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Author: Tracy Lloyd

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Active Brand Management

A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon.

Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry.

A strong brand strategy will take all that value and put it to work in new ways. It will elevate the importance and relevance of what is already known and believed about your business. It can also add many new reasons, both rational and emotional, that will create stronger bonds with customers and make your business more attractive to prospects. Finally, a well-constructed brand strategy can be used to unite and motivate your employees.

When your business has a focused brand strategy, all its working pieces generate more preference, loyalty, and appeal for your offering and greater profits to your bottom line.

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

1. Greater Appeal and Differentiation

Your brand serves as a magnet, drawing prospects to your offerings. Buyers see more difference between your offering and those of your competitors and act in your favor. Your brand stands out in an engaging way in the “me-also” world of your industry and beats back your competitors.

2. Improved Loyalty and Customer Retention

Your brand works as a glue, binding customers to your brand so they stay with you, grow with you, and tell others about your brand. It helps you identify your best customers and to direct special efforts against them. There’s far greater ROI in keeping an existing customer than recruiting a new one, and a strong brand idea can optimize your marketing budget.

3. Employee Engagement and Alignment

Your brand works as a North Star that your employees follow. As a result, employees feel more engaged, work harder for your brand’s success, and become great ambassadors for your brand. And when recruits feel the energy of your brand, and see the results your workplace generates, they are more likely to join your business.

Today’s most successful leaders embrace brand strategy as part of their overall business strategy. By setting concrete brand goals, and developing strategies and tactics to achieve them, they have seen their brands grow and prosper.

Arm your business strategy with a stronger brand. Develop a brand strategy that takes everything you do today to a new level. Then use your brand to win.

Learn more about the power of a strong brand strategy and brand differentiation. Download our white paper, Transforming Your Brand.

 Download White Paper

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

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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.

Brand Campaign: Emotional vs. Emotive Brands – What’s the Difference?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of an Emotional Brand Campaign

Have you seen a brand campaign lately that made you laugh? Cry? Smile? There are a lot of campaigns out there that pull at people’s heartstrings. And often the most shared campaigns are the ones that rely heavily on emotional content.

As a result, a lot of brands today are hyper-focused on creating emotional advertisements. People rely quite heavily on emotions to make decisions. Anyone in branding today knows this, but just because your brand produces one emotional campaign, doesn’t mean it’s positioned for long-term success. Today, to really connect meaningfully with people, your brand must be emotive, not just emotional.

The Requirements of Emotive Branding

Emotive brands are rarer than emotional brands for many reasons. Emotive brands don’t just create emotional ads. They forge meaningful – and valuable – emotional connections at every touchpoint. They are consistent with the emotions they elicit and make sure that these same emotions ring true through everything they do. Every touchpoint counts: the tone of voice your employees have on customer service calls, how your packaging and website make people feel, how people within your office talk with one another, how leaders welcome new employees, the emotions customers have when they first visit your store, office, warehouse, etc.

Being a truly emotive brand requires building an emotional experience that resonates with the customer at every point of their journey, which is no easy task. It requires a strategic mindset and complete alignment around what emotions your brand wants to elicit and how you plan to create and foster those emotions across all platforms, touch points, and brand engagements. When brands do figure out how to successfully behave as emotive brands, they are able to connect more meaningfully with their audiences. This means people are more likely to remain loyal and engaged, and ultimately feel bonded to the promise of the brand in the long-term.

An Emotive Brand Campaign Must:

1. Behave authentically:

Some emotional brand campaigns feel as if they are trying to elicit emotional responses purely to leverage their own business. These never work out in the end because they feel inauthentic. Being credible and authentically bonding with people through shared values, attitudes, and behaviors has more long-term hold today. Especially since consumers are more distrustful of businesses than ever before. Make sure the emotions that your brand is trying to elicit feel true to who you are as a business, what you promise people, and where you see your brand going. Your brand must behave authentically at every touchpoint in order to create an emotional impact that sticks with people in the right ways.

