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Tag: Strategy

Content Strategy Trends for 2020

Posted on by Chris Ames

As the decade winds down to a close, we’re taking a look at the most important trends affecting your business, brand, and culture heading into 2020. First up, we’re examining all things content strategy: tone, technology, and personalization. Let’s do it.

Mobile > Everything Else

The simple truth is if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work. There can be no compromise when it comes to the look, feel, or content strategy of the mobile experience—considering it is the dominant experience. In 2020, even more emphasis will be placed on increasing mobile user interaction. If your content is not custom-fit to the screen, you will lose out. Call-to-action buttons, for instance, need to be intuitive and easy to tap. Subject lines should be short and punchy so they fit on the screen. Animations need to auto-play or be optimized in another format. The list goes on.

No Sound? No Problem

In the infinite scroll of the internet, your precious, clever content needs to be accessible in the least forgiving way imaginable: viewed quickly, on mute, in a sea of other content. It’s been reported that 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. Make sure your videos are embedded with captioning and conveying your message and the emotional impact you’re seeking—even without sound.

Use Your Voice

As we have mentioned before, voice and audio mediums are leading a sonic revolution. If you want your content to be discoverable in this new era, you must consider how your brand feels with no visual support. That might be in the form of a podcast, creating audio versions of your blogs, or simply optimizing your SEO for vocal assistants.

Speak Like a Human

We know that by 2020, 50% of search queries will be voice searches. Google’s Hummingbird update encourages conversational, long-tail semantic phrases rather than using typical keyword phrases. So, instead of searching for “top marketing automation software,” one might ask, “What are the top marketing automation solutions for small business owners?” To cater to this changing user behavior, brands need to alter their content strategy.

Let Robots Do the Rote Stuff

Chatbots are no longer considered a new trend in the marketing industry. This once-clunky tool has proven itself to be vital for a surprising number of industries. AI is helping brands to be more interactive when it comes to engaging customers, automating rote tasks, freeing up time for higher-level thinking, and paving the way for conversational marketing that allows brands to guide users in their buyer journey. Just look at our work with Moveworks.

Think Outside Department Lines

Content strategy begins with marketing, but it should never end there. If every department uses marketing’s content, why not bring in those other minds to diversify the thinking? As an agency, our best work comes when we ignore department lines and fuse the best of our ideas together. If you create materials for sales without ever consulting your sales department, you’re doing it wrong. Engaging and nurturing the ideas of all the stakeholders is how you craft content people actually use.

Have a Heart

Always remember: people don’t need brands, brands need people. You need to build authentic, personal relationships with customers rather than just trying to sell to them. If your content doesn’t accurately reflect your brand’s voice, your mission, or the specific value you hope to bring your target audiences, you might as well not create it in the first place. No matter the year, authenticity and personalization are always on-trend. The numbers speak for themselves:

  • 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a key differentiator that leads to a purchasing decision.
  • 73% of consumers would pay more for a product if the company behind it promises transparency.
  • 94% of consumers say they would remain loyal to a brand that provides complete transparency.
  • In a survey of 1,000 people, 90% remarked that they found personalization appealing.
  • 80% admitted they’d be more likely to give their business to a company that offered them a personalized experience.

While some branding trends are abandoned as fast as they appear, leading with a social conscience is evergreen. Today, consumers want to believe that companies care about the same causes they do. According to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand report, 64% of consumers worldwide are “belief-driven buyers.” Modern brands need to demonstrate that they put people before profit to increase trust and loyalty.

Any Reality but This One

In recent years, both AR and VR have become massively popular. In 2020, AR is expected to surpass VR in popularity, despite VR’s early lead. Already, many major companies are making use of AR. Ikea, for example, has an app that allows users to visualize what a piece of furniture would look like in their home before making a purchase. How can you leverage AR to remove doubt or create desire in your customer?

Do It Live

Digital Marketing World has predicted that by 2021, 13% of all internet traffic will consist of live video. And that is just one chunk of the whole video gamut. With almost every major social media platform now supporting live video streaming, it is only expected to soar in 2020. As it continues to rise in popularity, live video or podcasts is your chance to let new customers see your business in action or learn from your expertise live and direct.

More 2020 Trends

In the coming weeks, we will be taking a look at employer branding, culture, design, and many other trends. Keep your eyes here for the latest and greatest in all things 2020.

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

Business Imperative: Socializing Strategy

Posted on by Joanna Schull

One of the first things we learn in business is the importance of “having a plan.” Preferably, it should be a strategic plan, complete with milestones, action items, KPIs, and other important measures. This is definitely true. You need to have a plan, and you need to be socializing strategy.

As someone who’s been in the consulting game for many years, I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat down with new clients only to discover that while there may, in fact, be a carefully (and expensively) constructed strategic plan, it’s a mystery to most employees. Chances are, they learned about the strategic plan via an online WebEx, saw some slides, listened to an executive talk, participated in some Q&A, and called it a day—and then promptly forgot the whole thing and went back to business as usual.

