Blog
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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Investing in Corporate Narrative During Transition: Essential Tool for CEOs
Transformations and Transitions The corporate narrative is an essential tool for CEOs. Persuading them to invest in one is hard sometimes. Competitive pressures on businesses today are stronger than ever. And as a result, many companies are taking new directions, which are leaving CEOs to reevaluate their position, redirect employees, and build new identities and strategies that are going to fuel business forward amidst important transitions and transformations. As many businesses today shift and flex to changing market demands, it’s easy for a large transformation or transitional period to...
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Brand Belonging, Essential to Building Better Brands
A Belonging Deficit We all want to belong. It’s part of what makes us human. The need for belonging isn’t new, but how we connect with others has changed, and not necessarily for the better. We have shorter attention spans. We glance from screen to screen so we often don’t feel completely part of any given experience. Not surprisingly, studies show feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and disengagement increasing, especially amongst younger generations. Many people blame this sense of isolation solely on technology. But there are other fragmenting factors in addition – decreasing levels of trust...
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Marketing Strategy That Fuels Growth
More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then? Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them? How can you identify the problem? And what can...
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How to Bring in a Branding Agency (And Still Thrive as a Creative Director)
Agency or Enemy? If you’re a Creative Director, chances are you’re some lovely mix of imagination, diplomacy, market knowledge, and damn good design sense. You bring focus to every project. You know how to communicate across disciplines and departments. After all, that’s why you were hired. So why in God’s name would you ever need to bring in an outside branding agency? And if by some cruel twist of fate you’re forced into this position, how do you avoid effectively hiring your replacement? If You’re Reading This Creative Brief, We’re Already Behind Schedule...
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Emotive Brand Co-Founder on Evolving a Business and the Challenge of Change
A little over nine years ago, Bella Banbury and I started Emotive Brand on a bit of a whim. Now, almost 10 years later, we have 20 people in our company. We’re recognized as a top agency in the strategy and branding world. CEOs of companies seek us out to achieve transformative shifts in their business. People hire us because they’ve been reading our content for years. Agencies around the world cite our content as smart and forward thinking. We didn’t expect all of this. We just started our agency and that was that. The cobbler’s children DO have shoes As we reach our double-digits, we’re...
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Remembering to Listen: Why Employee Input Is Key to Moving Your Brand Forward
Employee Input: A Valuable Resource You Might Be Overlooking At Emotive Brand, one of the things we strongly believe in is the importance of understanding how a company’s business strategy connects to its brand strategy. As a result, one of the first things we do is review a client’s research: external brand perception studies, competitive analysis documents, analyst reports, and so forth. This external audit is key – but in our experience, it doesn’t provide the complete picture. What’s missing? Potentially, your most informed and passionate stakeholders: your employees. It’s something even...
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CEOs: Building Trust and Living Your Values
The Truth Is Always Trending Good relationships are built on trust. Whether it’s between romantic partners, brands, customers, or government agencies, trust is the currency rate by which messaging is valued against. So, how much is your word worth? In today’s hyper-polarized landscape, it really depends on who’s speaking. In fact, the world is moving apart in trust. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, “In previous years, market-level trust has moved largely in lockstep, but for the first time ever there is now a distinct split between extreme trust gainers and losers.” No...
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Are the “Best Places to Work” Really the Best?
The Clout of the “Best Places to Work” List Companies like Fortune and Glassdoor have been dedicated to naming and honoring the ‘Best Places to Work’ for more than 10 years. And these awards have gained more and more clout with time. Much like colleges treasure their rankings, workplaces hold these awards like badges of honor. The ‘Best Places to Work’ emblem is hung from work walls, integrated into recruiting and new hire materials, pushed on social media, and celebrated by the press, employees, and company executives alike. Our work building employer brands with companies...
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Laser-Focused Branding and the Sales Learning Curve
Not For the Masses Every company wants to climb the Sales Learning Curve — a model for establishing and ramping up a sales force and increasing sales yield — faster. But few focus on branding as a way to accomplish that. In fact, a laser-focused brand is a critical driver of your sales reps’ ramp-up and revenue growth. It sounds risky to create a brand and launch a product based on the needs of a very defined group. But it might just be a better approach to branding and marketing. The Laser-Focused Branding of PubMatic Take the company, PubMatic. Before contacting Emotive Brand, PubMatic had...
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The Next Frontier for Employer Brands: Healthy Behavior Change
At Emotive Brand, we’ve seen a jump over the last year in clients seeking help with employee behavior change. Better brand behavior isn’t the focus. Instead, organizations are actually trying to help their people live happier and healthier work and personal lives. It’s exciting to see companies living out their employer brands through a greater commitment to their people, and to see them authentically rewarded with more trust and loyalty. Several trends have brought us to this point, starting with greater competitiveness in recruiting – especially in Silicon Valley, which seems to be...
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Changing Minds in an Industry Made Murky With Mistrust: The Launch of Sia
Cryptocurrency: Mistrust and Darkness “Bitcoin” was one of the most googled phrases this past year. Everyone rushed to figure out what it was, how it worked, and how to get in on the action. We’re living in a “Bitcoin Boom”; Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) raised more than$4 billion in 2017. Last year, the average number of bitcoin transactions was estimated at 12,000 / hour. And interest and investment in bitcoin and cryptocurrency are only increasing. While the world was chattering, regulators globally expressed concern. Words like “threat,” “heist,” “misleading,” “deceptive,” “criminal,”...
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The Business Case for Trust: How Leaders Can Unlock the Full Power of Trust
Trust Pays Off The business case for trust is straightforward and continues to grow. Each year, the data shows that companies with a culture of trust are more profitable than those without it. A culture of trust is not just a “nice-to-have.” It’s good business. Trust culture companies have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of three, and high-trust companies “are more than 2½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations” than lower-trust companies. Why? It turns out we come with an evolutionary hard-wired attraction to people we can trust and a visceral aversion to...
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How CMOs Can Control Their Brand Message in the Age of Digital Sprawl
The New CMO What does a CMO do? Just a few years ago, that was an easy question to answer. You focused on building a brand. You managed your channels: press, radio, a TV spot, maybe even an outdoor installation if you were feeling ambitious. Like a conductor, you could orchestrate your brand message with Mozart-like precision. Marketing, itself, was a pure sport, clearly defined. Flash forward to today, and the blurred lines between technology, marketing, and sales are harder to discern than ever. Fluency in digital transformation has gone from a specialty to a requirement. CMOs need to be...
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