2. Focus on consistency:

Consistency doesn’t mean boring or always predictable. Building guardrails for emotions can be particularly helpful here. Give your brand room to play, experiment, and be innovative without confusing consumers or behaving in ways that are off-brand and dilute your emotional impact. This means diving deep into what kind of relationship you really want to build with people, whether they be your employees, consumers, other businesses, or competitors. How can you connect in ways that feel consistent, but still flex to people’s unique needs?

3. Build meaningful experiences:

Every brand moment is an opportunity to build further meaning and should be approached as so. Whether it’s an internal meeting, an external presentation, a small or big event, a phone call, an email, or a board meeting – there is always space to convey the unique meaning of your brand and evoke the feelings that are distinct to it. Truly emotive brands are continually thinking of new ways to reconfigure, reshape, redefine, and enhance these brand moments – infusing emotions and meaning at every moment in subtle, yet powerful ways. This requires creativity and dedication to making every moment meaningful.

4. Be human:

As technology advances faster than ever before and digital becomes the new norm, being human is even more important for brands looking to connect with the people who matter so much to their success. A key part of behaving as a human brand – relatable, connected, lovable – is being emotive. Humans are both rational and emotional creatures, so connecting on a human level requires both the rational and the emotional. Marrying these in an authentic way is what gets people on board. Behaving as a human brand today means being flexible and dynamic. It’s about being in-tune with how your brand is making people feel, and being able to adjust accordingly.

More Than an Emotional Fix

Emotional brands may give consumers a 30-second emotional fix, but emotive brands forge meaningful connections that withhold time, shifts in the market, and even new competitors. Our work developing brand campaigns has proved time and again that emotive brands are better positioned to behave authentically, meaningfully, and humanly – and as a result, better positioned to thrive. No matter if you are a B2B or a B2C brand, your success hinges on how you connect with the people who matter to your business. These connections must be meaningful. Learn more about the power of emotive branding to power your brand campaign and create a more emotive, and therefore meaningful brand campaign.

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

Return on Meaning: Five Evaluation Criteria for Your Business

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Brands Rooted in Meaning Win Big

Return on meaning for businesses and brands is a compelling notion. In today’s world, it’s important to reconsider the ways you matter to people that are authentic to your brand’s purpose in the larger world. Now is the time to return to core human needs and evaluate where your brand fits in. This is why savvy leaders are taking a different approach to brand strategy. They are embracing the ideals of purpose, empathy, and meaning. They are creating newer, deeper, and more enduring connections with the people vital to their brand’s success, both within and outside their organizations.

In this approach, the keys to success are honesty and authenticity. In other words, the meaningful claims your business makes needs to be absolutely true. They also need to be seen as empathetic in order to resonate with the people involved.

How Do You Identify the Roots of Your Brand’s Meaning?

Consider how your product, policies, and procedures add to individual and collective well-being, both for your customers, your employees, and the communities and world around you. We suggest you explore these five areas as you pursue what matters most about your brand.

1. Human Safety/Security

In what ways does your brand help people feel more comfortable in the world, improve their sense of protection, or otherwise reduce feelings of insecurity?

2. Human Connectedness

In what ways does your brand give people a stronger sense of community, provide better ways to connect and communicate, or otherwise reduce feelings of disconnectedness?

3. Human Personal Growth

In what ways does your brand help people grow in body, mind, and spirit, or otherwise reduce feelings of meaninglessness? And inspire action and growth?

4. Positive Social Contribution

In what ways does your brand improve collective well-being across society or otherwise reduce social decline?

5. Positive Environmental Impact

In what ways does your brand work to ensure better lives for future generations or otherwise reduce negative environmental impacts?

Your brand may not be able to draw upon all five of these roots of meaning. At the same time, it may have multiple ways of creating meaning based on a single root. Regardless, the test is always how true the supporting evidence is and how well you see it through the eyes of others.

