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Tag: Target Audience

Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

What Got You Here

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops.

At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up holding greater meaning for those inside of the company, but lack meaning for other key audiences – prospects, customers, and recruits – who also matter to the brand’s success.

The warning signs of a solely internal-facing brand are plenty: internal names for your product, add-on brands, or a website that has been pieced together, mirroring the evolution of the company. These common indicators show that important audiences have been forgotten. If this sounds familiar, your brand needs to start looking outside itself.

Forgetting Who’s Outside

The problem with an internal-facing brand is that the brand isn’t always clear or powerful to outsiders. The purpose of an impactful brand is to connect meaningfully with all the people who matter to your business – inside and out. So if a brand makes sense to your team, but isn’t as easily understood by external audiences, your brand loses impact, and as a result, business eventually stagnates.

Sometimes all the effort that went into scaling your business becomes your brand strategy – making it very hard for outsiders to understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter. And when the people crucial to your business’s success don’t understand your brand, your business can easily fall behind the competition, risk becoming irrelevant and may even lack the future support needed to move your brand and business forward.

Time for a Brand Refresh

Consider these aspects of your strategy to refresh your brand and position your business for continued future growth.

1. Brand Architecture

For many high-growth companies, add-on brands have rendered your architecture irrelevant. Do you have one brand or many brands? A branded house? Or a house of brands? How do all of your products fit into the structure of your brand? Evaluate how all the different products, business units, and pieces of your brand fit together. Don’t let organic growth lead the way. Develop your brand architecture to help people understand your business, products, and services. Enable that architecture to work for today and accommodate for tomorrow.

2. Category Reframing

Your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. Companies that have experienced organic growth oftentimes outgrow their original category without realizing it. As such, many high-growth company will start in one category and need to shift into another over time. This shift might be necessitated by the advancement of products, the market, and/or new category. Choosing the right category or defining a new one is critical to positioning your brand in a way that frames your value and makes it relevant to your customers. We like to think of category development as a process that helps clarify and shape the perceptions, feelings, and attitudes about your brand. Think about articulating the right metaphor that will make it easy for people to find meaning in your brand.

3. Positioning

Knowing how you want your brand represented, enforced, and reinforced is part of developing your positioning. A strong and meaningful positioning can enhance what your brand does, how it differs from your competitors, and why it’s better than any alternative in the market. Ensuring you have the right positioning strategy is critical to building your business.

4. Target Audience

Who is important to your brand? Who do you sell to? Who are your most important brand champions? Who are the key influencers? These are all important questions to answer during a brand refresh. For high-growth companies, the people who were important to your brand when you started have probably evolved. So take a critical eye and focus on understanding precisely who your target audience is, why you matter to them, what are they looking to solve, and how can you create messaging to speaks to their needs and desires.

5. Your Why

It’s critical to make sure you lead with ‘why’ during a brand refresh. Most likely the success of your business and its growth is the result of your purpose, or reason for being. Formalizing your purpose into a brand promise will help your growing team get aligned internally around why you matter. Everyone can get on board the same boat and row towards the same higher purpose. And when you align everyone internally and drive them towards that purpose, the people on the outside will feel your why as well. A brand is a way of bringing your purpose to life, so focus on it and how you can make people believe in your brand.

6. The Competition

In order to differentiate yourself and offer unique value to your audiences, you have to know your competition – inside and out. Who you were competing with when you started businesses has most likely entirely shifted, especially in the fast-paced business world we work in today. Map your current brand against the competition and shift accordingly.

7. Corporate Narrative

Investing in developing a corporate narrative helps everyone understand who you are, what you do, why you matter, and what the future holds for your business. If everyone internally has insight into this, it helps the external storytelling become clear and consistent. Your corporate narrative should help tell the story of your brand in an honest, meaningful, and emotive way.

8. Creative Assets

Oftentimes, making your brand more clear, powerful, and meaningful to key audiences means refreshing your visual identity (and from there, your website). Ensure your identity represents who you are and why you matter. When looking to revamp your website, hire experts. Make sure your navigation clearly reflects your brand strategy and make sure your value proposition is clear and understandable to website visitors. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning a website, so use your newly refreshed brand strategy to guide these decisions. A strategically lead redesign is key to having a well-designed user experience.

A Brand Refresh = More Meaningful, Competitive, Successful Business

Taking the time to invest in your brand will bring tangible positive results to your bottom line.

In order to hold greater meaning in the hearts and minds of the people who are most important to your business, strongly position your brand and focus on meaningfully articulating your value.

By getting everyone around the table internally, with sales and marketing brought together, your sales cycle quickens, your business becomes better positioned for success, your recruitment efforts prove more successful, and your brand helps fuel a competitive and thriving business.

Refresh your brand and bring its purpose to life for both inward- and outward-facing audiences in order to stay ahead and continue to grow. Your business depends on it.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency. 

Brand Affinity: The Discipline of Choosing Who Loves Your Brand

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Want Everyone to Love Your Brand? Think Again.

