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B2B Brands Can Be Emotive and Should Be!

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

B2B brands deserve the same level of effort as their B2C counterparts

We were talking with someone the other week about emotive branding and they said, “Sounds great for consumer brands, but I can’t see it working for a B2B brand.” Well, we begged to differ! Indeed, we believe B2B brands have tremendous opportunities to differentiate and grow their businesses based on an emotive proposition.

Note that we didn’t say an “emotional” proposition.

Through “emotive” propositions we talk about B2B brands that reach out to people in a way that not only makes them think but makes them feel something memorably satisfying.

The Power of Emotive Branding in B2B

Emotive branding is about digging deep into a B2B brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of people. (Don’t stop reading, this is the good stuff most B2B marketers overlook.)

It is about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors; and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work. Your customers become more loyal, spend more money with your firm, and recommend your brand to their peers. Your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

Emotive branding isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets.

Rather, it is about conveying the meaning and evoking the emotions that draw people closer to you and sets you further apart from your competition.

And when B2B brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

Here are five additional reasons why B2B brands should actively pursue emotive branding:

1.  Business audiences wake up as humans – From the CFO to the data scientist to the salesperson to the receptionist, everyone in your business wakes up as a living, breathing member of the human race; a race as driven by the way they feel about things as anything else. By marrying your rational message to distinct meaning and feelings, you connect to people on a human level (and, as you well know, people like to be treated that way).

2.  B2B brands desperately need ways to differentiate themselves – Widgets easily blur into other widgets. It is increasingly difficult to differentiate on a product, feature, or service level as competitors find it easy to quickly duplicate innovation. So, where can B2B brands effectively differentiate? We think it’s by connecting to people on a higher level through meaning and feelings. It’s not as difficult as you think.

3.  Engaging employees is vital for B2B brands – In many B2B scenarios, it is the company’s own employees who develop, produce, market, and sell their offerings. Creating a sense of common purpose, motivating people to work effectively, and encouraging them to promote a spirit of collaboration are important cornerstones for any B2B enterprise. Emotive branding provides these cornerstones by creating a sense of purpose and direction in a humanizing and welcome way.

4.  B2B brands enjoy many deep brand moments – B2B customer meetings, a visit to the executive briefing center, and trade shows are deep brand moments that give B2B brands wonderful opportunities to convey their brand in new and differentiated ways and evoke positive feelings. Emotive branding offers interesting tools that help B2B professionals reconfigure, reshape, refine, and enhance these brand moments in often surprisingly subtle yet powerfully meaningful ways.

5.  There’s proof in the pudding – All of us at Emotive Brand have B2B experience (as well as B2C). We’ve applied the principles of emotive branding in a number of B2B scenarios, including global enterprise software companies, high-growth technology companies, global consulting firms, and businesses leading with purpose.

Looking to set your B2B brand apart by connecting meaningfully to people and distancing yourself from the competition? Emotive branding is your answer.

To learn how emotive branding works, download our white paper below:

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is an Oakland brand strategy and design agency.

The Role of Voice Technology for Brands

Posted on by Chris Ames

Voice Technology Is Older Than You Think

Voice is the newest technology platform on the block. And like all seemingly new things, it’s actually much older than you think. In the early 1960s, IBM introduced the Shoebox, an early effort at mastering voice recognition. This bulky little machine could recognize 16 words spoken into its microphone and convert those sounds into electrical impulses. Basically, it was a voice-operated calculator. Dressed in a tuxedo at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, developer William C. Dersch performed the miracle of turning your voice into a search engine.

Since those formative days, voice technology has advanced exponentially – and so has demand. By 2019, the voice recognition market will be worth $601 million. And by the end of 2022, voice commerce will be a $40 billion industry, while 55% of American homes will own at least one smart speaker.

Finding Our Voice

And while there is an undeniable demand for voice technology, it still feels like people and businesses are discovering the best way to tackle the vocal landscape. On this blog, we’ve written about how voice will alter the future of SEO, and it’s a great place to start if you’re new to the technology.

But beyond the nitty-gritty of formatting for mobile, creating rich snippets, and writing long-tail keywords that mirror natural speech, we’re interested in something bigger. How do you make your brand stick out in the world of voice? How do you provide unique experiences that fit the medium? And is there a role for voice in the world of B2B?