There’s a better way of socializing strategy—it comes down to following a few key principles and practices.

Step 1: Alignment

Align the entire leadership team on the key initiatives that’ll be required to execute on the strategy. The initiatives should be cross-functional and specific—not siloed within a single part of the organization. Good examples would be “develop vertical solutions and go-to-market expertise” or “create a culture of collaboration.”

Step 2: Plan for Change

As a leadership team, identify what’s going to change from three levels:

  • Functionally/operationally: What new things are going to need to happen? For example, do you need to develop new competencies, expand into a new geography, or acquire different types of talent?
  • Org structure: Are changes to the organization’s structure required to achieve the new strategy?
  • What internal cultural shifts will be required?: Starting with a baseline assessment of the status quo, what new types of behaviors will be needed to help the company adapt and execute on the new strategy?

Step 3: Socializing Strategy

Sharing and socializing the strategy and execution plan with your workforce is the next step. This is where it’s important to be thoughtful and thorough in planning and execution. Rushing the process will end up costing more in the long run, so take the time to do it right.

Don’t: Put together a deck, email it out, and consider the job done.

Do: Create an engaging way for employees to learn about the strategy directly from the executive leadership team, ideally with different leaders taking responsibility for explaining each track of work. If possible, do this at a live event that allows cross-functional teams to work together to discuss implications, as well as report outs from employees with questions, comments, and suggestions.

It’s important that the leadership team strike the balance of presenting a coherent, well thought out strategy while providing the rest of the company with an opportunity to provide input. This helps create ownership and buy-in across the company—but also may reveal things the leadership team may have overlooked or missed.

Step 4: Reinforce Awareness

Socializing strategy requires more than a one-time event. Best practices include:

  • Developing internal campaigns to keep it top of mind. Create a 12-month calendar to coordinate internal communications that reinforce the goals, but also celebrate progress and wins.
  • Ensuring cultural alignment. It is imperative that a company’s culture is set up to reinforce the change. This means taking a hard look at behaviors, metrics, and rewards. Do they align with the changes you’re asking employees to make? Are senior leaders practicing what they preach?

Step 5: Follow Up and Get Feedback

A good strategic plan will have ways to measure effectiveness by way of metrics, KPIs, etc. This is good, but not enough. It’s important to follow up and get feedback from the people who you’re ultimately relying on to see the strategy through: your employees. Find a way to check in on them and get a pulse on how it’s going, ask them what is working, and more importantly, what’s not. Nine times out of ten, you’ll get some valuable insights that will help to accelerate progress and keep things on track. At the very least, you’ll let your people know that you’re listening.

Strategic plans are imperative. Your company needs them to succeed in an ever-evolving and competitive world. But without a thoughtfully executed rollout plan to your employees—arguably the most important part of your business—even the most brilliant strategy will fall flat.

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

Non-Business Books to Improve Your Brain and Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

When I worked in a bookstore, I would often help young businesspeople find the books their bosses wanted them to read. This assignment was to help them expand their thinking, get a new perspective, and stand out from the crowd. But invariably, they would always ask for “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” or if they were in sales, “The Art of War.”

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with these titles! But in the words of Haruki Murakami, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

The following books are recommendations outside the business section that will, nonetheless, still greatly improve the way you think about language, design, communication, memory, the world around you, and your brand’s place in it.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Suppose I were to begin by saying I had fallen in love with a color.”

In 240 numbered fragments, Bluets is a philosophical inquiry, a color study, a personal narrative, an ode to an unnamed lover, a history lesson, and a world filtered through the color blue. Expertly juggling such divergent voices as Wittgenstein, Sei Shonagon, William Gass, and Joan Mitchell, Bluets is a brilliant little book that will forever change your relationship to the color blue.

The takeaway: There is immense power in owning a single color. When building your visual identity, don’t fail to consider color psychology.

Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

“Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world.”

Over the course of 15 years, award-winning poet Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. These lectures articulate the wisdom accrued through a life dedicated entirely to poetry, and this book is essentially a crash-course humanities degree.

The takeaway: The most successful thought leadership provides the best and deepest answers to your customers’ biggest questions. Think about structuring your thought leadership as an engaging lecture to deliver, either online or as part of a lecture series.

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words ‘contain’ meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning.”

What We See When We Read is a gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.

The takeaway: Narrative doesn’t have to be exhaustive—it just has to contain enough to spark curiosity in your target audience. Try writing your narrative in shorter and shorter iterations: 500 words, 100 words, 10 words, until you’ve crystalized your story down to its most potent elements.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.”

In this super entertaining memoir, a science journalist enters the United States Memory Championship, a competition where “mental athletes” battle to see who can remember such things as an entire deck of cards or the names and faces of 117 strangers. It’s a fascinating inquiry into how we remember and organize information in our minds.

The takeaway: We remember information best when it is tied to loci. How are you housing your most complex information? Your content strategy should be like a well-designed house: a room for each piece of information, with clear pathways for users to navigate, all laddering up to something greater than the sum of its parts. This is how our brain operates, so why not operate your communications the same way?

