneurs are rock-solid when it comes to articulating their value proposition, growth projections, technical capabilities, and market opportunities. But reserve a little part of your pitch deck to answer the question “Why?”

“Why” isn’t a tough question to answer. But it’s an extremely tough question to answer from your heart…to be convincing about what motivates you and why you’ll get up every day to make it a reality.

Call it “Why” or call it your first step in defining your brand. Either way, make sure its part of your pitch, it matters more than you think.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design consultancy that works with founders, startups, high-growth companies and VCs.

For further reading, you may enjoy

Does your brand make a promise?

Why is messaging so difficult for disruptive technologies? 

Six reasons why your startup should invest in brand at the beginning

The Value of Mapping Business Strategy to Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Business strategy and brand strategy should be closely linked

There’s a perception among many executives that business strategy is strategic, and brand strategy is a marketing tool – and not a strategic asset. As a result, businesses set ambitious goals, but don’t consider how investing in and developing a brand strategy could help get them there.

As a brand strategy agency, we rely heavily on our client’s full disclosure of their business strategy – their goals and objectives, pitch decks, revenue reports, exit strategy – to build a meaningful, emotive brand that will transform their business, drive revenue, enable them to hire top talent, and power the company’s future success. But, in order for a company to measure success and see the value of the brand strategy, the business and brand strategy need to be aligned. By mapping the two together, we can create a strong, impactful brand that is geared towards specific growth goals and worthy of investment.

Mapping ensures that business can grow in any strategic direction

In any business situation, the brand strategy needs to reflect both the short-term and long-term goals of the business. A brand that aligns with the business plan ensures these goals become reality. Consider these three situations:

Startups need top talent to build and sell their products.

Most startups have aggressive hiring ambitions to meet their revenue goals. And in today’s world, because startups are all competing for the same talent – data scientists, engineers, and top sales people – they need to rely on a strong brand to effectively articulate why they matter. Investing in your company’s brand strategy will help recruit the right employees who are aligned to your brand and business aspirations. When recruits and employees connect to your brand’s purpose in more meaningful ways, the business will stand out from your competition and employees will drive business because they will be more dedicated, loyal, and committed to your success.

High-growth companies that are looking to scale at a rapid pace need a brand strategy to stand out in crowded markets.

Your brand strategy is an opportunity to better connect your product and/or services to the people that matter most to your brand, and involving your sales and marketing teams in the process is a smart way to help map your business and brand strategy together. By examining business priorities, we can develop a go-to-market strategy that will drive revenue, better support your sales and marketing teams, and boost loyalty with your customers and partners.

Established enterprise companies often need a brand refresh to meaningfully reconnect to internal and external stakeholders.

In competitive markets, business strategies have to shift and change over time to help sustain growth, maintain market share, and combat new competition. These shifts in business strategy can be hard for an established company to take on – both internally and externally. Whether you are preparing for an IPO, involved in M&A activity, or trying to stay relevant in a changing market, investing in a brand strategy refresh can help articulate these shifts. Presenting a cohesive brand, corporate narrative, and updated look that communicates who you are, why you matter, and what you stand for is necessary to shift your business and reconnect the brand to all your key stakeholders

Mindful leaders connect business and brand strategy, and reap the benefits.

Regardless of what stage the business is in, a brand strategy is the best tool to hone in on the impact your brand can make. Aligning the brand strategy to your business goals makes your brand more impactful and emotionally meaningful. It is the best way to create a road map that is tailored toward your brand’s growth. Those leaders who understand the value of a strong and clear brand strategy are better situated to lead their business. Use brand strategy to connect and matter to the people who are most important to your brand’s success.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Brand Strategy: What is the Role of B2B Branding?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What is the role of B2B branding? How is it different from sales and marketing? Why should B2B enterprises be adopting purpose-driven brand strategies? What benefits will they accrue by adapting themselves to the changing requirements of the Purpose Economy?
Continue reading “Brand Strategy: What is the Role of B2B Branding?”

Overcome Startup Competition in a Crowded Eco-system

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Startup Competition is fierce

Startup competition is tough. People used to think that consumers have mind-space for only three brands in any given category: the leader, the challenger, and the one other company lucky enough (or hard-working enough) to be noticed and considered. The rule of three may still be true, but the sheer proliferation of brands flooding a truly congested sector can starve every brand for oxygen and make it difficult for any brand to stand out.

We deal with a lot of clients in crowded, complex categories and ecosystems: technology companies, software companies, professional services companies, media companies, etc. B2B companies rarely have simple value chains. A messy B2B2B ecosystem is more typical, sometimes extending into B2C. In especially jam-packed categories, it’s doubly hard for a company to stand out.

