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Tag: Startup

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.

Agile Brands Break Through

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Agile Brands are the New Norm

More than ever before, people expect brands to evolve around their needs, anticipate their desires, and cater to the ways they want to connect with the world. The expectation to keep up with market innovations and business trends translates into a demand for agile brands. Customer behavior is always shifting, and values are changing faster than most companies can keep up with. Consequently, people dismiss brand communications that are behind the consumer curve. For businesses, this mean it’s often hard to keep up. Fittingly, Wired calls this an ear of “Digital Darwinism”: a time when “technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt.”

Struggling to Adjust

The need for speed is an inherent challenge for many businesses. Others are dismissing the need to adapt altogether: stuck in a business-as-usual pattern, putting money towards investments that may not even be aligned to the shifting landscape, and as a result, stunting their evolution as a business. It’s no question that it’s becoming harder and harder to be relevant, let alone stay relevant.

Take advertising as an example. We’ve heard all the recent buzz surrounding the question: is advertising dead? Advertising isn’t dead, but advertising, as we knew it has most definitely changed. Because people today understand the tactics of communicating, discovering, sharing, and experiencing advertisements, consumers are often the ones ahead of the innovation curve, quickly dismissive of the old ways ads used to reach them. As a result, advertisers are trying all kinds of new tactics to connect with savvy consumers. And if they can’t move quickly enough to adjust to consumer’s new needs, they’ll end up fading into the clutter. The business risks losing money, time and resources on an irrelevant campaign.

Marketing teams face similar obstacles. This new era presents many challenges for businesses looking to exceed expectations and stay ahead of the consumer curve. Consumer expectations for how a brand communicates at every touchpoint – from a newsletter, to a digital ad, or in-store experience – have heightened. Markets are changing, consumer behavior is progressing, and smart businesses are focused on how to stay ahead of shifts. The ones that truly compete are able to anticipate how to adapt. In this new era of connectivity, the expectations for brand communications are high, and agile brands need the right kind of approach that enables it to adapt, shift, and gain respect and loyalty from consumers.

A Need for Speed

Staying ahead and quickly reacting to shifts is hard work and can be a drain on internal resources if your business is always in reactionary mode. Creating cutting-edge, vision-driven and transformational communications that are truly ahead of the curve stems from a strong and agile brand strategy. With external support, you’ll be able to move faster and more strategically to pinpoint what audiences matter to your brand, why they matter, how your brand can reach them today, tomorrow, and years up the line. A strong brand isn’t enough to break through. You need an agile, flexible, and strong brand to sustain business growth and relevancy.

Just as people are demanding more from brands, businesses are demanding more from agencies. And successful agencies are adapting to those needs – adopting faster, more efficient models for doing business. The objectives of brand strategy have evolved, and with it, agencies must also evolve.

A partner that is nimble and agile is critical to bringing your brand up to speed. By helping your brand meet the needs and expectations of your target audience today, you’ll be in a stronger position to anticipate the needs of the target audience for tomorrow. Staying relevant requires agility, speed, and a focused mastery of the industry.

Fast Forward

We know that many brands need a new, more agile approach to address the changing dynamics of markets and businesses. To meet those needs, we’ve developed Fast Forward for agile brands. Our approach offers a set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. Learn more how we can Fast Forward your business, build an agile brand that sits ahead of the curve, and transform your business.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Fast Forward Your Startup: Agile Strategy for High-Growth Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

A new approach for supporting high-growth companies

We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure on high-growth companies and brands to evolve and implement strategies in shorter and shorter time frames.

As a brand strategy firm, we discovered that many of our high-growth companies, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, needed a much more agile approach to addressing the changing dynamics reshaping their markets and business. To meet these needs, we developed Fast Forward. Fast Forward is a four-week process that focuses on the challenges your brand, team, and business face, prioritizes them, and gives you the tools to address them.

Fast Forward is an agile set of strategy development frameworks, tools, and practices designed to empower learning, gain superior return on capital, and accelerate implementation. It’s a more flexible process for overcoming the barriers to successful, timely activation of strategy. Fast Forward does exactly what its name suggests: moves your business forward, and moves it fast.

Your Fast Forward engagement is completely customized to your situation. The deliverables are defined by the challenges and opportunities you face and the strategic outputs you prioritize as most important.

The speed and power of Fast Forward stems from its format and focus. Step one is Immersion: a week-long intelligence gathering and analysis phase. Week two is On-site : our team working in partnership with your core team to diagnose your key challenges, selecting the most pressing needs to focus on, exploring  options, and then aligning around and work collaboratively to refine strategies, actions, and communications to achieve those objectives (it is intensely iterative). Weeks three and four are focused on producing the deliverables, which are finished at the Emotive Brand studio.

At the end of the four-week engagement, your team will hit the ground running with renewed strategic clarity and the agreed upon market-ready strategic elements to achieve the transformations essential to creating durable value and returns.

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The interior of the diagram represents the iterative process during the On-site Phase.

The goal of Fast Forward goes beyond just solving problems; it identifies new strengths with the potential to accelerate your performance by generating new levels of coherence and coordination among your activities, resources, and people. All too often we’ve seen that the 30,000-foot views of strategy do not succeed without successful on-the-ground execution. Such  execution requires the commitment and belief of leaders and implementers.

Fast Forward involves your team throughout the process to ensure alignment and gives you a new cohesive approach to strategy and implementation.

Is it time to Fast Forward your business? Are you a high-growth company looking to make an immediate impact?

Contact Tracy Lloyd, Emotive Brand Co-Founder to discuss how it we can help your business thrive.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Startup brands stop leading with features and benefits!

If only more startup brands understood the value of brand strategy and how it could lead them away from leading with features and benefits vs. why the brand matters.

Convincing minds by capturing hearts: the new brand-building approach.

What comes first? The rational decision to take the next step on the path to purchase, or the emotional trigger that gets them started on that path? Aren’t we humans cool? We pride ourselves on our cognitive skills, our ability to weigh pros and cons, and our decision-making power. After all, these factors separate us from other life forms.

We also prefer to emphasize our thoughts because we are able to talk about them, explain them, and defend them. Continue reading “Startup Brands Should Follow This Strategy to Authentically Differentiate”

Fast Forward: Our New Offering for High-Growth Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Developing Fast Forward, an agile marketing, branding, and business offering was the right thing for our team to develop for startups, to address the issues startups are facing right now.

We have created Fast Forward designed for our high-growth clients that need to make strategic shifts to quickly address product, industry, competitive, alignment, and other issues. Fast Forward is an agile workshop approach that very quickly develops a strategically aligned and nuanced understanding of your business and brand’s current situation. We bring the most important issues to light — business obstacles that your people and the Emotive Brand team must address head-on to maximize impact.

Agile marketing approach to address the need for speed

Fast Forward is a 3-week process built for impact and speed. Week one includes five days of on-site workshops; weeks two and three are devoted to creating deliverables specific to your immediate needs.

Condensing our process demands greater focus, attention, and teamwork. From day one, we embed our team into yours and get straight to work.

Fast Forward workshops begin by identifying and triaging the essential challenges and opportunities your business must address. It’s a very hands-on, collaborative approach. Your people are involved in a series of workshops that engage them in wrestling with your key issues. We don’t just facilitate these workshops; we concentrate our intellect, creativity, and experience on solving the issues together.

At the culmination of the on-site workshops, you emerge with an agreed upon set of high-impact strategic deliverables that addresses your most salient issues. These deliverables are tailored to your specific needs, and could include visual brand elements, company positioning, Go-To-Market strategies, target audience work, brand positioning, brand narrative, messaging etc.

By prioritizing deliverables unique to your business, challenges, and opportunities you face, we are able to amplify and accelerate the effectiveness of your investment and efforts and help you move forward with newfound purpose and energy.

Fast Forward is the fastest way for startups to move the needle of their business and brand forward

Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about our agile marketing solution — Fast Forward, or our work with high-growth companies. Check out how we helped Metal Toad accelerate their business quickly in our case study.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm focused on helping startups, their leadership teams, and their business thrive.

Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Why we believe founders need to rethink their investment in their startup brand

There’s the startup rush. That undeniable startup rush. That adrenaline flow that starts the moment you have an idea worth sharing. An idea that you’re willing to ask perfect strangers to fund. It’s a rush when someone says yes, and another rush when that first check shows up. The one that rents the homely first office and gets you going.

After that it gets harder.

The technology component of the idea might be easy for you. After all, it’s what you were trained to do. But for many startup founders, the hard part is figuring out the people part. It might come as a surprise that people do not always obey the laws of physics. That’s why brands were invented.

So how do you create a startup brand to wrap around your technological tour de force so actual humans can relate to it? Why should a supremely motivated, completely obsessed, workaholic driven, possibly undernourished startup CEO invest time, effort, and money to develop a brand with a purpose that has a deep, emotive core?

Investing in your brand can help in these 6 ways

  1. Differentiate or die

You’re in a crowded ecosystem. You have 100+ competitors in your Lumascape. You need a more distinctive position than: “We’re disrupting X” or “We’re like, you know, the Uber of Y.” A meaningful positioning can help everyone understand why YOU matter and why they should care. Differentiation is key to survival as a startup, so you need to get this right.

  1. Help them love you

In today’s hyper-competitive world, emotion is the secret sauce of many of the world’s most successful brands. It can help your brand become more appealing, differentiated, and loved once you recognize its power. Developing positioning and messaging that mixes both the rational and the emotional aspects of your brand will win both the hearts and minds of those people you are trying to capture.

  1. Get everyone on the same page

Nothing slows down an enterprise more than a workforce that is working at cross-purposes, who is unmotivated, and who are unclear about what the strategy is. You need to align the leadership team and employees around one solid reason for being, a strong positioning, and consistent messaging built on a solid foundation of brand purpose and company values. When a company is truly aligned, and working toward the same purpose, it can truly achieve anything.

  1. Exit on your terms

Every startup has an exit strategy. Aligning your brand strategy to your business strategy can really help you get there faster. Too many founders try to keep this under wraps when developing a brand strategy and the brand strategy is built to support the wrong strategy. Trust your agency to help you achieve your goals and objectives, share your exit strategy, and let them help you create the right brand strategy to help you get there.

  1. Behavior drives results

Extraordinary things happen when an organization embraces a purposeful brand strategy. It drives new attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors across your team. It evolves your marketing, communications, and advertising. It inspires new product development. It makes your workplace more productive. It changes how people experience your brand. The last piece is behavior. It’s both difficult and simple: When companies adapt their behavior to live up to the brand promise, people notice. And that’s exactly the result you want.

  1. Invest once

You don’t want to do it twice, so you want to do it right the first time. It’s true that many people, especially in software, are used to fixing errors on the fly. Software is relatively easy to repair. Reputation isn’t. Reputations are earned through consistent behavior over time. So it’s advisable to get your brand aligned early so it will stand the test of time.

At Emotive Brand, we usher newly created entities into the branded world for the first time. We straighten out brands that have fallen out of step with the pace of the industry. We reinvent brands that wake up one morning merged with another company’s brand.

Don’t wait too long to discover the true, authentic purpose of your startup brand, and define why it matters to the people that matter to your business. It will be well worth your time.

If you are interested in our agile marketing approach for high-growth companies, please visit some of our case studies and see how we’ve helped drive growth, developed strong messaging and positioning, and differentiated even the most crowded ecosystems.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Why Do Startups Have Prehistoric Ideas About Branding?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Startup Brand Strategy

One of the ironies of today’s world is that the leaders of the most innovative startups have the least innovative ideas about what it takes to create a brand and the value of investing in startup brand strategy.

The fact is, logos and messages don’t make a brand.

At least, they won’t make a brand that will thrive in the world today.

Studies prove, and we are talking about a lot of research here — People (as in your customers, prospects, employees, partners and investors) are all looking for more from brands when they invest time and money.

Continue reading “Why Do Startups Have Prehistoric Ideas About Branding?”