How to Stand Out in the Chorus

Something to consider right off the bat is how much more emotive a voice is than a block of text. As outlined in their article “To Read Emotions, Listen,” Psychology Today explains how an isolated voice may be the truest signal of a person’s inner experience. As opposed to visual cues, “the most reliable way to read someone may simply be to listen to their voice.” And it makes sense. How many arguments have you been in that started not because of what you said, but how you said it?

This same space of heightened emotion can be leveraged to create a stronger connection between brands and people. When crafting text for voice, brands should aim for something conversational, human, and warm. If you have a technical or lengthy offering, consider making an alternate script for voice that is more succinct and approachable.

As Ilker Koksal writes, “Voice shouldn’t just be about making a sale. It’s about being useful to your customers and being ready to help when they need you. Brands using Alexa and other voice-first experiences both create opportunities for customers to engage – and then help those customers become used to engaging on a regular basis, perhaps in a daily routine.”

Usefulness is where voice currently excels. Things like directions and recipes are thriving with voice search because it’s the perfect combination of needing an answer in a hands-free environment. The challenge for other brands is figuring out exactly how you can be useful.

  • Start with a persona and a question. In this customer journey, what search queries are your customers using early and late in the purchase process?
  • What content is helping them answer these queries or informing their opinion?
  • In a conversational way, what would these questions sound like through voice?
  • How could short-form audio content answer these questions succinctly?
  • Consider creating an “audio logo” or noise that’s instantly recognizable by ear, so customers have an aural way to know they are interacting with you.

How Can B2B Companies Sing Along?

When it comes to voice, the path for B2C companies is much clearer. In the U.S., Domino’s has already seen promising results since making its one-click Easy Orders option available through Alexa. Two months after launching, 20% of customers signed up for the service. I mean, what’s easier than saying, “Alexa, I want a pizza” and it magically arriving at your door?

Similarly, PayPal now supports transactions via Siri, allowing users to send and request money in 30 countries around the world with voice. As easy as saying, “Send $30 to my brother,” Siri pulls up a custom sheet with details of your transaction for authorization. Identifying opportunities for “one-click” interactions in your sales cycle is key, as voice search is all about immediacy.

Perhaps a more interesting use-case for B2B companies is that of Saint Louis University. Earlier this year, they announced they would be the first college or university in the country to put Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, prepped with university-specific information, in every student living space. So, all the questions a student might have – What’s happening on campus tonight? Where is the student center? When does the library open? – are easily accessed and organized in an interactive way.

Voice Lends Itself to Employer Brands

Think of how this technology could be used for an employer brand, or even onboarding a new employee. In one device or app, a business could have an interactive way to educate their staff on upcoming events, benefits, meetings, opportunities, or even storytelling from team members. Missed the last all-hands? Listen to a recording of the meeting. Curious about the vision of the company? Listen to the CEO explain the upcoming acquisition strategy. Looking to engage with the mental health benefits? Listen to stories from people who have taken advantage of the free therapy program.

The role of voice in brand is still being defined, but that’s the most exciting part. The immediacy and emotion of voice is yet another tool in our arsenal to transform the way people reach out to brands and the way brands respond back. To learn more about voice or our partnership with Voicify, contact Tracy Lloyd at [email protected].

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

Positioning Strategy for High-Growth Tech Companies

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

High-Tech Companies Have Banished the Word Brand Strategy

I’m not sure when it happened. I only know it has. Brand strategy is no longer something the tech world is asking for. Well, let me be clear, they are still asking for it, they just aren’t using the term brand strategy. Positioning strategy is the new brand strategy, at least for high-growth companies where time is of the essence.

I’ve felt the shift first hand. As a co-founder of an agency, I’m the person who takes the incoming calls from prospects looking for an agency. It used to be that I would patiently listen for the words “brand strategy” to qualify a prospect. But over the past three years, I’ve heard that term less and less. Instead, prospects are using other terms to describe their most pressing business problems. It just took me a while to really understand what was happening and why.

The Factors I See at Play in a Desire for Positioning Strategy

1. Agile has become a way of doing business. Marketers need things fast. They want quick wins as they look to test new ideas in the market, prove that they work, and implement them quickly and successfully.

2. Competition in technology has never been as fierce as it is now. The rate of disruption and innovation that is happening is amazing. But with that comes the difficulty of keeping pace. It comes down to differentiating, getting to market first, and, if you make it, staying ahead.

3. Data drives everything. If you can’t prove a project has a strong ROI, it won’t happen. Iterating and testing strategy and ideas has never been more important. There is no harder role than being a CMO right now. And any CMO or marketer in today’s world needs to prove a strong ROI in the work they are doing, especially when outsourcing to an agency.

4. Valuation is critical to any high-growth company. Being in the wrong category can derail even the best tech company from achieving their vision of a successful exit. This is top priority for almost any high-growth business, whether it’s a startup or a publicly-traded technology company.

5. Positioning has never been so top of mind for leadership teams. It is where the rubber hits the road. Every successful brand needs to be strongly positioned in the market to thrive.

6. Strategy is no longer enough to shift a business or brand. Marketers are looking for strategy AND the assets needed to implement in market ASAP. They just don’t have the team or the time to figure it out internally. They need both strategy and activation.

These are the factors that have shifted the landscape of what leadership teams and marketers are looking for to help their business thrive, to help their brand be more meaningful, to hire and retain top talent, and to realize their purpose and vision.

What are high-growth businesses looking for today?

High-growth businesses are looking for ways to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. It’s about strategies  to help scale their business. Quick wins that can prove ROI for larger investment. And strategies gain better valuations. They are looking for the magic bullet.

I believe that in B2B and high-tech, brand strategy has now become the following things:

  • Defining the right category – developing a new one or moving to a different one
  • Positioning Strategy to ensure you are perceived in the right space, associated with the right competitors, envisioned by your target audience in the right ways
  • Creating a narrative to align your corporate strategy, vision, and why you matter to all of your stakeholders, internal and external
  • Messaging that resonates, that blends the rational and emotional in ways that differentiate and support both marketing and sales teams as they drive revenue and build brand
  • Websites that deliver the value proposition, convert leads, articulate the story, differentiate, and help any prospective buyer or employee see why you matter

Positioning Strategy

So, while marketers are not asking for brand strategy in the way they used to, they are still asking for it. In many ways it’s easier because they are asking for it in ways that address their most pressing business issues. Demanding it in sprints, delivered in ways that are actionable. They need strategy and the tools to launch that strategy in market, but it is still brand strategy.

It doesn’t matter what terminology is being used it. Whether it’s brand strategy or a small component of it, being a good partner is being able to adjust to the needs of prospects – meeting them where they are at, delivering what will impact their business. When they win, so do we.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy firm.

How Client-Side Experience Informs Agency-Side Strategy: Interview with Emotive Brand Creative Director

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Interview with Skott Bennett, Creative Director

As Creative Director of Emotive Brand, Skott puts his client-side experience to work. An expert at creating meaningful solutions that meet the unique needs of both our customers and clients, Skott offers thoughts on how his years inside companies much like many of our clients inform his work agency-side today.

What drew you to agency work?

I always tried to bring an agency approach to my client-side experiences. And where I found this approach really worked was with brand-related projects. Identifying and defining the true purpose behind an organization, and then developing and implementing those solutions across the organization – that’s where I was most fulfilled. And I’m thrilled that it’s now my focus – helping brands better articulate what makes them special and unique.

How do you think working on in-house creative teams prepared you for your current role?

Working on the inside of technology brands – like many of Emotive Brand’s clients – made me fully aware of the challenges these kinds of organizations face. These companies are founded and fueled by smart, determined people who come from high-performance engineering cultures. They have incredible vision, but oftentimes something breaks down when they try to present that vision to the outside world.

Articulating a brand’s purpose isn’t easy. You spend years building complex technology that solves tough problems and then you take it to market by making it simple? I have nothing but empathy for founders or leaders who get stuck on that. It’s a contradiction, but ultimately “look how hard this was to do!” isn’t the story that’s going to delight a customer or grow a business.

That’s why there’s so much value in ensuring that key stakeholders – those people who labored over their solutions and products – play a part in the creative/idea process. Even at the early stages, it’s critical. It has to be a team effort.

Having experienced the frustrations inside many companies today first-hand, what do you think some agencies are missing about what their clients really need?

The best agencies don’t just help you come up with a brand strategy or throw a visual identity at you. They actually educate you and help you sell that strategy inside the brand – from top to bottom. Most agencies will get hyper-focused and worried about selling to the person who’s always at the table. But there’s a lot more people who need to get on board for the roll-out to be successful. The agencies who stand out to me are the ones that have helped craft the plan and sell the plan throughout the entire organization.

Working client-side, you also realize how hard internal change really is. You can’t throw people into a new planet without a spacesuit. You have to bring them on the journey. And that’s where the value of having an outside perspective really kicks in.

Can you speak more to the value of bringing an outside perspective in?

What happens a lot inside a company is that people figure out how to get things done inside the building. “I know how to get Sales to agree to X. I know how to get Product to sign off on Y.” Just focused on the inside, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important people: your customers. The audience isn’t just your department head or your CEO, but it’s easy to get stuck in an echo chamber where those people become the only people who matter. And outside perspectives – the really good ones that are based on sound strategy – can smash these type of echo chambers.

Does your in-house experience allow you to build more trust with clients?

The best thing about in-house creative teams – something that even the best agencies can forget – is that no one is going to know the brand as well as them. That’s why you have to make them part of the process. When an in-house team feels like they’re being dictated to and not partnered with, trust is impossible. And no one’s happy.

Respect is key. In-house creative teams must be brought to the table. Maybe they’ve already tried to solve the problem the agency is trying to solve. Maybe no one thought to ask them and they’re sitting on a great idea. Ignoring them is a big mistake. Their talent, insights, and knowledge are integral to getting to the best solution possible.

We talk a lot these days about agile strategy. What’s the importance of agility for clients today?

Tech companies move fast. We all know that. And in-house creative teams move even faster. It’s a go, go, go mentality. Creative brief? Please. Like that ever happens. You have to go straight from idea to execution in most cases. Working on the agency side, you get the chance to take a deeper dive and really explore solutions and methods. But you also have to be agile. Companies are trusting your ability to both deep dive and also to stay quick-footed, flex, and move in pace with their business. As a result, I make it my operating principal to combine the deeper dive into strategy and research with the insane speed of a high-performing in-house team. That’s what clients today need.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.

Creating an “On-Brand” Community for Developers

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Value of an Online Community

Building an online community is a great way for companies to encourage deeper relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and most especially – developers. Technology companies are particularly adept at leveraging active participation, good will, and sheer word-of-mouth power of the cloud crowd.

Many sponsor technical communities for developers like teaching, customer support, and newbie coaching. People flock to well-structured, well-run forums for advice, problem-solving, and to share their work and ideas.

Some communities spring up of their own accord, sparked by a lone enthusiast trying to solve a problem who attracts people with similar interests. But more likely, communities are created by companies willing to prime the pump and get things rolling. These communities can be of great value for companies looking to build loyalty, engagement, while sustaining relevance. So how can a company build a thriving, self-perpetuating community that’s aligned with company goals?

Here’s why a purposeful brand can help you create and run a vibrant online community:

1. Objectives

Define the goals for your online community from the beginning. What are you trying to accomplish? Set clear objectives and expectations that are consistent with your company’s business and product strategies.

Business strategy and brand strategy are inextricably linked. Since the brand is the part of your company that customers see, your Brand Strategy is an essential part of any community initiative.

2. Audience

Determine who are you talking to. Who are they exactly?  What do they need, want, and believe? What do you want them to do, think, or feel? At Emotive Brand, when we develop a strategy, it starts with deep understanding of all stakeholders, target audiences, customers, and yes, the community.

Persona Maps and Persona Journeys are extremely helpful here. Persona Workshops cast a wide net and then probe deeply into the key people your company wishes to influence. It’s easy to map their demographics, industries, job roles, responsibilities, and influencers. More important, you can discover their needs, pain points, beliefs, and feelings so you can match messaging and/or product solutions to answer the specific needs of specific types of people.

3. Content

What topics do you want to cover in your community site? What content do you want to host? What message do you want to send?

Brand Strategy helps here, because it includes Positioning to define your company offerings and the Messaging needed to target the right strategic messages to the right people, as defined in your Persona Maps.

4. Quality

Quality matters. Developers will spend a lot of valuable time on your community site researching problems, asking questions, posting solutions, studying documentation, and downloading code. So the least your brand can do is to create a clean, well-lit place that’s usable and attractive. Use your brand to guide the brand experience you want people to have when engaging with your community.

The Brand Promise that’s at the heart of your brand will give you the charter to invest in a high-quality community site.

5. Design

Developer sites are frequently created by engineers for engineers. But they shouldn’t look like freeware, even if running on an open-source platform. There needs to be a consistent, symbiotic relationship with the corporate brand, even if you’re hosting the community site separately from the corporate website.

Brand Guidelines will specify acceptable designs and prohibit unacceptable designs that might damage the corporate brand.

6. Tone

Geekiness is cool. We love geeks. Almost 97% of our CEO clients are engineers! We honor them. We make them heroes. But that doesn’t mean that your community site needs to go overboard with geek-speak or drown in abstruse jargon. Simplicity, directness, and clarity are always the key to good communication.

The Brand Voice defines the way the brand speaks, and how it should not speak. It also sets the tone for the community discourse, which is crucial if you want a brand-appropriate site that grows because it’s inviting for people to join.

7. Style

The Brand Promise – the promise your brand makes to the people who matter – helps crystallize the brand’s role in the community. You can choose the proximity to the community that’s most comfortable for your brand. Branded communities fall into four camps:

Full engagement – with active participation by designated company brand ambassadors to provide technical support, ideas, postings, documentation, code, and site moderation.

Moderate engagement – company staff is involved for editorial purposes, policing member postings to prevent bullying, remove trolls and keep things clean.

Low engagement – built and then run with a let them come-to-me mentality, basically hands off, allowing community members to run the show.

No engagement – companies who channel customer support into static lists of FAQs, better than nothing, but it sure isn’t a community.

8. Dialog

There’s no better way to understand people who are important to your brand than by paying attention to the community. Communities are built to encourage dialog between interested parties in two-way or multi-party conversations. Your brand has the opportunity to participate and listen.

Brand Strategy can help you listen attentively and respond appropriately. Empathy should be the guiding light for any community, and rooted in any Brand Strategy.

 9. Care and feeding

Once you start a community, it’s up to you to keep it going. It’s like a garden. You till the soil, plant the seeds, water and fertilize, pull the weeds, and encourage growth. You welcome the bees and birds, too. And you do it every single day. Only then can you enjoy the fruit.

How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community. A Brand Strategy specifies both the strategic shifts a brand is trying to make, and the behavior necessary for people to live up to. How you behave sets an example and drives the culture of your community.

Your online community may turn out to be a genial collection of like-minded enthusiasts or a contentious battleground trolled by argumentative egomaniacs. Either extreme can be valuable as long as you have them under your tent. When you build a community that’s aligned with your Brand Strategy, you can enjoy the benefits of reduced customer support overhead, loyal and interested long-term users, a rich environment bursting with good ideas, and a vast team of de facto ambassadors willing to spread the good word about your brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

Digital Health: A Future With Millennials

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Digital Health

At Emotive Brand, our work with purpose-led healthcare companies has expanded our vision of how digital health can change people’s relationship with how they manage their health. Today, most patients, across all generations, still depend on long-established ways of connecting with healthcare providers. According to Salesforce’s report, “2015 State of the Connected Patient”, 76% of people call to set up appointments, 62% rely on a doctor to keep track of personal health data, and 40% review the data with their physician in person. However, this is changing rapidly and the future of health looks different.

Infusing technology into healthcare management is revolutionizing the healthcare industry in new and valuable ways. From downloading the latest health-tracking app to taking out loans to get through medical school to going on social media to express their frustration with the state of healthcare as a whole, millennials are deeply engaged in their health management and their needs are center of change in the digital health industry. According to Salesforce’s report, around 70% of millennials want to increase the use of mobile devices, apps, wearables, 3D printing, telehealth, and other cutting edge devices to streamline and improve the way they interact and manage their health.

We’ve learned the phrase “digital health” means different things to different people, and this post focuses on what it means to millennials. As a millennial myself, I am interested in the impact of digital health on doctor-patient relationships. How do, or might, advances in digital health change the relationships we have with our doctors? And, as a result, where do millennials see the future of digital health heading?

I reached out to my peers and what rang true for them was this: Across the U.S., millennials believe that by putting more focus on the individual patient’s needs and feelings, digital healthcare technology can make healthcare more personalized, empathetic, streamlined, and meaningful.

The following are the additional top-line findings I gathered from the responses I received.

1.Millennials value digital health because it helps them better manage their health, making millennials feel more connected to their personal well-being.

Millennials consider digital health to be a system of platforms, devices, and technologies that have become integrated into the way we manage, digest, and interact with our health. Commonly cited examples of digital health include health tracking devices like FitBit, self-diagnosing websites like WebMD, doctor communication platforms likened to , and apps that make it easier to make appointments, order medication, store individual health data, and recommend preventative health measures. It means convenient communication with doctors, streamlined healthcare, personalized information and counsel, and individualized and private health tracking. These technologies help keep us connected with the information and the experts essential to managing our personal health.

2. Millennials have different and sometimes non-existent relationships with their doctors, but they believe digital health has the potential to change that.

Because millennials are switching cities, jobs, and budgets more than any other generation, going to the same doctor year after year is rare and oftentimes unsustainable. In fact, according to Salesforce’s report, millennials are the least likely of the generations to have a permanent physician, and are generally frustrated with filling out repetitive forms, the time wasted waiting in sterile doctor’s offices, and muddling through the murky waters of choosing a suitable health insurance plan. Oftentimes, being busy or not wanting to deal with the hassle of going to a doctor leaves millennials skipping check-ups, self-diagnosing illnesses, frequenting urgent care, or calling their family’s doctor to address their needs.

But digital health offers a potential solution. Millennials are interested in a world where they can text their doctor or Skype with their physical therapist. They wonder why making an appointment isn’t as easy as sending money over Venmo. They marvel at the possibility of swiping a card containing all their health data (like a credit card) at the doctor’s office. They search for apps to help them find the best doctors in the vicinity with reviews from their peers. Millennials ask, “What if, instead of spending that hour waiting to see the doctor,  we went out for a run?” Overall, millennials crave connectivity without having to go through the hassle of trying to connect, and they believe advances in digital health can make such connections  more reliable, accessible, and valuable.

3. Millennials believe that the digital health technologies that focus on personalization hold tremendous value.

Oftentimes, the frustration of health insurance and healthcare providers can leave millennials feeling out of control and discouraged with the system. Conversely, devices that encourage reaching goals and keeping on track make millennials feel like they play an active role in their health. Digital healthcare that gives this sense of control is of great value to millennials. Millennials want digital health to integrate seamlessly into their lives. They want technologies to feel like they were made for them.

As a result, digital health brands that focus on the consumer have a real opportunity to resonate within the millennial market. Millennials are downloading health-tracking apps at rapid rates and searching carefully for the best healthcare suited to their personal needs and lifestyles. In short, millennials care about health. They care about our health and want doctors, insurers, products, and technologies that feel like they care, too. Many also want to be doctors, others work for insurance companies, or aspire to create new technologies that encourage this level of empathy, attention, and care. Because there are so many layers in the healthcare consumer experience, there is a huge opportunity for digital health brands to make an impact by making sure every touchpoint feels focused on the consumer.

4. The future of healthcare hinges on digital technologies, coupled with an empathetic approach.

Millennials see digital health as a way of moving healthcare forward. The industry is full of opportunity and potential. And healthcare technology encourages collaboration amidst the often disparate parts of the healthcare industry. It puts a needed focus on preventative health, enabling individuals to be more proactive about their health. Many millennials believe that the future is a world where all health information will be digitally stored and safely accessible. Data will be in real-time, with constant collection, analysis, and recommendations.

However, some millennials worry that the shift to digital health could mean that personalized healthcare becomes even more dehumanized. This is why so many millennials believe that companies, hospitals, and insurers alike need to restore focus on the person. Empathy is the key here, and millennials believe that successful healthcare is empathetic healthcare. If digital health is used to create, encourage, and manage empathetic healthcare, we will move towards the future in the right way. Brands that innovate with empathy in mind will gain the respect and loyalty of millennials – moving healthcare forward by putting patient care front and center.

This is the sixth installment of “Meaningful Millennials,” our ongoing series where we interview millennials on a variety of subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio.

If you are interested in contributing to next month’s discussion and you are a millennial, please email me at [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Why Digital Health Brands Need a B2B2C Strategy

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

B2B Digital Health Brands

Healthcare brands can never be too sensitive, too thoughtful, or too careful. B2B digital health brands need a brand strategy that addresses the needs and challenges of real people with real health challenges. It’s important to remember that no matter what your company offers, in B2B there’s still a person at the end of the line, not a faceless entity. As consumers have more and more information about healthcare through mobile applications and online resources, the demand for people-centric health brands is becoming stronger by the minute. A B2B2C strategy will make your brand more relevant and meaningful to both the businesses you sell to and the people who ultimately benefit from your product or service.

Build a Persona Map.

Before embarking on any business or brand strategy shift, it’s important to really know who your key audiences are and to be able to prioritize them. Whether you are targeting payers, providers, employers, or consumers, building a persona map helps ensure your brand is relevant to those that are most important to your success. Identify the needs, pain points, motivations, and expectations of the people you need to reach. Although your brand may sell to businesses, there’s a Benefits Manager, a Chief Medical Officer, a VP of Population Health, or Vendor Evaluator you’ll need to create a relationship with in order to be successful. By personifying your target audiences, you might find that their needs aren’t all together that different from those of consumers. Your key audience is likely looking for an effective healthcare solution that’s affordable and easy to use, just like the rest of us. After all, we’re all just people at the end of the day.

You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone.

In digital health, your business clients need to understand both your B2C and B2B value proposition. The business messages need to include things that they care about: return on investment, data capabilities, cloud services, trends, and insights. On the other hand, consumers care more about, and are more focused on the end goal of living a healthier life. Your brand can’t be everything to everyone. A B2B2C brand strategy enables the brand to express its narrative to all audiences in the most appropriate ways.  It uses brand-level messages to speak to the big picture aspirations of people. Meanwhile, your B2B messages become more effective when focused on the product or service offering that your sales team can take to market.

Shift Your Brand Strategy Toward People.

Targeting your brand-level messages on the needs, motivations, and aspirations of people means connecting your brand narrative and visual identity to those people as well. A B2B strategy that focuses on actual people is inherently more meaningful because it empathizes with their real healthcare challenges. B2B brands with a B2B2C strategy create a strong emotional impact and, in turn, are more relevant to the people with the most influence: consumers.

And You’ll Create Value for Businesses AND Consumers.

Remember, in healthcare it’s consumers who call the shots. Whether your organization is offering a digital health software platform, a medical device, healthcare data, an app, or wearable device, it needs to connect with real people. Adapting a B2B2C brand strategy will impact your business by making emotive connections to both the businesses you sell to and the individuals who ultimately choose to use it. By shifting your B2B strategy toward people, you will create a more emotive brand that businesses will latch on to.

Emotive Brand is interested in talking with digital health brands about developing more meaningful brand strategies. If you would like to learn more about our work and experience, contact us here.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

How Global Enterprise Tech Companies Can Re-brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s impossible to escape the blinding pace of technology. Ideas, innovations, and companies emerge like skyrockets, lighting up the sky and sometimes the world. We’re used to the speed because we live here, and because many of our clients are start-ups. We build meaningful brands to guide their stratospheric growth.

Then there are companies that have been around for a while. Venerable tech brands that have stood the test of time. Some dating back to the days when Silicon Valley was populated not by software geeks on corporate campuses, but by apricot and prune orchards.

Rethinking and recalibrating brand strategy can be scary for an established brand. But adapting to shifting trends, while remaining true to the heritage that got you there in the first place, is essential for any brand that needs to maintain a connection to all the people that matter to the brand.

Here’s how brand strategy can help an established tech company refresh or re-brand.

Change is not a sign of weakness

When a brand has been successful over a long period of time, it’s a sign that it’s been doing something right. And it’s a sign of strength, not weakness, when the leadership team realizes it’s time to change with the times and alter long-standing behavior to address the reality of today. An authentic brand that knows its strengths is a in a great position to stay up to date and compete with current rivals, while gaining the most from its heritage.

Brand behavior drives brand health

Some companies are held back from greatness by the “this is how we’ve always done things” syndrome. Leadership teams who recognize these indicators often turn to brand strategy to figure out how to reconnect with customers in meaningful ways and how to reenergize company behavior to deliver on the promise. Great leaders live the brand promise personally and lead by example. But it’s not always easy. It takes guts for a CEO to change direction and adopt a new way of thinking and acting. It takes even more guts to enlist the entire workforce to follow.

Employees are involved. So involve them early.

Most people are resistant to change. So when a brand needs to change with the times, it’s a good idea to pave the way by including people from all levels of your team. When they’re invested in creating the strategy, they’re prepped to handle the changes needed to roll it out. This is doubly true for companies with employees who’ve been around for a while. They might have very good ideas to help the company evolve. So ask them for input and meaningfully socialize with them once the work is done.

An old-fashioned practice turns out to be very modern

Giving customers what they want is what successful businesses have always done. Sometimes venerable brands need to freshly rediscover what people want. When your team knows what your customers want, need, think, and feel, your brand can make a more emotionally meaningful, stronger connection to people in a way that meets their expectations. It’s called empathy. A new-sounding name for a very old fashioned fundamental of people businesses.

Venerable brands often have a huge advantage over newer brands because they’ve already forged strong connections and already mean something to people. Like all brands, a venerable brand needs to speak in a consistent voice and behave in a consistent way to deliver on both the rational and that emotional connection. Brands like this, that evoke emotions, don’t just feel better, they perform better. No matter how old they are.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy company in the San Francisco Bay Area that’s only eight years old. But our experience spans decades with fresh strategic thinking for brands that want to stay meaningful, and stick around.

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Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

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

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

After that it gets harder.

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

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

Investing in your brand can help in these 6 ways

  1. Differentiate or die

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

  1. Help them love you

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

  1. Get everyone on the same page

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

  1. Exit on your terms

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

  1. Behavior drives results

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

  1. Invest once

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

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

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

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

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

How Do You Create a Product that Matters?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Whatever industry you are in, whatever kind of buyer you target, whatever distribution system you use, whatever your promotional budget, you can’t afford for your product to be a lemon.

It needs to stand out from the field in unique and meaningful ways.

This can be hard to accomplish when you’re working to business-as-usual.

After all, your competition is generally using the same technology, same ideology, and same processes to create, distribute, and promote its products.

And, even if you are able to jump ahead of the competition in some significant way, they’re able to catch up so quickly that your advantage is short-lived.

That’s why, in crowded, cluttered, and confused categories, it’s essential to break through, to rise above, and to matter in meaningful ways.

But we see many products fail to matter from the get-go.

Few notice when they come to market.

They find themselves quickly relegated to the blurry corners of the category, the internet, and the shelf.

Why do so many products fail to break through the clutter?

Because, all too often, product designers aren’t engaged around the idea of what makes a product truly matter to people today.

That’s because the company they work for hasn’t adopted a clear, concise, and compelling Purpose Beyond Profit.

The company is still doing business-as-usual and not taking steps to transform itself through meaning.

As such, the company’s product designers don’t seize the opportunity to design products that represent, encapsulate, and magnify the best intentions of the company.

The resulting products, while worthy unto themselves, don’t leverage, add to, or amplify a bigger story designed to differentiate and create appeal for the business.

In the end, too many products are too narrow in their goals; they are solely focused on the immediate problem or opportunity and do not benefit from deep insights into why what they’re building will matter to people.

When product people work toward a higher purpose, products that matter become a natural result

When a company is driven by a Purpose Beyond Profit, product designers join the rest of the company in working toward a meaningful ambition.

They design products that matter because the solutions they offer reflect not only an answer to the immediate needs of buyers, but also a carry a response to the more holistic hopes, desires, and aspirations of buyers seeking to create new meaning in their lives.

The nature, intent, and scope of that higher purpose helps product designers to craft ideas that matter.

This is not about adding a layer of purpose on top of the product, but rather it’s about baking the purpose into the product at the earliest conceptual stages.

Indeed, the starting point of design for products that matter isn’t technology

Rather, meaningful design starts with the lives of the people who will, one day, learn about the product, try the product, use the product (perhaps over and over again), and talk about the product, and the company behind it, with family and friends.

A Purpose Beyond Profit merges the holistic needs of buyers with what the company does and how it does it.

It is a guiding light, a purposeful stimulant, and an effective filter for designers of products, and for everyone else in the company.

As such, the products purpose-driven designers create work in a broader context than immediate problem-solving, easier ways to do things, or new advantages owing to new technology.

Products that are vivid demonstrations of the business’s Purpose Beyond Profit

These are products that break through the clutter, rise above the crowd, and matter in powerfully meaningful ways.

People don’t simply “buy” these products, they “buy-into” the idea of the product.

They don’t simply “use” these products, they “incorporate” them into their lives.

They don’t simply “acknowledge” they use these products, they “advocate” the use of these products.

The results of buying-into, incorporating, and advocating, add to both the economic and emotional value of your business.

People look forward to your next product idea.

Not with the expectation of a simple “wow” feature, but with the heartfelt belief that your next product will, once again, help them create new meaning in their lives.

In other words, a new product that matters from a company people respect, admire, and support.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.