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Tag: Strategy

Uncovering the True Dynamics of Strategy + Design Synergy: A Conversation Between Robert Saywitz and Giovanna Blackston Keren

Posted on by Robert Saywitz

Our recent work rebranding Topstep—a financial trading platform based in Chicago, IL—shed light not only on our belief in the power of simplicity and clarity for our client but also on internal agency processes that helped us create an authentically differentiated brand. I sat down recently with our Director of Strategy, Giovanna Blackston Keren, to have a candid conversation about our roles in this process and why agencies seem to talk about the relationship between Strategy and Design more often than it comes together successfully in real life. We used our work on Topstep as a prism for this discussion because, in many ways, the project typified how we seamlessly crafted a strategy + design experience from start to finish. Giovanna asked all the right questions.

Why are agencies always talking about the collaboration between Strategy and Design? If it really happens so seamlessly, and if it’s the norm, then why are we all still talking about it?

The truth is, a seamless integration of the two is the ideal but not all agencies are able to pull it off. With Topstep, as with other clients, we were able to bridge the gap by bringing designers into the project early and keeping strategists involved throughout the process. Inviting designers to the initial kickoffs and key meetings helped them absorb the full brand story, informing their creative development. Inviting strategists to provide quick gut-checks throughout the creative process also kept things moving forward while also voicing moments when design needed to shift or even stand down and let the strategy come through more prominently. Extending involvement in both directions is often a problem of bandwidth, but well worth it in the end.

Why do you think that Strategy and Design often seem to be on such different pages, that actually finding a way for us to be talking the same language is challenging?

There is often a natural divide between the expert skill sets of the Strategist and the Designer but, here at Emotive Brand, we bridge that gap in a few ways. One is by having designers involved in Strategy meetings and vice versa; we have also started to share knowledge within our teams through skill-sharing workshops so that Strategists and Designers understand what each other do and literally begin to speak the same language. It also helps that we have specific roles for Creative Strategists—strategists with design/writing backgrounds and steeped in design but performing as a high-level strategic thinker and, at times, a copywriter for the designers and presentations. Their role often transcends boundaries and is the connective thread between strategy and design processes, as well as the articulation of creative thinking to the client. Specifically, with Topstep, this seamless dialogue between Strategy and Design allowed us to focus on the inauthentic, dry, and confusing nature of the language of most financial institutions. Our designers utilized this insight to tap into something bespoke and authentic—cutting through the clutter with radical honesty and a bold, language-driven typographic system.

So often throughout my career, I’ve felt like when I’m finally sharing the strategic blueprint with designers, they tend to see it as shackles rather than a wellspring for exploration—even though the strategy platform is usually built upon months and months of research, interviews, and insights. Do you see Strategy as a constraint in your process?

I actually find that the right kind of constraint can function as a creative accelerant to get you to the strongest ideas much quicker, but perhaps guardrails is a better word than constraints because, without the guidance of the strategy, you’re often jumping around in different directions, exploring far too many ideas that don’t have the grounding of the strategy. I have a fine art background so I know all too well that stepping up to a blank canvas with no plan in mind is much more of an overwhelming challenge than when I have my sketchbook full of notes to guide my process. When you have strategic limits in place, it creates much more freedom and opportunity for a deeper exploration rather than wider, and in this sense, the rules can actually set you free. When we started our initial ideation for Topstep’s new brand identity, we cast a wide net with 20-30 different mood boards but the strategy helped us efficiently narrow our focus to 5 of the most relevant and resonant options that embodied the strategy and the kind of brand that Topstep wanted to be.

Ultimately, we’re not creating just brand strategies, and we’re not creating visual identities. We’re creating brand experiences, brand worlds, and those worlds have to be built out of Strategy and Design.