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed?

The takeaway: Empathy is your secret weapon. When you’re close to a business’ daily operations, it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful brand, you need practice in stepping out of your own perceptions. There’s an inherent deliberateness, thoughtfulness, and patience that comes with empathy. It’s a muscle we should all flex more often.

Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

Austin Kleon gave a talk to students at a community college in upstate New York in 2011. For his lecture, he created a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard when he was starting out. Equal parts manifesto and how-to, Steal Like an Artist aims to introduce readers to the idea that all creative work is iterative, no idea is original, and all creators and their output are a sum of their inspirations and heroes.

The takeaway: Do a competitive audit of your field. What do you love? What do you wish you wrote, engineered, designed, built, sold? What can you steal? What can you improve?

What Books Are You Reading?

We’d love to hear what you’re reading and what’s inspiring you. Leave a comment below, or explore this list of further reading:

Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
Kenya Hara, White
Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Ray Fawkes, One Soul
Stephen King, On Writing
Alan Fletcher, The Art of Looking Sideways
William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons
Eleanor Davis, You & a Bike & a Road

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

A 5-Step Action Plan for Sales and Marketing Alignment

Posted on by Stephen Banbury

B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment 2.0

A former colleague of mine just started a job where she was required to stand up and deliver a sales presentation to the sales leadership team. That wouldn’t be unusual for a new salesperson – but she’s a marketer. And the experience of walking in the sales team’s shoes made her a better one.

B2B companies talk a lot about sales and marketing alignment, but talk will only get you so far. Companies need to take action to get their sales and marketing teams empathizing with each other, strategizing together, and working from the same playbook.

It’s a critical time for sales and marketing alignment. The benefits have never been greater. As technology and data transform business, new opportunities are emerging every day for the savviest B2B companies to boost lead quality, close more deals, strengthen their brands and improve their work culture through tighter teamwork.

So how to get from here from there? If you take the following action steps, you’re all but certain to enjoy stronger B2B revenue growth this year.

Action 1: Plan together

Most companies have already conducted their 2019 planning meetings, but if you haven’t, now is the time. And even if you have, you shouldn’t stop there. Before the holidays, be sure to put four quarterly sales and marketing planning meetings on your calendar for next year.

A lot of change can happen over the course of a year, so it’s important to have an in-depth planning session at least quarterly. This is a chance for B2B sales and marketing teams to sit together and review sales objectives for each time period. Then you can agree on how the strategic marketing plan can best support those objectives, from corporate and field events to high-value content.

Action 2: Walk in their shoes

Aligning goals and tactics is an important start, but for greater impact, marketing needs to truly understand the hurdles salespeople face every day.

Marketing tends sometimes to lean toward the aspirational, but sales enablement requires a more down-to-earth approach. It’s important that marketers attend regular sales team meetings – yes, every week — and hear firsthand what is working, what is not, what prospective customers truly care about, and what key questions marketing absolutely needs to answer.

As my friend’s experience above illustrates, having B2B marketers stand and deliver a sales presentation is a great way to enhance their understanding of how well their own slides work in practice, not just in theory. Actually telling the story is the best way to gauge how each piece connects with different audiences while identifying any gaps.

Sales, for its part, should appreciate that marketing is tasked with a longer-term, strategic role in growing the company, the brand, and its customer relationships.

Particularly as subscription-based SAAS becomes the dominant revenue model, topline growth is driven less by closing a few big deals and more by long-term nurturing that paves the way for customer loyalty and successful cross-selling and up-selling.

It takes mutual respect flowing both ways to fully leverage the strengths of both sales and marketing – so everyone can reap the benefits of these opportunities.

Action 3: Connect top to bottom

Sales and marketing alignment at the executive level is not enough. The entire organization, from the c-suite to operations to customer-facing field staff, should know each other and have regular conversations. If this isn’t happening, now is a good time to make those introductions.

Action 4: Pay for what you get

Typically sales teams are compensated based on meeting and exceeding revenue targets, while marketers aren’t ­– but it doesn’t have to be that way. Some B2B companies have started rewarding marketers for KPIs like deals influenced or deals sourced. Good CRM tools are making it possible to track the effectiveness of specific pieces of digital content, making detailed ROI measurement – and rewarding the content creators — more feasible.

Action 5: Lean heavily on your brand

As sales and marketing alignment gains steam, brand makes even more of a difference. It gives both sides a common understanding and shared language as they essentially co-create the B2B brand experience.

The most successful sales and marketing partnerships are aligned in their commitment from top to bottom – from their brand’s highest-level vision to its most tactical tools.

By nurturing mutual respect and leveraging the strengths of both the sales and marketing teams, your company will be set up for greater success in 2019 and beyond.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Brand Strategy firm working with high-growth technology companies. Learn more about our work with high-growth technology companies here.

What Does the Agency of the Future Look Like?