Today, it’s actually normal to have hundreds of companies in your category. Categories like AdTech, MarTech, Big Data, Analytics, SaaS, the list goes on. In your case, you still want to know how your brand can stand tall enough to get a steady flow of oxygen, recruit the very best talent, and remain healthy.

In these over-crowded categories you may find yourself fighting against forces greater than direct competitors. Sheer clutter can be a more powerful distraction to potential customers than any competitor’s offering. Your brand and how it connects to the people that matter to you is a key in differentiating yourself from your startup competition.

A few guidelines from the world of brand strategy:

Be true to yourself and your purpose

At the brand level, you’re not competing product vs. product. It’s not a feature vs. feature game. Your brand needs to have a relevant place in your customers’ hearts and minds. So be true to your brand and the promise you make and bring it out in everything you do. Leading from your authentic vision and consistency of purpose will help your brand mean more to people. And that alone will make you more memorable. 

Turn your back on competitors

Yes, ignore them. They aren’t running your business. You are. So instead of focusing on your competitors, focus on your customers. Be empathetic. Know them inside and out. Learn what makes them tick, how they feel, what they need. This may sound like basic sales training, but it’s vital at the brand level, too. If you know what matters to your prospects, you can structure your brand offering with the confidence that it will connect.

Don’t chase your tail

It’s tempting to try to react to competitors. Some companies consume excessive quantities of precious time and resources tweaking their positioning, their marketing, or even their products to fend off competitive threats. If you have a well-conceived brand strategy to begin with, your brand will have a strong connection to people who matter on an emotional level. Your brand will be founded on what you believe. Knowing what you believe makes you stand out from the crowd.

Live your brand promise

Brands that are meaningful and stand the test of time – the ones that stand out from competitors – are driven by the behavior of people who are committed to living up to the brand’s promise. Every single interaction people have with your brand needs to reflect the brand strategy in order to solidify the brand’s position in their minds.  How you go to market, the look and feel of your branded communications, how your brand speaks and what it says, the way your brand makes people feel, and how your brand behaves at every brand touch-point. No interaction is unimportant. Everyone needs to be on-board with living the strategy.  So don’t keep your brand strategy bottled up deep in a file cabinet. Socialize your strategy from top down and bottom up so everyone in the company knows the story and lives it.

So if you wake up one day and find your company surrounded by hundreds of other companies clamoring for oxygen in your category, you’ll know it’s time to take a deep breath and take a fresh look at your brand.  Focusing on a brand strategy can help you can better articulate “why you matter” and better articulate your true differentiation, and create a strong and compelling go to market strategy. A brand strategy will help you cut through the clutter and stand out in an over crowded eco-system.

Emotive Brand operates in a crowded category with many other brand strategy firms. We stand out by knowing what we believe in and by sticking to our promise to transform the way brands reach out to people and the way people respond to brands.

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Read more about how to differentiate your brand.

Learn more about an AdTech brand we helped create true differentiation for here.

 

A Learning Culture Can Bring New Value to your Business

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Expertise in Learning?

Starting a new job or entering a new industry always entails a learning curve. People understand they have to learn quickly in order to survive. It’s the key to their success.

When people work closely in a business or specific industry, as experience builds and time accumulates they often forget this sense of voracious learning. It becomes more and more difficult to see things in a new light. And some top leaders are stuck thinking in a silo.

Some call this ‘the paradox of expertise.’ As expertise increases, people struggle to notice possibilities, discern novel patterns, or see new prospects, ideas, or insights.

Out-Learning the Competition

Learning – studying and absorbing trends, market forces, new technology, research, and happenings within your industry and outside it – is key to success today. It will drive your business towards the future, keep your brand agile and able to shift as fast as the world you work within. Building a culture of voracious learners is one of the best things you can do for your business.

Here’s how to build a learning culture:

1. Look wide and far:

If you gather information from the same, ingrained sources as your competition, the findings and the decisions you make from those findings won’t stand out. Shifting perceptions requires widening the lens of where you’re looking. And innovation and creativity thrive on perception shifting.

Expanding your point of view and discovering a different angle requires bringing people with a diverse array of mindsets into the conversation. Experiment and adopt new ways of thinking, seeing, and working. What you do and how you think should never be contained. So examine what’s happening in other industries and draw parallels and note constrasts. In fact, the most established practices in one industry could be revolutionary when translated into another.

Interconnectivity is key to successful business today. And understanding a business and where it can go requires learning about the world at large and where you are situated within it. A learning culture can help bring new thinking, ideas, and opportunities to your business.