Yes, the success we enjoyed with Topstep came from the constant conversation between designers and strategy along the journey—using the strategic platform as a foundational road map for creative exploration. We were very purposeful in bringing the client along on the journey as an active participant and everything we presented to them was met with a very open discussion about our rationale for design decisions—no feedback or pain point was too delicate to unpack between us, which is often a missed opportunity between agency and client. I think that level of honest conversation from the very start of the strategy process through the end of design helped build a foundation of trust and respect between us and the client that allowed us to move much more efficiently and make great decisions together. Ultimately, it helped a great deal when it came time to sell in a radically simple design direction.

The final design direction for Topstep was directly inspired by one of the territories that we brought to Topstep in our Strategy Workshop “And the rules shall set you free.” Traders often feel that the rules hold them back from really being able to be the successful trader they think they can be but, in reality, it is these very rules that keep them on the right path to ultimate success. Seems like a meaningful parallel here with our conversation about the relationship between Strategy and Design?

Definitely. Just as Strategy provides guardrails, it also allows you to explore freely without feeling like you’re staring at that blank canvas, reaching for any idea that may be well-executed but has no relevance with the business or what it is we’re trying to achieve, and in that way, the rules really can set you free. For Topstep, we harnessed this strategic freedom to move against the grain of the natural instinct for many clients to add as many elements into the composition as possible to tell their story and opting for being utterly clear, simple, and to the point, and in the financial world, that becomes quite radical.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” — Hans Hofmann

Click the link to see our work for Topstep: https://www.emotivebrand.com/topstep/

Emotive Brand is a 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.

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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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 there 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.

Emotive Brand Co-Founder on Evolving a Business and the Challenge of Change

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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A little over nine years ago, Bella Banbury and I started Emotive Brand on a bit of a whim. Now, almost 10 years later, we have 20 people in our company. We’re recognized as a top agency in the strategy and branding world. CEOs of companies seek us out to achieve transformative shifts in their business. People hire us because they’ve been reading our content for years. Agencies around the world cite our content as smart and forward thinking. We didn’t expect all of this. We just started our agency and that was that.

The cobbler’s children DO have shoes

As we reach our double-digits, we’re turning the tables. It’s time for us to do some reflection and strategy work of our own. So we’re putting ourselves through the very methodology we use with our clients and we’re eager to see what shakes out. Our agency has become the client.

The first feeling I had was, “Holy shit. This is tough!” It’s hard to face the realities of change and the future. It’s hard to decide what you want, where you want to be, and how you will get there. I have more empathy for our clients right now than I ever have.

Along this journey, I’ll be sharing some thoughts with you. We’ll no doubt glean new insights about ourselves, but also learn things that we want our clients to know, too. Here’s where I’m at 2 months in.

Change is hard

Until someone asks you to question some fundamental things about your business, you don’t know what ‘hard’ really means. I get it now. The rational brain wants to analyze. Look at the numbers. Understand the trends. For me, this is the easy part. The numbers don’t lie and it’s important to take the time to really understand what they are saying. So I naturally thought this was the end. I was ready to start making the change.

But even when the facts tell a very clear story, your emotions can stand in the way of change. Yes, I am talking about fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s easy to focus on the rational needs for change. I didn’t realize the major role emotions play in any change process. It’s human nature. If I felt this way, our clients for sure must feel the same way.

We talk a lot about empathy at Emotive Brand. This process we are undergoing is opening my eyes to what it takes to have the courage to initiate changes in your business. I see now that we also need to help our clients get through the emotional hurdles to change. We need to give them the time and the emotional support they need to evolve their business and themselves.

Being agile is not as easy as it appears

Our clients’ timelines are shrinking. They need their projects completed faster than seems reasonable. So we’ve adapted. We’ve created a methodology that is agile. We work in sprints. We’ve realized we can develop strategy and branding at a pace we never thought possible – and still deliver smart work. But, what is always interesting, is that when we hear our clients say “fast”, intentions don’t always equal reality. Working quickly isn’t just a challenge for us, it’s really difficult for our clients too. They struggle to meet their own high-pressured deadlines. In the end, it’s difficult for some of them to keep pace with our agency and our ability to move quickly.