Posted on by Chris Ames

Last week, Emotive Brand celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Naturally, the milestone has led all of us here to reflect on the last decade and ask what it will take to continue to be successful moving forward. Today, Founding Partner and Chief Strategy Officer Tracy Lloyd and Creative Director Thomas Hutchings tackle that very question. What does the agency of the future look like? How does it behave? And how do we continue to push the envelope of what’s possible?

How have you seen the agency space shift over time?

Thomas Hutchings: Gone are the days of real arrogance, where an agency could rest prim and proper on its name alone. In the beginning, when there was far less competition, you could get away with being very demanding and say to clients, ‘It’s our way or the highway.’ Now, the space is so diverse and versatile, agencies try to provide the best experience possible. It’s a much more malleable and friendly relationship where you really immerse yourself in the client world. Keeping those worlds separate is an old way of thinking. In a sense, it’s kind of reversed: the agency is now the client and the client is now the agency. In addition, there’s been an increase in robust in-house teams that are strong, educated, talented, and bring something to the table. Perhaps some would see that as intimidating, but I think it’s great. We seek to inspire one another and be an extension of your team.

Tracy Lloyd: It’s a much more agile relationship that agencies are having with clients. There has been a shift from agencies dictating how long a project will take to the client driving the time frame. And at the same time, the problems agencies are being asked to solve are getting more complex. No longer are agencies able to lean on old methodologies. Solving the business problems of high-growth companies today requires having the right frameworks that can be adapted in real-time to keep pace. It’s about leaving your ego at the door and acknowledging that our clients are sophisticated, educated, and have a lot of the same skills agencies have. You must be prepared to be collaborators – not dictators.

What’s the value of bringing in an outside agency?

TH: While brands and their in-house teams have definitely become more robust, agencies will always bring a lot of muscle to the game for one key reason. Brands are cursed with having to focus on themselves 100% of the time. We have the privilege of working on so many different projects across a myriad of verticals. We have a 360-degree view of the landscape and can leverage solutions from other fields or spaces. That’s a very unique power.

TL: We are asked to solve some tough business, product, and brand problems for our clients. As an agency, we bring a very senior team that not only dedicates time to fix those problems but solve them in unique ways. You need that outside perspective, that diversity of thinking, and that unique pool of talent that agencies bring in order to see the problem for what it is. It’s the fastest way to ascertain the strategic shifts you need to make to get back on the right track.

What have you been most surprised by?

TH: It’s been fascinating to see the small to medium-sized agencies become the new champions of this era. They are the ones getting the big clients, and the giant branding firms are wondering where they sit in this space. It’s almost akin to what’s happening in the retail space, with big box stores versus small independently-owned businesses focusing on experience. Clients are looking for the weird and the wonderful – not just the cold, stark efficiency of a massive branding firm. The agencies that create brands that actually mean something, rather than just exist and churn, will be the ones that survive in the long run.

TL: We work with mostly B2B brands. I think there are some B2B companies that are raising the stakes. The branding out there is getting more interesting, more experimental, and less corporate. That’s really nice to see. With the bloom of smaller digital agencies, there is a lot more competition out there – but I think it’s incredibly inspiring. I feel energized and inspired by our peers and am happy to be pushing the envelope of what’s possible alongside them. I think this year will be revolutionary for what we will see from B2B brands and the agencies that serve them.

What does the agency of the future look like?

TL: Agile. Smart. Nimble. Focused. I think the agency of the future, especially those agencies that work with B2B brands, will be two-fold. First, they will be the ones who can bring the same level of strategic problem-solving and creativity of B2C agencies. And second, they will be known for developing those big ideas that create new categories, new markets, new revenue models, and build brands that people want to buy, work for, and talk about. That’s the agency of the future we are trying to build.

TH: The best agencies are the ones that keep their minds open and are willing to take a brand into any avenue. The more you pigeonhole, the more stagnant your agency will be. That’s easier said than done. Much of that comes down to surrounding yourself with people who have a natural hunger for curiosity. Those who ask, ‘What if it went there? Why can’t we do this?’ You need to embrace a challenger mindset to upset preconceived notions and conventions if you want to make something that really resonates.

If you could start over and build from this agency from scratch, is there anything you’d do differently?

TL: This is a hard one to answer. In many ways, we are doing the same things we’ve always done, just on a bigger scale. Our clients are the C-suite. The companies are bigger, global, and recognizable by name. The stakes are higher, and our team is more senior. But in principle, we are operating the same way. The tenets of Emotive Brand have always been about finding the perfect blend of emotional and rational strategies to help change how people feel about the brand and to ensure they are activated in the ways business need.

We’ve worked hard to make the experience clients have with our agency different in every way. We’ve used our own methodology to deliver on that, and every employee from day one knows how to deliver on that. I’m glad we were clear from the start, and I’m proud to know it still drives our behavior as an agency today. We continue to lean into a sales-led approach to solving positioning and go-to-market strategies for our technology clients because that’s just how my brain works. And it’s working. Our references are not just CMOs and CEOs – CROs love us, too. As an agency, it’s helped us become recognized as a go-to B2B branding agency. And that means something to me. Because delivering growth is how our clients measure our success, and theirs.