A Refreshing and Gratifying Audit

You should feel proud and gratified after such an audit. At its best, an exercise like this will reveal how your brand generates meaning in ways you never before considered. When you use these meaningful attributes to shape your brand strategy, amazing things happen. Suddenly, you’re able to elevate your story, connect on deeper levels, and fundamentally change the way people think, feel, and act with respect to your brand.

As such, more positive energy is created within and around your brand. This energy attracts the prospects you need to grow and move closer to your vision for the world you do business in. It gives your current customers good reasons to become long-term loyalists and advocates of your brand. It draws in the recruits you need to grow and innovate. It aligns, engages, and motivates your employees. It gives your leadership new depth and purpose.

Return on Meaning: A New Path Forward

By identifying your brand’s deep-rooted meaning, you set the stage for a more competitive presence, a stronger organization, and a better future. This is because meaning naturally generates more meaning. As you embrace the meaningful goodness of your brand, you and your team are inspired to build upon it and to develop new roots of meaning.

Step back from your daily pressures. Walk in the shoes of others. Go back to the basics of core human needs. Gaze deeply into your brand and let it reveal the roots of meaning that will help your brand thrive now and over time.

Download our Purpose Beyond Profit white paper.

Are you interested in learning more about how your brand can have a stronger return on meaning? If so, contact us at Emotive Brand.

The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future.

This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. 

It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. 

It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful outcomes from their employee engagement activities, they not only achieve their traditional objectives, but also something of great and enduring value: a new, higher-order and meaningful alliance with their employees.

This paper will suggest that the traditional notions of “purpose”, “values” and “culture” need to be rethought in light of the changing attitudes, expectations and aspirations of both current and prospective employees. It presents the alternative ideas of “ambition”, “feelings” and “behavior”, which are better aligned to the needs of the modern, meaning-seeking employee.

It will detail what composes the ideal master plan for a meaningful workplace and how that master plan can be used to fuel a range of plans designed to engender meaning at the corporate, workplace and individual levels. 

Finally, this paper will point out the need to rethink how to engage employees who are seeking meaning and urges businesses to think beyond mere “internal messaging” programs.

While this series challenges a number of established employee engagement “principles and practices”, it demonstrates how the “meaningful workplace” concept addresses the same business objectives of improved morale and increased productivity and engagement – albeit from a more compelling human perspective. 

Here’s what you can look forward to in the Meaningful Workplace

  1. Context: the workplace in crisis
  2. Understanding what makes something “meaningful”
  3. Toward the meaningful workplace
  4. Employees respond positively to a meaningful workplace
  5. Why people are looking for meaningful workplaces
  6. Why workplaces aren’t meaningful now
  7. Making your workplace more meaningful
  8. “Ambition” is the new “purpose”
  9. “Feelings” are the “values”
  10. “Behavior” are the new “culture”
  11. Making it happen
  12. Going beyond “messages”
  13. A process of self-discovery and self-identification

If you or someone you know is challenged by a workforce in which employees aren’t engaged, productivity is down and morale is low, download this paper. It is a must read for any business today.

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

Brand Strategy for Turbulent Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Business is in Flux

Brand strategy matters now more than ever. COVID-19 is a health crisis first, but also, an economic one. Many businesses that we work with are feeling uneasy about the current economic situation and the long-term effects of COVID-19 on business. Financial markets are no doubt showing extreme symptoms. There is an unignorable sense of shutdown and although the world has faced other economic crises before, this time is different. Business leaders, VC funders, investors, consumers, and employees are unsure how long this will last and to what extent they must shift strategies. Even economists are uncertain of how to quantify the true impact.

As the initial shock of this new world fades, brands are being forced to transform the way they do business overnight, continually adapting, thinking, and acting with empathy and purpose. These companies are facing more difficult choices. Below are some brands that have made significant shifts to how they operate to put their brand forward in more meaningful ways.

