Strategist Archives - Emotive Brand

A Team of Strategists

Lots of businesses use the title of strategist for roles within their organization. For us at Emotive Brand, we have a very clear and defined view of what makes a good brand strategist. We carefully curate our project teams of strategists with a focus on selecting the skill sets and experience that are best suited for our clients and our projects.

The Need for a Great Strategist

In today’s hyper competitive, interconnected, always shifting world, businesses need great strategists to really drive their business and brand forward.

When recruiting and hiring strategists at our agency, there are certain qualities we look for.

1.Information masters

First off, successful strategists are talented and powerful listeners. In order to get to the heart of business problems and help align leadership teams around an impactful strategy, strategists need to be great listeners and also know who to listen to. Great strategists know how to get the information they need using many different frameworks and formats from people first-hand.

Effective strategists understand that listening is sometimes about reading between the lines, absorbing what people say, what they don’t say, and what their body language communicates. In strategy projects, clients are often so close to the problems, they can’t really see what is happening. Through listening, strategists gain a keen understanding of a business, its current situation, where it needs to go, and why.

But great strategists don’t just listen. They are able to distill the information gathered from listening into powerful insights and ideas. It’s not just about processing information. A strategist can actually take that information and do something with it – moving it to a different, more enlightened place by reframing what was heard and delivering that back in a different and evolved way.

Great strategists have the simultaneous ability to see both the big picture and all the little details that might lead to big insights. They are able to constantly adjust and adapt to new information. The ability to balance many different inputs and ideas and then be able to make adjustments so that everything fits together is critical.

This means effective strategists consistently develop and test hypothesis. It’s all about gathering the right types of information and proving or disproving before moving on.

2. Business experts

This is two-fold. First, being a strategist requires business experience. Like many other professions, strategy is a learning process that develops when fostered. And business acumen in different industries is often what turns a good strategist into great strategist. So as people work with different clients, solve unique problems, notice patterns, develop skills, and gather information, their strategic minds become honed and they are able to understand more and more what it takes to be great.

Second, great strategists must become experts in whatever business their client is in no matter how complicated or how long it takes to reach that level of understanding.

They dig deep to understand a business at the highest level – grasping the ins and outs of product architecture, a complicated sales approach, a complex ecosystem…they have to deeply understand it all. It must be as if they’ve worked for that business and industry for years.

Great strategists also have to build confidence that they are knowledgeable and fully understand the client’s business. Once that trust is earned, client’s are able to be led to new levels of thinking. They know that until they are confident and knowledgeable, they can’t be impactful facilitators. It’s necessary to make their clients confident that they bring an extensive mastery to the table.

3. Strategy as a journey

Great strategists always have a strategy for the strategy. They know their ideas have to be bulletproof. When creating a strategy, they are constantly challenging their own thinking. They know everyone is going to look to poke a hole in it. And if they don’t fill in the hole, someone else will.

In the end, after having heard the input of everyone from the start, deeply listening to each voice, and distilling what everyone has said, great strategists always go back and gut test. Where is the client going to get hung up? Successful strategists have strategically accounted for these places and can protect them and move the strategy forward.

4. Strategists in the world at large

Great strategists delight in the world and its interconnectivity. They draw on the cues of everything that’s happening within it. This is why the most talented strategist are often veracious readers who immerse in a wide net of areas. Curiosity is key here. And great strategists are always well-rounded, holistic thinkers.

It’s super important that strategists keep current with trends and forces – beyond just the category they are working in, but also, within the world at large. Great strategists can’t resort to old patterns of thinking or outdated models. They evolve as the world evolves and business shifts.

Successful strategy isn’t possible unless it’s up to speed and embedded in what’s contextually happening in the competitive world the strategy exists in and the larger world as well. So successful strategists can draw insights from everywhere.