So it was pretty funny when, during our first sprint on our own internal project, we ourselves got in the way of delivering on our own “agile” project. The second lesson learned: moving fast is hard. More than twice, we put our own strategy project on hold to focus on our clients’ strategy projects. It begs the question: “How do we help our clients do their job, meet their own business deadlines, and move their strategy project forward?”

We’ve created a process to help our clients understand the time they need to devote to work with us, from meetings and workshops, to rounds of review and circulating deliverables internally for approval. When we develop a project plan, we always ask our clients about major events in their world that may impact our work together. We know we can enable clients to move at the speed they want. It just takes time – devoted time. Wish we had taken our own advice on this one. Without a solid project plan in place, almost everything can stop it in its tracks.

Building alignment is personal

We know firsthand change is hard. And moving fast is not always easy. But how do we manage these speed bumps and, at the same time, align a leadership team around the difficult shifts that transformation requires? Iteration. Putting the cycles in. We’ll go backward and forward as much as is needed to build consensus. We work to ensure everyone feels that their voices were heard to reach agreement and, ultimately, alignment.

How? We’ve developed frameworks that surface up gaps in alignment and facilitate discussions to hammer things out. This allows us to appeal to individual personalities and ensure people are truly honest with their feelings and opinions. We’ve excelled at doing this with our clients. In fact, we’ve built our reputation and agency on this activity.

But, again, it was much harder to do for ourselves. While tools and frameworks help facilitate available options and reinforce smart strategy, they don’t take into account the human side. People process things differently and at different speeds. They require different ways to evaluate options and opportunities. Sometimes their role in the organization can create blind spots. And people in different roles can easily view things through a siloed lens.

Only when we acknowledge these lenses and map personal roles back up the organization’s overall needs can we facilitate the group and reach full alignment. Without the alignment of a leadership team, there’s nothing. No moving forward. No change. And no successful transformation.

Strategy and branding moving forward

As we look to evolve our own agency, I’ll keep you updated on our progress. I’ll share what I learn and how that affects the experience, tools, and processes we use in the future with our clients. What we do for our clients is hard work. But now we know firsthand what the struggles our clients endure feel like. And I’m trying to use this experience to do better, be better, and deliver better on behalf of our clients.

Stay tuned.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and branding agency.

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What Brands Need to Do Right to Nail Their Digital Strategy

Posted on by Chris Ames

Emotive Brand Experts #5: Michael Beavers

Continuing our Emotive Brand Experts series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else – and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today.

Michael Beavers is a Silicon Valley-based digital strategist who works with leading technology enterprises, consumer brands, and startups. A veteran from both sides of the client and agency relationship, he’s worked with Google, Yahoo!, Intel, and many others.

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How do you define digital strategy?

Digital strategy describes the intersection of business strategy, insights about the human beings who interact with your company, and the systems through which they do so – then translating those insights into design and engineering implications. Your brand is represented online through a wide variety of channels. But there’s a big difference between delivering a brand message and thoughtfully delivering services and information that make the claims of a brand true. The services you create through every interaction with your customer are how your brand is perceived against the claims or characteristics of your brand.

Where do you begin as a digital strategist?

Regardless of the size of a project, I begin with inquiries about everything I can about a company. What do they do? For whom? Why?

I like to sit down with various stakeholders and examine what they do, why they do it, what digital things they depend on: websites, digital campaigns, ads, enterprise software, emails, everything. I also try to understand the company’s mix of enterprise software and IT environments that enable all of these tactics.

Often the digital goals expressed by my client need to be shaped further or altered beyond their original form. Then I shape both into something everyone can agree to before we put our goals and assumptions to the real test with customers.

How have you seen digital strategy change over time?

Gosh, what hasn’t changed? Devices are constantly changing, and not just the way we code for them. Technology is a scaffold for human behavior. What’s interesting is that human behavior changes that scaffolding, but the opposite is also true. Companies have a responsibility to make claims about their brands, back them up with great human and technology-enabled interactions that should never manipulate customers, but respect and shape how they behave with your company.