Don’t build a brand for everyone. Build a brand for the people who will become your most loyal and loving customers. You can’t be a match for everyone – especially if you’re at the earlier stages of growth. You don’t have the time, energy, or resources to successfully connect with such large, indistinct groups. A “let’s-make-everyone-love-us” mindset will only dilute what some people could really love about your brand.

When we work with clients on developing target audiences, they often want to become like Nike or Apple – a brand that almost everyone names as their favorite. Or they believe they can find some huge, untapped segment of the market that will go crazy for their product. However, these kinds of vast segmentation strategies fail more often than not. They cast nets that are much too wide. The groups are too big. The perfect customer is too vague. And in the quest to reach and satisfy everyone, those brands end up pleasing very few.

Create a Deep Connection with the Right People

We talk a lot about the value of emotionally-connected customers. It’s something we truly believe in as an agency, but it has also been proven time and time again. In fact, according to HBR, on a lifetime value basis, people who report an emotional connection to your brand will be twice as valuable as even your most “highly satisfied” customers. They will purchase more, visit more, spend more, engage more, recommend more, and trust more. Why? You make them feel something positive and unique that deepens their bond at every brand touchpoint.

So the question is not: “How many people can you make love your brand?” Instead, it’s “Which people will love your brand the most?” Focus on the people who can connect with you – emotionally and meaningfully – and go from there.

Consider these examples of companies who deepened brand affinity with the people who mattered most.

Finding the Sweet Spot: Amex

American Express introduced its first credit card in 1958. But in the early 1990s, competition intensified. The company had to reconsider its product line and its target customers in order to stay at the top. Credit cards had become commonplace. Amex (strategically) made the decision to not keep marketing to every person. Instead, they decided to focus on their most profitable customers – deepening the brand’s emotional connection with the people who already loved them. And they reaped the benefits.

They doubled-down on the “point junkies”: business executives who thrived on accumulating points from travel and hotels. Amex decided to reward these customers even more. They created the Rewards Gold Card in 1994 – a card with a higher annual fee, but double the reward points.

Point junkies loved it. In fact, by targeting this small but valuable group with a very specific offer, Amex converted even more people into point junkies.

The brand’s charge volume increased substantially and they outpaced all the competition. Not everyone loved them, but the people who mattered did.

Ease for Everyone: DocuSign

Now consider a different kind of example – a brand who started small and then cast its net wider. DocuSign, now the global leader in digital transaction management, started off with one simple goal: make it easier for real estate agents to get signatures and close deals.

Anyone who signs a document was a prospect for this company, yet they began with a targeted approach. From there, they’ve expanded to the enterprise segment and simultaneously expanded their service offerings. So even as they expand to different markets, DocuSign continues to deepen their relevance with the people who love them already.

Brand Affinity with the Right People

Think about your most profitable customers. The people you connect with best and the people who show the greatest loyalty and love for you today. How can you deepen the bond with them? How can you expand that core group or leverage them to attract others who will love you just as much? These are the types of questions you should be asking.

If you need help with segmentation strategies or increasing your brand affinity, please reach out.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

Product Design and Brand Strategy?

Too often marketers and product developers don’t see the connection between product design and brand strategy. We’ve noticed this trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and absorbs their point of view into the planning process, they can design more meaningful, more successful products.

Brand Promise

Brand strategy synthesizes a company’s business strategy, purpose, and product positioning into a distinctive promise that informs everything the brand stands for. Who the brand serves, what the brand brings to the table, and why it matters to people. Over the long months it takes to build a product, it’s tough to stay true to the emotional impact you hope your product will deliver. The promise at the core of your brand strategy is the beacon you can follow, with constant guidance to help you build a brand-appropriate product experience.

Brand Voice

How your product meaningfully connects with people matters more than you might suspect. You want the product to inspire meaningful feelings like excitement, amazement, or delight. Brand strategy sets the tone by establishing a voice that’s consistent with your promise. Brand voice is a delicate thing, which can include words, sound effects, and music. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It’s developed through a rigorous brand strategy process. It’s explored. It’s discovered. It’s developed. It rarely comes from QA engineers writing error messages.

Dialog

Ever make a mistake using an app? How can it be a mistake if you happen to press the wrong button in a confusing UI? Ninety percent of the time, when a user gets derailed in an app, it’s because the app itself is too complicated or the navigation is deranged. In other words, it’s not your fault, Citizen User.

So is it ever appropriate for a sensible brand to write the word ERROR in a dialog box? The clue is the term “dialog.” A product is a dialog with a user. A human being. A person. A person like you does not need a product to waggle a finger and issue a stern warning. If the product needs to help the user make a better decision, it’s called coaching. Encouraging. Extending a helping hand. Dialog. Not an error warning. Not lecturing. Not accusing. Not criticizing. Brand strategy provides guardrails for voice and behavior so your product doesn’t veer off track.

Once you’ve built a product with your brand strategy firmly in mind, you’ll wonder how you ever built anything without it. And whether you’re building an app, an online service, a mobile device, a piece of electronic hardware, a wearable gizmo, or any product that a human being touches, you’ll never build anything without a brand strategy again.