5. Trusted advisors and enthusiastic coaches

One of our favorite parallels to draw at EB is between brand strategy and coaching. As such, great strategists often act as coaches. They understand that not every client is the same – some need to move fast, others prefer distance over speed. They help clients break out of outdated behaviors and practices that are holding them back, adapt to new skills, shift, increase performance, and gain competitive edge. Great strategists adapt to the objectives of the client and create a customize path to transformation.

In order to move a strategy forward, strategists have to establish trust. Oftentimes, this means going out of their way for clients and being willing to do a little something extra to show their support and dedication to the project. Empathy is also key here. Great strategists gain client’s confidence every step of the way and understand what it takes to make the client feel confident enough to bring the strategy to life.

Greatness in Action

In order to have maximum impact, a strategist has to be able to consume, assimilate, and distill lots of disparate information into clear and powerful concepts and ideas. They also have to be able to express that concept with compelling language and build a powerful case to explain, defend, and generate excitement around their strategy. This is a no small task.

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

The Role of Insights

As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations.

In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy.

What’s your best definition of an insight?

Insight is, by its nature, tricky to understand and therefore hard to define. Insights aren’t linear, like data or information. They are triangulated from information and other inputs – notably emotions – to then come up with something new.

Information is 1+1=2. Insight is 1+1=3, and the 3 literally feels different.

In branding, insights inform the core truths of your brand strategy and work as the foundation on which everything else is built.

What is the goal of a strategist making insights in brand strategy?

There are probably infinite truths about any brand. The role of the strategist is to figure out which ones are the most important to the brand itself and at the same time resonant with its stakeholders. Good insights make sense both intellectually and emotionally. Once you find a powerful insight, you’re playing in very rich territory for the brand.

How do you get to an insight?

To drive brand success, the most powerful insights are the ones that triangulate powerful core truths about the brand itself, its target audience, the competitive landscape, and the broader cultural context. So strategists need to immerse themselves in the brand, its key audiences and the greater fishbowl it is swimming in, whether that context is business, technology, pop culture, or what have you.

To understand the brand itself, a strategist will investigate its origins, its history, its products or services, what its people and internal culture are like, what its highest aspirations are, and how it speaks and acts in the world.

For target audiences, it’s important to uncover peoples’ key challenges and aspirations that are relevant to the brand, their met and unmet needs (both functional and emotional), their perceptions of the brand and its competitors, and how the brand might best fit best into their needs and aspirations.

How do insights help change how people inside the brand see their business?

When we present clients’ brand story to them, it’s like we’ve articulated something that maybe has always felt true, but has never been fully expressed. It suddenly crystalizes what really matters about their brand and business – and this clarity can inspire action, excitement, a unified vision, and really power the brand forward.

Can companies do their own branding? What do you think is the value of an external agency?

It makes sense that the people who know a brand best should be the best at articulating it, right? But, my experience has been that many companies struggle to brand themselves.

There are a few reasons. For one thing, companies already have an emotional investment in who they think they are. Everyone will know how the CEO thinks about the brand, too, and inevitably that’s going to unduly influence the thinking.

Instead of unearthing real insights, company insiders will typically be operating on the more superficial level of information. As a result, they fall short of the depth and richness they know their brand story should have. When you look at internally developed brand strategies, they typically feel rather flat and obvious instead of rich and insightful.

Essentially, it usually takes an outsider to get a clean and unbiased view of the brand and then tell its story in a really powerful way.

What are the key characteristics of a person who is good at unearthing insights?

The most important is empathy. Understanding emotional truths requires being emotionally attuned to the situation and the people. If there is no emotional attunement, there will never be an emotional insight.

You have to be a truth-teller, willing to put aside your own ego and ideas, and prioritize finding the truth no matter where it lies. This requires not bringing too much of your own filter and biases to it too.

At the same time, you must be analytical. This isn’t an exercise in just feeling. You have to be moving down a path of useful insights that lead to meaningful brand strategies that help your clients realize their highest aspirations as a brand and as a business.

When you strike that balance between empathy and analysis, you can create rich and compelling brand strategies that are absolutely game changing.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

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What Makes a Great Strategist?