Blog
Educate, Activate, Accelerate: Three Tips for Bringing Design to Life
Working on a brand project can feel a lot like being back in school. You do your homework, you research, you drink coffee late into the evening. And just like graduating, there comes a crucial moment at the end of the journey where the agency hands off the assets. This hard-earned diploma might be a new visual identity, a new website, or even just a new logo. As far as the SOW is concerned, the “work” is over — but of course, this is where the real work begins: activation. Sure, you may have a framed degree on the wall, but if you’re not taking active steps to bring those lessons to life,...
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AI and Machine Learning: A Future Forward for Brands?
The Future, It’s Here: AI and Machine Learning It’s easy to think of an AI-led world as a thing of the future – that movie-like image where robots run hotels, TV ads know your name, and data is more valuable than the gold people ran to California for decades ago. Yes, the future is blurry, exciting, full of fear, and countless unknowns. Yes, it is changing every day – and fast. But the future is happening, now. In fact, AI is already integrated into the way each of us experience brands every day – even if we don’t know it. You wake up in the morning and ask Alexa what the weather is. You...
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Unrealized Business Value? Build It With Brand
Unrealized Business Value If you’re feeling thwarted by business value that’s falling short of its potential, the answer may well lie in your brand. It’s true that brand lives under marketing, not finance. But a sharp, well-aimed brand strategy can address critical business results from lagging market capitalization to margins. At Emotive Brand, we believe that brand isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you behave, how you serve each of your audiences, and, fundamentally, what you believe. That means your brand strategy is a foundation you can use to build value holistically,...
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The Power of Debate in Meetings to Drive Business Forward
Meetings: Valuable or Valueless? What’s more frustrating than sitting through endless meetings and coming out on the other end asking: What was the point of those? As technology introduces even more ways to communicate offline, you would think we’d see the quantity of meetings decreasing. However, the opposite has been shown. Research shows meetings increasing in length and frequency. In the 1960s, executives spent less than 10 hours in meetings. Now, executives spend about 23 hours a week in them. And although no one loves a day jam-packed with meetings, what’s really at the heart of the...
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Using Benchmarking Research to Track Growth and ROI
Many of our clients count on their brand strategy to be a springboard for growth. Whether they’re falling short of ambitious goals or have truly hit a wall, brand strategy can help create the shifts they need to move ahead. But how do you measure success beyond hard numbers like revenue and inbound queries? How do you get insight into whether, how, and how much your brand strategy is fueling your growth – and what more it might be able to do? Brand perceptions, after all, are a squishier metric than dollars. Right? Benchmarking Research Demonstrates ROI Not necessarily. Brand perceptions can...
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Storytelling Is the Best Bridge Between Customers and Solutions
Once Upon a Sales Deck Salespeople want to sell. This much we know. Often, in our conversations with clients or in our perusing of sales decks, we hear a similar refrain. How do we cut to the chase and get to the meat? We don’t blame them. In today’s millennial-influenced age of purpose, you could sit through a narrative, a manifesto, a history lesson, a personal testimony, and a video on corporate social responsibility all before learning what someone is actually selling you. That’s the balancing act. You’re only as strong as your story — but if your story goes on too long, meanders, or...
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Enduring Brand Lessons from the Worlds of Retail, Restaurants, and Other First Jobs
Is there anything as formative as our first jobs? It’s a magical time when the newfound autonomy of getting a paycheck is immediately countered by an ugly truth: making money is hard work. For many of us, first jobs start in the worlds of retail, restaurants, and other seemingly unglamorous customer service gigs. There are, by definition, entry-level positions, but don’t let that fool you. Any job that puts you in front of people — people with highly-specific desires, big expectations, and virtually no patience — requires a herculean amount of smarts and emotional intelligence. There is a...
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Brand Growth in a Saturated, Competitive Market: Yes, It’s Possible
Brand Growth Despite Growing Competition Brands saturate our world. They are all looking to innovate faster, compete harder, and disrupt bigger. Why? Competition is tough – from both emerging and established brands. This forces companies to always be on their toes. But competition isn’t always a bad thing. Competition is what gives brands the motivation to do better and be better. If your market is crowded, it doesn’t mean your employees must work 18-hour days or that you have to outspend on advertising. Instead, what you really need to do is work smarter. Here are some ways you can grow...
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Emotive Design Is Felt in the Gut
This week, we had the pleasure of adding Beth Abrahamson as a Senior Designer to our team. She is a multidisciplinary graphic designer whose practice challenges the distinction between art and design. Constantly shifting in and out of different mediums – collage, ceramics, photography, drawing – she’s an expert at imagining how these forms can live in the digital world. With an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts, Beth has recently worked with AirBnB, Southern Exposure, San Francisco Art Institute, and many others. We sat down with Beth to discuss her work, the importance of...
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Brand Affinity: The Discipline of Choosing Who Loves Your Brand
Want Everyone to Love Your Brand? Think Again. Don’t build a brand for everyone. Build a brand for the people who will become your most loyal and loving customers. You can’t be a match for everyone – especially if you’re at the earlier stages of growth. You don’t have the time, energy, or resources to successfully connect with such large, indistinct groups. A “let’s-make-everyone-love-us” mindset will only dilute what some people could really love about your brand. When we work with clients on developing target audiences, they often want to become like Nike or Apple – a brand that...
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Mistakes to Avoid When Activating Strategy
Activating strategy is an integral part of moving your brand and business forward. Your brand strategy is a road map for success that positions your business for the future. It’s the set of tools meant to bring your brand to life and move your business forward. Activating strategy means you need a strong go-to-market plan in the hands of a motivated, aligned marketing team to steer how the brand looks, behaves, and speaks – inside and outside your business walls. Strategy is Set. So, What’s next? The value of a strong strategy can’t be fully realized until the strategy comes into real life...
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The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right
Disruptive and Transformational Technologies Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, iOT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams? As an agency, we work with many tech clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition....
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Brand Is the Best Foundation for Growth
Emotive Brand Experts #6: Kelly Morgan Continuing our Emotive Brand Experts series, we’re interviewing past and present Emotive Brand clients to discover what they do better than anybody else — and how that expertise can be used to embolden your brand today. Kelly Morgan is Head of Marketing at Lyra, a startup that’s transforming behavioral healthcare. We’ve been working with Kelly to rebrand Lyra, and they just launched their new brand last week. In addition, they’ve secured their next series of funding! Kelly spoke with us to discuss key learnings from the rebranding process. What was the...
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How to Grow and Maximize Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement Is More Than an HR Benefit Since Gallup began tracking employee engagement in 2000, employee engagement averages haven’t budged. A recent Gallup survey shows that indeed, work could be more fulfilling for most Americans. The percentage of U.S. workers whom Gallup considers “engaged” in their jobs averaged 34.1% in March. As it stands today, over two-thirds of the American workforce is disengaged at work, and it appears that no amount of HR benefit, wellness programs, or incentives can make a dent in this number. So how does an organization build a culture of...
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Category Creators: Creating a New Brand Category to Drive Growth
Category As A Frame Of Reference A brand’s frame of reference is the foundation of its positioning. It will determine the points of parity the brand has to meet in order to be considered a legitimate player, and highlight opportunities to differentiate. As such, your brand needs to fit into the framework of a brand category that people understand and relate to in order to really ‘get’ your brand. As UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff explains, a frame of reference is absolutely essential, get it wrong and your difference may be ignored: “Framing provides a mental structure that shapes the...
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