Emotive Brand teams up with clients to ensure that the brand strategy finds its way into the product experience to make a meaningful impact on users. To experience brand strategy the Emotive Brand way, give us a call.

To read more on this subject: Brand Strategy and the Value of Creative Design 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design

Posted on by Dann Wilkens

We’ve noticed a product trend, especially with technology companies. Products can suffer growing pains if they are conceived, gestated, and born into the world without the guiding hand of the brand. On the flipside, brand strategy can have an enormously reassuring influence on the design of a product. In fact, our brand strategies exert positive influences on the product designs of most of our clients, in direct and indirect ways.

Here’s how.

Empathy

Brand strategy always starts with a thorough study of target audiences, which means understanding what makes them tick. Their needs, expectations, pains, and joys. When a brand really gets their user base and Continue reading “How Brand Strategy Can Meaningfully Improve Product Design”

Brand Persona: Know Your Audience, Know Yourself

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Do you know your target audience?

We mean, not just whom you need to reach, but what they need, want, and feel? Do you know what makes them anxious, alarmed, or scared? Do you have any idea what they think? What fires them up?

What they’ve tried before and liked, or completely failed? What makes them assured, calm, trusting, or confident and bold?

Hmmm. Maybe you don’t know your target audience. At least not well enough to connect on a meaningful level.

We recently read an enlightening blog post from Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, the renowned start-up incubator. In the post, Graham detailed 13 tips for start-ups. Things like:

  1. Pick good cofounders
  2. Launch fast,
  3. Let your idea evolve
  4. Understand your users, and
  5. Don’t get demoralized.

At the conclusion of his piece, Graham grew contemplative and wondered, if he could tell a start-up CEO just one of the thirteen tips, which would it be.

His answer: #4. Understand your users.

At Emotive Brand, our brand strategy is geared toward making your brand matter to people. In order to do that, we need to understand who these “people” are. That’s why we start our brand strategy process by understanding them thoroughly, through our proprietary Persona Mapping Workshop.

So, who really is your audience?

What if you have multiple customers in different categories or different job functions?  How does the Brand speak to people important to your brand, no matter who they are or what they do? At the brand level, your brand should be able to connect emotionally and meaningfully across the board.

At Emotive Brand, we aim to bring our clients into meaningful dialog with the people that most matter. At every touchpoint. One of the foundational tools is our Persona Mapping Workshop. To gain an accurate picture of your targets, we bring in top people from your company, from different departments and levels. And we put them to work. Together. The focus of this workshop is prioritizing your target audiences, working hard to we understand their needs and desires so the brand can connect more meaningfully with them.

When we’re done, we have accurate, deep, emotive portraits of the people you’re trying so hard to influence. We have an agreed model of their needs, wants, influences and pain points. The resulting persona maps make it clear to your organization precisely who your brand needs to talk to. And just as important, what to say to them.

To learn more about how persona mapping brings your customers into focus so your brand can have emotional impact on the people who matter, give us a ring.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Asked by Marketing: “Who Else Should We Target?”

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

Marketing suffers when it seeks to appeal to everyone, brands thrive when they appeal to more than customers.

One of our favorite cartoonists, Tom Fishbourne, takes a poke at eager marketers who dilute their efforts by vainly attempting to appeal to everyone.

Of course, most marketing is an outbound effort, designed to maximize sales at the lowest possible cost. It is a complex and dynamic game, and it’s little wonder some marketers “go big and wide” in their view of the market.

Sharp focus has multiple rewards

At the same time, highly focused marketing efforts often prove exceptionally effective. Marketing that covertly or overtly states “not for everyone” tends to mean more to the brand’s loyalist (witness the focused loyalty and financial success of Apple’s ecosystem vs the disparate and fragmented worlds of Android, et al).

But branding isn’t the same as marketing, if you care to make the distinction. Brands can be aimed at a highly focused target group, but they need to also mean something to people outside that group. Specifically, such brands need to hold meaning for people inside and outside the enterprise. Again, many of the most successful focused brands are driven by highly involved and  engaged product designers, customer service teams, and sales and marketing organizations.

Bridging internal and external mindsets

The need for brand thinking that can bridge all these disparate internal and external stakeholders, brings us back to the people being pilloried in Tom’s cartoon. At a certain level, brands need to “be for everyone”, and while we’re not talking about everyone on the planet, we are addressing the needs of all the different people touched by the brand in one way or another.

To reach this point of meaning for a virtual hodge-podge of human needs, interests, beliefs, and aspirations, one has to plunge down to the deep connections that unite all people. Its a matter of reaching down below the surface of the highly focused consumer you aim at, and the engineering, production, management, financial, etc, mindsets that seek meaning from your brand.

Don’t blandly pursue everyone, but remember to pursue everyone that matters through meaning

Branding needs to work to a broader agenda than marketing. Managed properly, meaningful brands propel themselves to greatness by truly mattering to the people vital to their success, both within and outside the business.

Don’t only think about your customers and prospects. Create a brand aura that fills everyone your brand touches with differentiating purpose and meaning.

http://tomfishburne.com.s3.amazonaws.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/targetmarket.jpg

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency