Blog
Authentic Brands Just Feel Right: Inject Purpose and Feeling
Everyone’s Claiming Authenticity Where are all the authentic brands? In today’s world, where curation is everywhere, vacuous claims are made left and right by brands, and people are inundated with meaningless media content, authenticity is a hard feeling to come by. You can’t visit a website or see an ad where you don’t see brands declaring that they are, in fact, “the most genuine and the most trustworthy.” The problem is, with so many choices and so much available content, people see right through brand claims that don’t ring true. And because declarations of “authenticity” don’t always...
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5 Things Executives Need to Know When Embarking on Brand Strategy
Investing in brand strategy is a big decision for executives to make today. Plunging into an ocean of the emotional, strategic, and intellectual dimensions and depths of your brand is not what executives often want to spend time and budget on. Preconceived notions about ROI, doubts about the actual value of it, and the more obvious budget concerns to evaluate brand strategy are hugely challenging. Many companies don’t even make it to this place – the place where they accept and understand they actually do need to invest in the brand to address their business problems. But for those that do,...
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Disruptive Brands: How to Challenge the Status Quo and Succeed
Disruptive Brands Are In We’ve talked some about disruptive brands, why challenging the status quo and presenting information in a fresh way is an important driver of successful businesses today. Millennials value disruption more than any generation before. Many brands and businesses today are thriving because they aren’t afraid to do something new and make a splash. Companies everywhere are trying to figure out how to be the next Uber, AirBnB, or Amazon of their industry – innovating faster than their competition, hiring the most creative people out there, and doing something that’s never...
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Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly
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...
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Liberate Your Leader
In the movies, we always cheer for the regular Jane or Joe who looks Big Bad Leader in the eye and tells it like it is, rather than how Big Bad Leader likes it. Then, of course, Jane or Joe is exiled to the ends of the earth as punishment . This is known as “killing the messenger.” History says that angry rulers sometimes killed messengers who brought bad news because they could not separate the news from the person who brought it. Obviously these rulers were bonkers, but the concept of “killing the messenger” never went away. The phrase lives on today in organizations with hierarchical...
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How Great Leaders Accelerate Innovation Through Meaning
Why the need to accelerate innovation? “No company in the future will be in a position to succeed if it squanders the imagination of its employees.” Professor Gary Hamel, co-founder of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) and the M-Prize: Innovating Innovation Challenge. Hamel says innovation is one of the most important and difficult challenges facing business around the world. At the same time, innovation is a vital capability for companies because it is the: > only insurance against irrelevance > only antidote to margin-crunching competition > only way you can...
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Marketing vs. Brand? Do You Know the Difference?
Marketing vs. Brand People are sometimes confused about the difference between marketing vs. brand strategy. This is not surprising, because they are not mutually exclusive ideas. They are interdependent strategic activities that feed, inform, and drive each other. The important distinction to make is in the intent and desired outcome of each area. Brand Brand defines how people should ideally feel about your business and products. It strives to find how to optimize belief in what you do offer and what you stand for in the world. It is an abstract idea held in the hearts and minds of people...
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The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy
The Role of Insights As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations. In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy. What’s your best definition of an insight? Insight is, by its...
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Professional Services: Elevate Your Firm By Embracing Purpose
Professional Services Brands When it comes down to it, strategies to ensure credibility, expertise or commitment don’t make a professional service firm to stand out. We expect law firms, management consultancies, and professional services brands to be credible, to have expertise, and to be committed; they shouldn’t need to be reminded of these attributes, and this type of positioning holds no sway in an already overcrowded, homogenous group of competitors. Many professional services firms “brand” themselves around ideas of client-centricity and attentiveness. For us, this simply isn’t...
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How to Make a Business and Brand Transformation Successful
Emotive Brand hinges itself on the power of business transformation through brand strategy, and brand strategist, Jo Schull adds a honed strategic mind to our team. By working directly with clients to help understand the true essence of their business, she uncovers the necessary internal and external strategies needed to transform the potential of their brand into a reality. In this interview, Jo offers her thoughts and expertise on how to make a brand and business transformation successful. People are always talking about business transformation – what does that mean? Business...
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Meaningful Millennials: On Millennial Advertising
Millennial Advertising We’re back with our ongoing installments of “ Meaningful Millennials ,” where we interview millennials on a variety of different subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio. As a brand strategy firm, we work with a lot of clients who are looking to reach, connect, and engage with millennials in productive, positive ways. Millennials now represent the largest group of consumers within the U.S., and thriving brands today are highly aware of this. When millennials are wielding over $170 billion per year in purchasing power, there’s no ignoring us. I heard fourteen...
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Building the Perfect Team? Is it Even Possible?
A recent New York Times Magazine article, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” went viral and became one of the most emailed and widely shared stories for days – for good reason, in our opinion. Building a good team is a difficult task for most companies, organizations, agencies, classrooms, and families alike. And building the perfect team? That often feels impossible. So why do some groups thrive? Why do others falter? Is there a key to team success? These were the questions Google set out to answer. Here’s our spin on what Google discovered. Teams = Teams The...
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Why are Feelings and Purpose so Important in Business Today?
Feelings and Purpose-led brands Why are purpose and feelings so important now for brands? A meaningful brand is the persona-driven presence and experience of an organization that has proactively decided to orient itself around an authentic purpose. Such brands do so with the intent of emotionally connecting to people on a deep level, by addressing core human needs. Most significant, a meaningful brand strives to forge these attitude and behavior changing connections both inside and outside their organizations. To summarize, a meaningful brand is: – Proactively meaningful across all...
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Consider This Before Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy
Preparing to Develop Go-To-Market Strategy Developing a strong go-to-market strategy (GTM) is hard to get right – especially for any startup in high-growth mode. The right GTM requires bringing together all of the strategic assets that address your business and growth strategy: sales, marketing, product, channel, brand, and vision. The benefits of developing this kind of strategy are huge, but a lot of pieces have to come together in order to properly prepare and ready your organization for investing in it. Bringing in experts to help create a GTM strategy brings both a strategic and a...
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Why Brand/Artist Collaborations Are Taking Center Stage
Brand/Artist Collaborations In the Spotlight The rise of brand/artist collaborations in recent years says a lot about where branding is headed. What were once two separate playing fields are now overlapping more than ever before. And for brands and artists alike, it’s a powerful joining of forces. The list of recent brand/artist collaborations is ongoing. French visual artist, Ludo, collaborated with cutting-edge fashion brand MINOTAUR to create a capsule collection that tied the brand to Ludo’s unique, hybrid style of juxtaposing the natural world with technology – helping MINOTAUR live up...
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