  • In early March, U-Haul provided free 30-day storage spaces for college students impacted by evacuations at university campuses amid school closures.
  • Top Auto Insurers, like AllState offered customers refunds for not driving during COVID-19 crisis. Since so many consumers can’t hit the road, insurance companies agreed that there was no reason to ask customers to pay normal rates.
  • Retail stores like Michaels, Ace Hardware, and Petco are offering curbside pickup services for a contactless way to purchase essential items.
  • Dyson shifted innovation focus to ventilators.
  • Local restaurants and chains have devoted profits to donate to healthcare providers experiencing a deficit in medical supplies and families in need.

So how can today’s brands start to adapt their offerings, reposition, shift and shift their communications, behavior, and marketing to maintain relevance and meaning in today’s turbulent world?

Brand Strategy Matters Now More than Ever

With much in flux and lots at stake, businesses need more customized brand solutions now more than ever. An external perspective can help businesses make sure their positioning, narrative, and go-to-market strategy are on track with shifting market trends and demands. Brand strategy has become more and more important to sustain a thriving, successful, and inspired business.

More Customized, More Tailored, More Agile

Business support needs to be more customized, tailored, and agile. Strategy has to move even faster in order to stay ahead and stand out. Positioning matters even more and brands need a strategy that is attuned to their specific needs, services, and current challenges.

Emotive Brand has listened to the needs of our clients and adapted our own client solutions in response. We have introduced a more agile approach to using strategy and design to solve business problems. More customized, easier to buy, lower commitment, and higher impact.

In Today’s World, Every Business Has Different Needs. We Help:

  • Leaders who need a new corporate narrative to maintain relevance
  • High-growth companies in need of an updated go-to-market strategy
  • Struggling companies needing to invest in a turnaround strategy
  • Corporate cultures that are off kilter because the company has grown too fast
  • Companies facing demands for top-line revenue growth quarter after quarter
  • Leadership teams having trouble formally articulating their brand purpose
  • Companies struggling to recruit fast enough and attract the top talent they need to innovate and grow
  • Websites that need an update to compete and convert
  • Brands that need to reposition to stay competitive in a crowding market
  • Brand identities that are falling flat and need a refresh

Whatever the issue, an external perspective will help you dive into matters and create customized and tailored solutions that overcome these challenges. A brand strategy that positions your business for success and helps your business thrive will weather the tides of 2020.

Learn more about our services that can help you transform your business and make your brand matter more.

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

Illustration created by Starline

Transforming Business Through Empathy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy and Business? Some say no, we say yes.

There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy.

Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own.

Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position to one that is robust in meaning and purpose.

Empathy as a driver of brand strategy

When you’re close-in to a business’s 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 and purposeful dimension for your brand requires you to step out of your own perceptions of what’s good and valuable about your brand. It forces you to look at your brand – and everything it represents – through the lens of human needs, values, and aspirations. Through an empathetic approach, it’s easier to see the meaningful outcomes people experience based on their interactions with your brand. As such, empathy leads you to the deep-rooted, emotional connections that can be forged to create strong and enduring bonds. You won’t reach this point without allowing yourself to take the necessary steps back to the most common and fundamental needs, values and aspirations of humanity.

Empathy as a cultural ethos

Your business is a set of policies and procedures that have been conceived and designed to produce desired metrics (e.g. productivity, efficiency, profitability). Empathy can be used to elevate how well these functions not only produce the desired metrics, but do so in a way that aligns to the needs, values, and aspirations of the people involved. Empathy helps you create a more human-centric culture, by encouraging you to rethink and reconfigure the nature of your policies and procedures. As such, empathy helps you better engage and motivate employees. This means they’ll be far more likely to listen to, appreciate, and follow your leadership.

Empathy as an engine of innovation

If your business, like many, is struggling with hyper-competition and increasing product commoditization, innovation will be a primary focus. Nothing inspires innovation better than empathy. By encouraging your development people to “walk in your customer’s shoes”, either literally or through sensed experience, you bring them closer to what’s really important and valuable to the market. An empathetic attitude sheds new light on what’s needed now and how to best address that need or opportunity.