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

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Getting all the Stakeholders on the Same Page

Posted on by Chris Ames

In America, there is a strong belief that the success or failure of your venture comes down to individual drive. It’s you, and you alone, that can turn the tide in your favor. In reality, as even the most steadfast founders learn, much of your time will be devoted to appeasing external stakeholders. Sometimes, those who know the least about your vision will have the most influence over its chance of survival.

Navigating the C-suite requires knowing how to engage stakeholders by building and nurturing relationships. The meaningful enterprise has moved from a transactional foundation — where enterprises serve their own benefit, even at the expense of others — to a relational foundation — which acknowledges that interdependence among diverse parties is essential for sustained success. Here’s the thing about relying on others: it’s always slower in the short-term. But for those with the patience to sacrifice short-term speed for long-term agility, it can be incredibly rewarding.

Before we get too deep, a bit of housekeeping. What exactly is a stakeholder? A stakeholder is anyone who can affect or is affected by the actions of a corporation. The concept of the stakeholder was first used in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institute, and described them as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist.” This description is as wonderful as it is vague, allowing you to cast the net as widely or as tightly as you wish. Is it those who directly fund you? Or those who provide those late-night emails of clarity when you’re spiraling? In short, yes. For a bit more guidance, look to the difference between internal and external stakeholders.

Internal stakeholders typically comprise employees, managers, owners, and in some cases, volunteers, interns, or students. The importance of consulting with internal stakeholders is self-evident. They are the ones on the front lines. They hear everything, know everything, and work across all touchpoints. Think of them as the physical engine. You can’t get a tune-up from a specialist without bringing them an actual machine. Most founders understand how vital their own team is. The trick is bringing that same love, care, and attention to outside counsel.

External stakeholders are those outside the corporation who interact with it in some way. This could be funders, investors, shareholders, advisors, banks, finance companies, suppliers, policymakers, legislators, social media influencers, and of course, customers. Each of these groups of stakeholders is usually termed a “constituency,” and each constituency represents a homogenous group usually holding a similar interest in the organization’s affairs. Think of them as the team of specialty mechanics, each having a particular, bespoke solution to make your engine run a little better.

When it works like it’s supposed to, stakeholder consultation results in a relationship of mutual benefit. It enables us to spot trends, emerging challenges, and risks. It brings a fresh set of eyes to your venture, offering new perspectives which can be used to improve project design and outcomes. And as anyone at a cocktail party has learned, playing nice can form unlikely collaborations and partnerships. All of this helps your brand to:

  • Determine needs and expectations
  • Identify perceptions and attitudes
  • Evaluate implementations and actions
  • Establish the brand values and positioning of the corporation as seen by others
  • Ensure your decision making is more informed and in tune
  • Administer a greater chance of implementation and activation

So, when and how do you bring in the troops? Kevin Crump, writer, and Customer Success Manager recommends weaving them in as early as possible.

“If you engage your stakeholders early in the project — ideally during the planning stage — everyone gets a common understanding of the scope, the timing, the budget, and the resource demands from the get-go,” he says. “This means no major surprises later in the lifecycle, and no ongoing divergence between stakeholder vision and reality. That’s why we have menus in restaurants. We don’t just expect the waiter to serve us exactly what we want without discussing it first.”

In this lovely diagram from B2B International, a B2B market research company, we see how a method of planning, process, presentation, and promise can be used to maintain effective communication throughout the entire lifecycle.

Getting all the Stakeholders on the Same Page - Planning Diagram

This outline is a great bird’s eye view of how to approach stakeholders. But what happens when you’re in the weeds with someone difficult? Here are four strategies for making sure you don’t burn your only bridge out of town.

1. Seeing. You can’t solve a problem if you can’t identify it. The first step is to clearly identify your stakeholders and figure out what motivates them. Primary stakeholders are those directly affected by the work. Customers often fall into this category. Secondary stakeholders are those indirectly affected by the work. This includes support teams or those impacted by the outcome. Key stakeholders are those with strong influence and vested interest. This would be the executives. Each group has different interests, objectives, and agendas — many of which will be in direct competition. Identifying and ranking their influence and interest will help keep projects moving in the right direction. The truth is, not all stakeholders are created equal, so sleuthing out who holds sway and who is your best champion will save you a lot of stress. Ask yourself questions like:

  • What are their most pressing business needs?
  • What is the best way to communicate with them?
  • What information or details do they need?”
  • Do they fully understand your work or do they need some extra explanation?
  • Who influences them?
  • What are they responsible for?
  • Who do they report to?

2. Listening. This is much easier said than done but resist the urge to close communication channels just because you don’t like what you hear. When receiving negative feedback, I always have to remind myself that it’s very unlikely someone is doing this as a personal attack against me. (Though not impossible.) Nine times out of ten, even the most off-kilter comment is based on some insight, backroom conversation, or email you weren’t looped in on. Try to see where difficult stakeholders are coming from and put yourself in their shoes to better understand their motivation and goals. Do their needs align with your project’s objectives? Do they simply want things done a different way? Common ground isn’t always common, but it’s worth searching for.

3. Meeting. Never underestimate the power of individual communication. For one, it’s a more human, efficient way to explore diverging viewpoints. You can clear the air, vent, and hear things from a new perspective without the formality of a group presentation. And two, meeting without other stakeholders in the room takes the pressure off and prevents negative opinions from spreading. Sometimes, it’s about just letting someone feel that they are heard.

4. Proving. A sad truth: you’re probably going to lose a battle of opinions to a senior employee. That’s why you should arm yourself with cold, hard facts that support the direction you want to take.

“Change the game by quickly running a test and collecting some evidence,” says Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group. “Move the discussion from opinions to data. Share what you’re learning very openly. It may be that neither of your opinions was right.”

Especially in data-hungry Silicon Valley, data will always trump hunches. More than being right, it shows you’re taking a more analytical approach to your role, which will bolster your credibility for the future. Even if you can’t find a mathematical proof point, you can use the voices of actual customers to make it less about your opinion and more about what’s right for the market.

In the immortal words of John Donne, no man is an island. As much as we’d like to singularly launch our idea into the Fortune 500, chances are we’ll need the help of external stakeholders. So, here’s to the power of compromise, communication, and diversity of opinion.

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

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An Audience-Centric Approach to Communications

Posted on by Chris Ames

The Curse of Knowledge

When you work in the business of ideas, things are bound to get complicated. At Emotive Brand, we mainly work with high-growth, B2B tech companies. Our clients are experts at building big, technical, complex systems that solve real human problems. What they aren’t always experts at, however, is explaining those ideas in a way that feels human and approachable.

We don’t blame them. It’s something that’s often called “the curse of knowledge.” It’s when you’re so immersed in the universe of your product that you have a hard time remembering the rest of the world hasn’t been on the journey with you. This is where jargon, shorthand, and tunnel vision thrives – often to the detriment of your audience’s comprehension.

The Idea and the Selling of the Idea

So, here’s the million-dollar question: how do you explain something complicated in a simple way? This question – the magic trick of turning the difficult into the delightful – is the engine of branding. There is the idea, and then there is the selling of the idea. You can have the best hardware, software, or cloud service in town, but if you don’t take an audience-centric approach to your communications, no one will hear you.

There’s a saying that the moment a piece of art is finished, it no longer belongs to the artist. When you release something to the public, you are surrendering a certain amount of control over its meaning, use, and interpretation. The same is true for your product in the market. It doesn’t really matter what you meant. What matters is what the audience feels.

What Does Your Audience Need to Hear?

As Matt Abrahams, writer at Insights by Stanford Business, says, “Rather than start drafting your presentation, email, or meeting agenda by asking, ‘What do I want to say?’ start by asking, ‘What does my audience need to hear?’ In order to answer this, you might first think about what your audience knows and how they go about knowing.”

Questions are a beautiful place to start. Before you write a single word for your webpage or conference, ask yourself: What is your audience like and why are they here? What keeps them up at night and how can you remedy that? How can you hold a place in their heads and hearts? How might they resist?

It sounds simple, but it’s a radically different approach than what you usually see in the market. How many presentation decks have you sat through that start with a long history of the company, a poorly designed graph, or a disproportionate focus on their own sales, promotions, or services? Meanwhile, the universal human benefit is buried 30 slides later.

The hardest part about writing is knowing what to say and when to say it. The brilliant thing about an audience-centric strategy is that it answers these questions for you. By definition, it’s a strategy that’s built to resonate because it’s built from the audience up.

As Bill Skowronski, writer at Sharing the Good, says, “Audience-centric objectives are built on a deep understanding of the target audience’s needs and desires. Therefore, because the content is strategically designed to help customers, it can be search engine optimized to rank when they’re researching and will directly resonate with them. And because the messaging is audience-centric, it stands out in the industry, differentiating your business from every other one that says they do what you do.”

Complexity vs. Complication

Perhaps there are those out there who hear “simplify” and think “dumb it down.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Simplicity is not at war with complexity – it’s at war with confusion.

In his TED talk “Simplifying Complexity,” ecologist Eric Berlow describes the difference between complexity and complication beautifully. “For me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven is complex. But a curry, onion, poppy, cheese bread is complicated.” He goes to explain how in understanding the interconnectedness of species, you need to embrace the big picture in order to see the easy solution. “We’re discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. So, for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most.”

Everything vs. the Right Thing

That’s the exact exercise brands need to do in creating audience-centric communications. Google, for instance, is about as complex as a company can be, yet they always keep their messaging simple. Their dense web of technical prowess isn’t wasted, it’s just used to stitch simple human truths everyone can remember and understand.

Here’s Google’s mission: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Imagine for a moment you built Google and know everything about it. Think of how easy it would be to make that statement more comprehensive, more technically accurate, and more complicated, essentially making it worse.

That’s the burden of “the curse of knowledge.” You’re constantly fighting the urge to explain everything, instead of leaving your audience with the one perfect thing they need to make a decision.

To learn more about crafting audience-centric communications, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd.

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

Image credit: Getty Images

Five Challenges Brands Must Overcome in 2019

Posted on by Chris Ames

As 2018 comes to a close, we at Emotive Brand can’t help but reflect on the trends and forces that defined the year. The Golden Age of subscription services continued to shine brightly, bringing personalized eureka moments to thousands of people. Politics seeped into everything, with brands either choosing to walk the line or pick a side. And our data, once seen as merely a byproduct of business, has continued to become the engine of business itself.

Looking ahead to 2019, we examine five challenges that brands are facing right now – and how to overcome them using a transformational business strategy.

1. Incremental change is fine – just not if you want to be a market leader

“Anything you can do, I can do better” is a mentality shared by many brands and vengeful siblings, but it misses a key point. Your biggest competitor is not another brand, it’s the category you’re in. There will always be another company offering a similar service. The way to differentiate is by fueling big idea innovation. The most innovative companies look for transformation everywhere: in new channels, communications, value propositions, and more delightful experiences. Airbnb is not a slightly more affordable hotel, it’s a thoughtful reconsideration of what it means to travel. Lyra is not a slightly better employee assistance program, it’s a smarter approach to emotional health.

2. Strategy is (and always will be) your strongest weapon

Before brands can delight or amaze, they first need to understand. Knowing what your customer needs, wants, expects, or desires should not only be the foundation from which your product is built, it should drive growth initiatives and resource allocation. For a great example of a brand capitalizing on customer insights, look at Wayfair. Buying furniture online is nearly frictionless – except knowing exactly how the piece will fit in your house. “View in Room 3D” is a brilliant use of augmented reality, allowing people to use their smartphones to precisely visualize how that sectional will look in their living room. The brand strategy informs and enables the business strategy.

3. There’s no real excuse for communication breakdowns anymore

Now more than ever, there’s a glut of communication tools to foster collaboration and eliminate silos within your team. It’s your responsibility to discover how your team works best, and then equip them with the right tools to win. Maybe it’s a matter of personality, and it requires facilitating a workshop to identify your preferred working style. Or perhaps it’s a matter of product, and something like Slack or LogMeIn will streamline your processes. Either way, your internal communications should be treated with the same urgency and gravity as your external ones.

4. Creating a consistent brand experience is worth the headache

Recently, our design team had the pleasure of visiting the Letterform Archive, a non-profit center for typography and lettering in San Francisco. In the archive, we flipped through Coca-Cola’s advertising manual from 1948 – and we couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy at the simplicity of the media sphere. Radio, newspaper, print. That’s it. Now, of course, we live in a hyper-fragmented landscape where a mixture of screens and devices vie for our attention. If you’re selling soda in 2018, you somehow need to have a mastery of Snapchat and smart refrigerators, in equal measure. This is a nightmare for brands as they attempt to optimize the customer experience. But you can’t afford to ignore a social media channel or device aspect ratio if you want to remain relevant. For guidance, look to Netflix. Regardless of device or account, user preferences are seamlessly remembered and transferred. At the end of the day, people don’t care about the medium. They just want results.

5. In this age, only emotive brands are remembered

Here in the office, there’s a certain Maya Angelou quote that gets said often.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In all your interactions for 2019, you should be asking yourself, how does this make our customers feel? Our partners? Our employees? The branding process can be obtuse. There’s jargon, terminology, workshops, and processes that everyone, especially those in the C-suite, might not be familiar with. But that’s the brilliant thing about emotion – it transcends language to hit you right in the heart. You may not know everything about your brand, but you know how you want it to make people feel. That emotional impact is your compass. Let it guide your decision making and it will undoubtedly lead you to a place of business and brand transformation.

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

Personalization Can Drive Meaning For Brands

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What helps create a truly meaningful brand? A flawlessly articulated purpose? A killer logo? A leadership team that really understands the value of brand? Complete internal alignment? Oftentimes, the interplay of many different brand elements work together to create cohesive and lasting meaning. But one element that is gaining value in the world of branding is personalization.

Right now, personalization is “in” with brands. Mass consumption and mass production are becoming things of the past. These days, brands that matter and resonate with people are the ones that feel like they’re authentically made and designed just for you. It’s the age of personalization.

In marketplaces crowded with new technologies, ripe with innovation, and full of competition, personalization has become one of the most important ways to differentiate. People crave connections, and brands that establish relationships and produce emotionally meaningful connections with their audiences stand out – and win.

Here are five ways brand personalization helps create meaning for brands and drives brand performance.

1. Product Customization

When people get to customize a product to perfectly fit their need, aesthetic, and lifestyle, the brand gains meaning because they play an active role. Customization increases feelings of uniqueness and individuality, while still allowing all the positive brand associations of brand belonging to arise. For instance, Nike ID allows shoppers to design their own shoes and feel as though they are stylists and designers themselves. The brand is flexible to each individual, while living up to their brand promise of inspiration and innovation. Customization allows brands to become ownable to their audience on an individual level.