The early days of the commercial Internet were about experimentation and the organizational stuff companies have to offer. There was a middle phase where a lot of companies take a more manipulative view of consumers, which everyone sees through. I’m encouraged, however, as I see more companies view themselves as complimenting who they are and what’s great about themselves through software and services delivered through UIs across all devices. Everyone is now a software company, and some are acting like it.

What are some common missteps you see in the field?

Most of the time when a company is funding a web project with a marketing team, they think too narrowly about the user experience and what web teams rely on to inform that experience. Take any website from any global brand. Is it enough to organize the company’s information logically and push a beautiful design to production as quickly as possible? Maybe…but probably not.

What’s logical to internal stakeholders is the result of years of living inside of a company’s culture, its operations, and its organization. If that’s the basis of your user experience, you may simply be exposing your org chart and dysfunction. That’s not good enough.

A great strategy reflects the company’s goals and challenges but leans heavily on insights about customers and their worlds and contexts under which they experience your company. From a digital perspective, that’s what “brand” is.

The best way to inform your brand is through studying customers and users with minimized bias. When web teams at companies understand the value of research, the differences in customer satisfaction and brand perception is significant.

My very favorite question during strategy formation is, “How do we know?”

How do you discover that? Through personas?

Oftentimes, yes. Personas can be very helpful, but there are bad anti-personas out there, chiefly from marketers understanding personas to be assumptive bio-sketches of who they imagine their customers to be.

Personas were originally an advent for software design. But they’re useful for marketing and messaging, so it is common to place a “target segmentation” lens on personas for messaging. This has deleterious effects on how qualitative research is funded and how protocols get designed. Those outputs are rarely suitable for designing great digital experiences.

When informed with real observed data, personas are powerful informers of a digital experience. You can convey messaging in any number of ways, but above everything, you must give people something to do that is in line with their tasks and contexts.

This is the difference between marketing with digital “stuff” and marketing software or UI-led service delivery, which make brand claims real.

It is important for brands to update the axiom of customers always being right: the customer is always right to do what they do, so we should understand what it is that would help them believe in us as a company.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen over the years?

I think the biggest change is unfolding before our eyes today in our national politics; specifically, the interdependencies of social media, ad networks, monetizing news content, and foreign operatives exploiting things that we all depend on to stay informed and go through our days.

The distribution of content and opinion through news and personal social channels has never been this intertwined. Because makers of the commercial could not foresee foreign interference, the Gutenberg press of our age has gone awry.

It breaks my heart to see but I’m also encouraged by what I see in the design and engineering community. Discussions about signaling meaning and trust, design and engineering ethics, and consumer awareness of security have never been greater. So that’s the new current situation and context for all digital strategy.

A company trying to sell more stuff to the right people has to understand how to be authentic. It must align its values to those of its customers, and make it real through trustworthy commercial interface products.

Brands must also now deal with the proliferation of the marketing technology stack. It encompasses everything: hosting, content automation, marketing automation, CRM suites, analytics, social media, and case management.

The implication is that marketers have a lot more to manage now. The complexity and scale of marketing has increased exponentially, and customers interacting with your digital experiences bring heightened skepticism and service expectation. Staying on top of those skills is really challenging. That’s why it’s often helpful to have expert outsiders, people willing to gently bust the silos and mixed contexts that hinder great customer experience.

What advice would you give to fellow digital strategists?

The best advice I can give is to stay curious and have fun with this stuff. Try to dig into as many tactics for understanding as you can but don’t over-index on any one skill. It will be different tomorrow anyway. Be at least categorically familiar with various web technologies, marketing automation, analytics, and how to read and interpret how they report insights you can use to form your strategy.

Know yourself. Are you a T-shaped professional and embrace your natural curiosities? Are you comfortable exposing your areas of ignorance to understand them better?

Do you think in both short and long-term frames? You may already be a great digital strategist, even if you don’t have an engineering or design background.

Spend time figuring out those worlds. Designers and engineers are ultimately the people who you serve through your strategy. Your communication should be an organized vessel of clear insights and objectives. Their work is what makes the brand real for customers. They need your help.

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

What Makes a Great Strategist?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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.