2. Learn collaboratively:

Collaboration hinges on humility. It’s important to listen as if you can learn something – asking questions, engaging fully, and being open to other angles. Everyone within your organization should have the mindset “I’m still learning” – no matter your role.

Admit when you don’t know something. Ask for help from different people. Gather an opinion from someone you don’t usually talk with. These kind of collaborative practices can be quite valuable.

A designer can learn a lot from a strategist, an accountant from a writer, a C-Suite leader from a new recruit, and vice versa. And always share your findings. Engaging in collaborative learning can take an organization to the next level.

3. Be open to what’s possible:

Don’t settle for the status quo. Ask: What can I learn now? What’s possible for my knowledge? My organization? Its products and/or services? Its people? The brand? The best brands of today are built for the future. By being open to what’s possible, you can position yourself to be at the cutting edge of that future.

So take interest in what you don’t know. Strive to gain new perspectives and new information. Expand your knowledge and the scope of your learning in order to fuel creativity, innovation, and agile decision making.

Learn to Thrive

Consider some learning-focused companies today that are thriving. The CEO of WD-40 Company, Garry Ridge, prides himself on building a learning-obsessed company culture. And rightly so. The focus Ridge placed on a voracious learning culture explains how how the company nearly tripled its share price since 2009.

Google has formalized informal and continuous learning, giving employees allocated time to explore their own interests within the workplace. GE has created programs such as Change Acceleration Process, meant to foster experiential and continuous learning and fuel innovation.

The examples are many. No innovative, cutting edge, top company today is at the top because they stopped asking questions. These companies are always curious and always learning.

Creating a learning culture can foster the business agility and open mindedness that businesses and brands require today. And leaders who put a premium on learning can help fuel a culture of learners that will shine from the inside out. So focus on learning as an asset and position your business for greatness.

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

Your Business Issues Just Might Have A Brand Solution

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Top-of-Mind Business Issues for the C-Suite

When you spend a lot of time working with people in the C-suite, you’re exposed to C-sized business issues. And those larger strategic problems can’t be solved by the CEO alone, or often times by existing resources. When changes in your industry push you to shift business strategy, it’s a sign that your brand strategy needs to shift in a synchronized way in order to reposition for success.

We’ve surveyed C-level executives about the number one desire they have for their brand strategy.  Know what they want? Differentiation. A competitive advantage. A defensible position. But differentiation is tough. And when your competitors are howling like wolves at the door, how can you stand out from the pack? So if your company plays a supporting role in a complex ecosystem, how can you stand out from the crowd? Brand strategy can help.

Here are a few business issues that you may have experienced yourself.

  • A small, high-growth company in a congested ecosystem filled with other small, high-growth companies needs to sharpen its position and narrative to demonstrate a meaningful difference.
  • A decades-old service company embarks on a long-term plan to upgrade technology and improve the customer experience. They want to update the brand and communicate what it means to people every step of the way.
  • One company acquires another and discovers the need for a refreshed brand architecture and streamlined product architecture, a fresh visual identity, and internal transformation programs to get two cultures to mesh as one.
  • A growing start-up in a lightning-fast technology category needs to lead with its authentic purpose in order to compete for engineering top talent in a field dominated by huge, established brands.
  • A financial services company rolling out a new developer platform needs to understand their new target audience, recalibrate its positioning, build a new go-to-market strategy, and deploy a sales enablement program to scale quickly.
  • An on demand start-up that’s achieved lift-off needs help preparing for its larger delivery footprint with a brand that delivers on its promise.
  • A high-growth SaaS company needs to define a new category to align with a new set of product features and upgrades, create new product brand messaging, and refresh the look and feel of the brand across multiple offices in multiple countries and languages.

These are real scenarios, and if they sound familiar to you, you can probably empathize with leaders of these companies. Interestingly and notably, in each of these cases, the businesses solved their business problems through the lens of brand strategy.

And you can, too.

Successful high-growth. The need to attract top talent.  Launching a new product. A shift in strategic direction. These can all have major impacts on your business. So make sure your business strategy and your brand strategy are well aligned. Changing strategic direction doesn’t happen instantly. And it definitely doesn’t happen by itself. In fact, it takes thoughtful planning, strategic involvement from the C-suite, and diligent execution all the way down the line.

If you have a strong vision for the future, but have business issues with your marketing, go-to-market strategy or positioning, a strong brand strategy can help you get from here to there.

Just ask any of our clients.

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

Read more about brand strategy here: Why Brand Strategy Needs to Start in the C-suite.