2. Ease and Convenience

In the hectic lives of today’s consumers, time is a precious resource. People want to spend the least amount of time doing things that don’t matter to them so they can dedicate time to doing the things that do matter. People want brands that integrate into their established lifestyle with the minimal effort. For instance, some people choose to do all their grocery shopping online in five minutes via apps like Instacart vs. spending hours at 3 different grocery stores. Other brands focus on personalizing for your well-being by tracking eating, exercise, sleeping, and stress patterns on a single device. Adaptability is a huge component of personalization these days. Brands like the FitBit not only add ease to a user’s life, but adapt to their every move, and push them to make the changes needed to reach personal goals.

3. Cohesive Look and Feel

In order for a highly personalized brand to function, it has to have an especially cohesive look and feel that grounds the brand. Even though consumers can build their own, unique Nike shoes, all Nike products and brand experiences are still easily recognizable as Nike and branded this way. A strong brand logo is key to this. Oftentimes, established brands, such as Coca-Cola, can pull of fun personalization tactics (like writing names on their cans) and not run the risk of diluting their look and feel.

4. Social Buzz

Personalization campaigns can create a lot of buzz on social media. Because they are personal, people are more likely to share brand experiences on their personal pages. When people get socially engaged with a brand, the brand becomes even more integrated into their own personal brand, and also easily expands into their social network.

5. Handcrafted

In many ways, the trends of personalization are returning to previous times when tailors made clothes one by one. People want things that feel specifically produced for them. Take Harry’s razors for instance. Harry’s delivers their handcrafted razors in packaging that resembles old wood boxes. They are not only easy and convenient, but feel handmade. They feel indulgent in a way that says, “just for you”. People want brands that are making a positive impact in the world and that also make them feel special. Brands that can create products that feel handmade are able to create positive feelings towards the brand.

Personalization, if done right, can be a huge brand asset. It can create deeper meaning, brand relevance, and drive growth. Make sure that personalization is well-connected to your brand strategy so that all aspects of the product development, brand experience, and look and feel are tightly connected. Each brand should use personalization in a personalized way — one that lives up to the brand promise, and is tailored to the way their brand wants to make people feel.

Emotive Brand is a strategic branding agency.

Marketing Strategy That Fuels Growth

Posted on by Carol Emert

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More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then?

Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them?

How can you identify the problem? And what can you do to nurture your target audience while giving your sales team the support they need to drive growth?

Marketing Strategy That Drives Growth

At Emotive Brand, we find that the diagnosis for this condition virtually always comes from the outside.

The area where insiders typically have the least insight is the hearts and minds of their target audiences, which are so easily obscured behind the company’s own view of where its value lies. Companies often also find it challenging to stay on top of new developments in communications when their core competencies lie elsewhere.

Cue your agency. It’s the agency’s job to:

  • Understand your brand, products, and services in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of the people who can make it grow.
  • Use customer, marketplace, brand, and contextual insights to define strategic shifts that will win them over.
  • Create the right message and present it creatively to get their attention and rekindle the connection.
  • Identify existing and emerging channels that will best support your message and resonate with your audiences.
  • Tie it all together in a marketing strategy that drives growth.

Rebooting Advertising and Marketing Strategy

We’ve been working with a Silicon Valley client whose technology is so smart it inspires us. This company has been in business 15 years. It has a crack product that’s unique in the market. The product should be selling itself.

But there’s a problem: the company has under-marketed both its brand and its product. Its sales are lackluster. We identified five primary marketing challenges:

  • Marketplace perceptions hadn’t kept up with the company, so potential customers had outdated ideas that needed to be overcome before they would even pay attention.
  • Its advertising and marketing communications were telling an old story that didn’t communicate the product differentiators and reinforced outdated perceptions.
  • Its communications style was out of date and disconnected from both the brand truths and its audiences.
  • The client was spending ad dollars against a broad target rather than an audience aligned to its sales target, wasting precious marketing dollars.

We dug into this project to understand the marketplace, the product, and the brand through the eyes of our client’s target audiences. And we transformed its marketing strategy with some fundamental shifts.

Aligning Marketing Strategy with Sales

First, we used creative and surprising ways to talk about the product in advertising. Solidly rooted in meaningful customer insights and up-to-date product truths, the creative is doing a great job at grabbing the attention of sales prospects. Fresh and resonant messaging and design are replacing apathy with interest and engagement.

We also employed account-based marketing (ABM), replacing the client’s broad advertising strategy with a personalized approach. We’re targeting the sales team’s hottest prospects, in the places where they are most likely to engage.

This more resonant, tailored messaging is reinvigorating the company’s sales as well as its brand, making it relevant again and helping nurture prospects who might have ignored a more general message.

If you need fresh ideas for connecting with your sales prospects instead of merely reaching them, Emotive Brand would like to connect with you.

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

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