Empathy as a leadership practice

We’re all born empathetic. As babies we all had the capacity to perceive how others were feeling and what they were experiencing. Sadly, over time, we lose this skill. However, it is remarkably easy to revive and put to good use. Mindful leadership is the goal. All it requires is that you adapt your leadership presentation and style based on an understanding of your follower’s needs, values, and aspirations. You don’t necessarily change your management objectives, you simply radically improve your leadership performance by forging more meaningful connections with your followers.

If you are looking into the future, looking for new ways to transform your business, and have questions about your brand’s ability to navigate the rough seas ahead, you’ll want to carefully consider your own, and your organization’s, capacity for empathy. The strongest businesses going forward will be known for how their meaning and purpose-led behavior enhances both individual and collective well-being. They only reach this strong position by embracing empathy every step of the way.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
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Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now

Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly meaningful experiences is what really matters right now.

At Emotive Brand, we’ve built our methodology on our belief in the power of emotion. Our methodology has never proved more important or relevant than now. Emotive brands forge emotional and meaningful brand connections by caring deeply about people and aligning their actions and communications to the deep-rooted human needs, desires, and aspirations of all those important to the brand.

We see the keystones of such connections as empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. In our seminal white paper, “Transforming your brand,” we introduce these key drivers of thinking in this way:

“Emotive brand strategies use empathy to better understand and address the needs, values, interests and aspirations of people, both within and outside of your business. As such, we take your brand’s positive attributes and match them against what we know about the ideas and ideals that people care about, connect to, and that can change their behavior. We also encourage our clients to adopt new behaviors that are more empathetic toward both their employees and customers, and to use the insights they gain to identify ways to make their workplace and offerings more personally relevant and emotionally important in the moment.”

Why Empathy?

Empathy is being able to vicariously experience how another experiences something. It’s not actually having the same experience, but rather allowing yourself to see the world from another’s perspective. For example, you don’t have to be blind to understand what life is like without the key sense of sight. Empathy is an innate trait (children are naturally empathetic), and simply needs to be sourced from within. We take an empathetic view of your audiences and then assess how your brand addresses their deepest needs. The results are sometimes unexpected, but always gratifying to our clients, and cultivating empathy is especially essential in navigating uncertain times like these.

Why Compassion?

Compassion is putting the insights you gain through empathy into practice in a helpful way. This is the essence of problem-solving. You come to understand another’s needs and then redesign products, experiences, and communications accordingly. This means greater creativity, innovation, and a continually broadening perspective. We turn to our compassionate nature to translate the unique intersection between your brand and basic human needs into actionable practices that bring the resulting meaning to life.

Why Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the practice of being more aware of the surrounding world and more alive to its inherent possibilities. It is about having a broader perspective and a universal respect for others. It is recognizing that more unites us than separates us. It is about being humble, feeling connected, harnessing and using energy in new and more gratifying ways. When you employ a mindful attitude in everything you do, you enable a mutually-beneficial balance between your tangible business needs and the intangible meaning that will help your brand thrive in a COVID-19 world and beyond.

Every brand strategy we develop embraces the practices of empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. Through this we are better able to match your brand’s attributes with what truly matters to people today on deep and meaningful levels. At the same time, the brand behaviors we develop aim to promote these factors on both leadership and organizational levels.

Making Meaning A Way Of Doing Business

Organizations and leaders are often overwhelmed by circumstances and respond by turning inward both as individuals and on an organizational level. A state of mindfulness enables organizations and leaders to rise above the immediate situation and to turn outward to others on a deeper and more personal level.

Brand behavior that promotes an empathetic, compassionate, and mindful culture helps ensure that your brand will evolve into the most meaningful state possible. As a foundation for your brand culture, these vital traits also make sure that your brand’s meaningful way of being is sustainable and enduring.

As brands seek to confront the challenges of this new world, it’s only natural that they turn to meaning. But it is important to remember that it’s one thing to claim meaning, and quite another to continuously create meaning both within and outside your brand organization. When empathy, compassion, and mindfulness inform the organization, drive its decision-making, and shape its vision, meaning goes beyond being a buzzword and becomes a way of doing business.

