Blog
On Creating Resonant Digital Brand Experiences Today
Digital Brand Experiences We asked our design team about their point of view on building resonant digital brand experiences today. Here’s what they said. Historically, brands used to rely heavily on brand marketing and advertising for awareness of their products and services. But in the digital age, many brands are born solely online or as an app. In essence, screen only experience(s). What makes some of these brands good vs. great? Great digital brands are true utilities. Once you get into someone’s life and seamlessly integrate into their every day, that’s when you find success as a...
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Business Growth: Steps to Success for the Mid-Market
Leveraging new data about business growth from the National Center for the Middle Market, Emotive Brand identifies three key factors that make all the difference. Business growth is always good. But sustained, consistent growth is always better. Data from the National Center for the Middle Market shows that the best indicator of company’s financial future is not how fast it grows, but how often it grows. Those that expand incrementally are more apt to survive, thrive, and outperform. Companies that grow consistently are more adept at aligning their organizations’ people and practices around...
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Can Collaboration Tools Actually Help Build Better Teams?
More Than Your Average Team Building Activity If you know us at Emotive Brand, you know we love a healthy dose of post-work cocktails, a Friday spent hiking as a team, or the occasional holiday extravaganza. We can genuinely say we enjoy spending time with each other. Even so, we would be lying if we said productive collaboration always came naturally. Like any business, we run into communication issues. We question whether we have the right people in the right roles on the right projects. Some of us work best in short bursts, others need longer spans of time to be productive. Some love...
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Personalization Can Drive Meaning For Brands
What helps create a truly meaningful brand? A flawlessly articulated purpose? A killer logo? A leadership team that really understands the value of brand? Complete internal alignment? Oftentimes, the interplay of many different brand elements work together to create cohesive and lasting meaning. But one element that is gaining value in the world of branding is personalization. Right now, personalization is “in” with brands. Mass consumption and mass production are becoming things of the past. These days, brands that matter and resonate with people are the ones that feel like they’re...
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Do a Company’s Vision and Mission Statements Have Expiration Dates?
Vision and Mission We probably don’t need to convince anyone that having a vision and mission matters. They give you a North Star, help you focus on a goal, and act as a check for your strategic decisions. But how long should a vision and mission stay intact? At what point should you change your mission and vision? Like many brand strategy decisions, it depends. At Emotive Brand, we believe a company should update their mission when it doesn’t match their strategy. Few would argue with this point, right? What’s more difficult than deciding if you should change your mission, though, is how it...
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Healthcare Brands: In An Era of Transformation, Where Is Your Value?
Healthcare Brands, A Time of Transformation The healthcare industry is undergoing a massive transformation – and it’s about time! As new players emerge in the market, they expose the cracks buried deep within our bureaucratic medical system. Upstarts shine a light on unmet consumer needs and are sparking a shift in focus from provider to patient. This forces the entire healthcare industry to begin to explore the need for a holistic patient experience instead of a messy set of siloed solutions. If patients focus on value, healthcare brands are wise to follow suit. Just because the...
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Enabler Brands Are Inspiring, Too!
Disruptor vs. Enabler Brands These days, disruptor brands get all the attention. Companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber have each skyrocketed into popularity by rattling the industries they came from. We get it. There’s something inherently inciting, even American, about the idea of taking down the big guys with your off-kilter vision of the future. It’s easy to root for. But here’s the thing about trailblazers — if everyone blazes their own unique trail, customers are faced with a dizzying network of singular (and often incompatible) solutions. In the course of one day, a person might...
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How Brand Strategy Can Uplevel Your Company’s EQ
Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) may account for as much as 80% of peoples’ personal success – more than intellectual intelligence (IQ). At Emotive Brand, we believe EQ matters as much as smarts for brands too. So how does EQ apply to brands, and what can B2B CMOs do to uplevel their organizational emotional intelligence? EQ has five components: self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy, and social skills. All of these apply to businesses as well as people. And all of them can impact basic business strategy, from how to articulate your brand to who to hire and how to...
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HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together
Finding the Right Fit: HR’s Number One Challenge HR and Marketing? The role of HR has evolved significantly in recent years. Attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is a high priority for executives, and most companies place this responsibility on HR. According to PwC 18th Annual CEO survey, a full 73% of respondents are concerned about the availability of talent – a 10% increase from 2014. Executives worry that it’s getting harder to recruit and keep the people who are both skilled high-performers and ‘fit’ within their organization’s culture. And without top talent, maintaining a...
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Branding Is the Heart of Demand Generation
Demand Generation for B2B Marketers In the dark old days of 2012, the process of tracking a lead through a sales cycle was a slow, manual process. With the rise of automation platforms and integrated CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, our pipelines are now routinely filled with promising leads. The only problem? Everyone else has access to the same toolkit. What might have been considered a competitive advantage is now table stakes. Demand generation might fill the barrel with fish, but it’s the strength of a brand that hooks the lead. Refresh Your Brand According to Forrester Research, 68...
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Aligning Business Strategy to Brand Strategy for Long-term Growth
Planning for Tomorrow We’ve written a lot about the importance of aligning brand and business strategy. But many leaders dismiss the business strategy as something necessary for the brand strategy. However, without understanding where the business is going, the brand can’t help the business grow in strategic ways. Aligning Leadership It’s obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. But gaining clarity on the business strategy can’t happen in a silo. You can’t develop a coherent brand strategy without internal alignment around the business strategy. That means...
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Finally Create Marketing Materials Sales Actually Uses
Marketing Materials: Is Sales Using Them? If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably created some awesome campaign assets only to find out that the sales team never used them. Or maybe you planned a customer event with a meaty agenda, but no one in Sales sent invites. You spend tons of time creating marketing materials and executing events and campaigns only to find Sales finds no value in them – and doesn’t share them. So how do you create marketing materials Sales actually uses? You work with Sales as much as possible. Know the Sales Strategy First, you’ve got to bring Sales into the...
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The Balancing Act of Creative Direction
The Journey Is the Destination When I was studying fiction at San Francisco State University, I had a professor that used to say, “If you know exactly what you want to write about, then why are you writing it?” It was a soft-ball criticism aimed at a particular kind of writer. Those that came in overconfident, inflexible, and usually with their entire story already mapped out beat for beat. In their rigid defense of what they thought the story should be, they missed the opportunity to truly discover what it is or what it could be. If there’s no journey of discovery, no unanswered questions...
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Is it Time for a Brand Refresh?
What Got You Here Sometimes it’s hard to recognize that it’s time for a brand refresh. Why embark on a brand refresh if your business is successfully growing? Many high-growth companies grow organically, without any strategic direction. Things takeoff. Your team expands. New offices open. Your product line multiplies. And growth mode may happen without making plans for how the brand will accommodate and flex as the business develops. At these times, decisions are often made that help an internal team manage change. In many cases, this means that some of the key brand components end up...
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To Every Marketing VP: How to Talk About Brand so Your CEO Will Listen
The Role of VP of Marketing – It’s Not Easy Is VP of Marketing one of the hardest corporate jobs? We think so. As a Marketing VP, you have a set of responsibilities that varies dramatically day-to-day – and company to company. You touch every area of an organization and engage with almost every member of the leadership team to solve your business’s most pertinent problems. People look to you to drive demand gen campaigns, build awareness for products and the overall brand, support sales teams, support the company’s HR, and fuel recruitment efforts. And, of course, no technology marketing job...
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