Download White Paper

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

Image by Alen Pavlovic

Cultivating Empathy: Essential in Uncertain Times

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Empathy in Uncertain Times

These days, everything feels unsettled. We’ve watched travel discontinue, lively offices expeditiously shift to remote work, restaurants and small businesses shut their doors, cities still and quiet, as the landscape of our global economy shifts on a daily basis. Recognition that this COVID-19 state of living, working, and doing business will not be ephemeral is settling in. We’re seeing first hand as our clients are forced to quickly adapt—make swift decisions, innovate new solutions, and reimagine the way they’ve always done business.

It’s clear that the weight communications hold has heavied. Executives are reaching out to their employees, eager to instill both calm and action. Businesses are connecting with stakeholders aiming to secure trust. Brands are reaching out to customers, motivated to emotionally resonate with consumers’ current state of mind. These connections, big and small, have never been more critical. Empathy has never been more essential.

Getting Closer in a Socially Distanced World

Empathy is an innate human skill that is available to each and every one of us. As such, it is a talent that stands ready to be reanimated through leadership, organizational behavior, and brand behavior.

As your brand aims to re-create a collective sense of what truly matters to people, and responds accordingly, it has the opportunity to take on a new and more emotionally valuable role in people’s lives. Employees will feel closer to your organization if they feel it is working hard in favor of their interests. Customers will feel a sense of kinship if they feel your brand truly understands them. Now is the time to think about how the experience of your organization’s products, marketing, and support all confirm its commitment to putting people first. How do you ensure that people walk away from every communication feeling they’ve been listened to, that their needs (both emotional and rational) have been better met, and their fears have been quieted? That every connection means one step closer together?

Redefining Empathy

At Emotive Brand, we see empathy as something a bit more than simply “sharing someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in their situation.” (the dictionary definition). To us, it’s more powerful than both sympathy and compassion combined. Empathy is two-fold: both understanding and action. It’s the ability to truly feel and understand someone else’s situation—their emotional state of mind, their needs, desires, and fears. To use that empathetic understanding and take action that is in tune with the person and their state—ultimately improving it.

It’s no secret that business has never been strong on empathy. The closest it usually comes is in consumer research, but that science often leads to inhuman numerical analyses of the human psyche. People are notorious for telling researchers what they want to hear and are often unable to articulate what they really want or need.

Empathetic understanding is not necessarily an empirical process. Rather it is an experiential one leading to deep insights and a profound understanding and appreciation of the lives of others. It is a way to feel the hopes, dreams, fears, and concerns of the people your business seeks to impact. It is a way to vicariously experience what they see and feel when they use your products, experience your marketing, and deal with your people. This informs you of how you can retune and refine what your business does in ways that better reflect the insights you’ve gained through empathetic understanding. This also leads you to new ways of doing business that is more aligned with today’s world and more resonant with where people are today.

It’s Time to Rediscover Your Innate Empathy Skills

The smallest children show empathy for others, but we tend to lose this skill as we enter the mainstream of life. We can, however, reawaken this valuable talent and put it to good use.

The first step is to turn up the dial of two other innate traits: curiosity and caring. Think of the people who your brand impacts as people you know, love, and treasure. Try to imagine the perspective they have on what’s happening, the attitudes and beliefs that drive their behaviors, and the emotional nature of their new daily realities. Give them permission to have values and needs other than your own. Don’t ascribe right and wrong, rather strive to find out more about what drives them, what fulfills them, and what brings them greater peace of mind.

Empathy Has Rewards

For leaders today, empathy might be your most powerful tool. By better understanding what makes followers tick, empathetic leaders can find ways to make their new ideas, messages, strategies, and dreams more relevant and emotionally important. This shifts the response from followers, not only in aligning them to your vision, but also energizing them to work better together, develop new ideas, and strive for the highest goals.

The rewards multiply for an organization in which empathy is a core practice today. More resonance, greater impact. More appealing, relevant, and differentiated products. More compelling, activating, and loyalty-building marketing. More innovation, collaboration, and spirit flowing within the organization and greater stability to underpin your business.

If you want help embedding empathy into your executive and company communications during this time, please reach out.

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

Using Metaphors to Communicate on Behalf of Your Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Meaningful Connections

Even the most complex brands need to make meaningful connections with customers. At Emotive Brand, we work with a lot of brands that have complicated technology, products, or services. As we dive into these brands, we often find that even company founders struggle to clearly explain what their brand does and why it matters in a way that truly resonates with customers. Oftentimes they use a metaphor to describe their offering.

Metaphors are powerful communication devices. They help us consider new ideas or concepts in a relatable way. They help us move away from talking about features and benefits and towards a better understanding of the brand’s significance.

In the evolving marketplace of SaaS, AdTech, FinTech, cloud services, big data, platforms – the list goes on – the amount of brands out there with innovative and complex offering is seemingly endless. We encounter technology, banking, professional services, and even luxury brands that need a better way to communicate their value proposition without getting stuck in the trenches of abstract vernacular and terminology. With the proliferation of different products and services, brands are under increasing pressure to stand out, be clear about what they offer, and create an emotional connection. Brands that do all of that and articulate why they matter set the stage for meaningful connections.

Brand Name as a Metaphor

A metaphor can be used in a brand name or as part of a tagline. By choosing a culturally familiar symbol as a representation of your brand, you can create a deeper meaning that resonates with the people important to your brand. A metaphor shapes the way we engage with the brand because it is often the basis for a brand story. Consider the metaphors used in some of the world’s most valuable brands:

Amazon: It’s the largest river in the world. You can find everything on Amazon. And the brand promise reinforces the metaphor as “… a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Oracle: Defined as a thing that delivers authoritative, wise, or highly regarded and influential pronouncements. Oracle has a wide range of technology offerings from software to cloud engineering, all of which are intended to act as oracles in the world of technology.

Corona: ‘Crown’ in Spanish. A symbol of a powerful force. A thing preeminent in its class. Corona is the ‘King of Beer’ and its name makes people feel confident, masculine, and proud – qualities we often associate with beer drinking.

Campaign Metaphor

For a truly complex business offering, a brand might need to lean on a marketing campaign based on a metaphorical concept. We looked to some of the best campaigns of all time to see which of these turned a metaphor into a way of communicating what the brand stands for, why it matters, and what sort of emotional connection it created.

Chevrolet: Like a Rock

The “Like a Rock” campaign evokes toughness, ruggedness, and safety. When people are referred to as a ‘rock,’ it suggests the person will never leave you hanging, they are dependable, and unwavering. Chevy’s campaign expands on the subconscious feeling of people who own a Chevy: it’s there when they need it, and it’s all they need.

Red Bull: Give You Wings

The idea that Red Bull “gives you wings” suggests that Red Bull can metaphorically lift you up to achieve even the riskiest endeavors. Whether it’s staying awake longer on a graveyard shift or diving off a 50 foot building into a shallow river, Red Bull promises to give you the energy and courage to make it happen. The campaign conveys the feeling of capability, determination, and power.

How to Choose a Metaphor for Your Brand

If your brand offers a complex product or a service that is difficult to explain (maybe because there’s nothing to compare it to), consider using a metaphor as the roadmap for how you talk about your brand or explain the complexities of what it offers. When leading clients down this path, we often ask:

  • What does your product represent to customers?
  • How does your brand deliver value?
  • Where does your brand fit into your customers’ lives?
  • How do you connect your offering to your brand’s promise?

Consider brainstorming these questions to help guide your metaphor. Although products and industries evolve, the beauty of a brand metaphor is that they don’t change. The core meaning is a constant and the way people connect with your brand becomes long-lasting. With the right brand metaphor, you can create meaningful connections and relevant customer experiences that grow alongside your brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.