Blog
Not Another Outdoor Brand: The Appeal of Meat Eater
In our last blog post, Joanna Schull explored an approach to companies that are creating their own categories. Today, we’ll talk about what happens when a brand takes an existing market category and turns it on its head entirely. When this happens organically, as part of a larger vision, the results can surprise and excite. Sandwiched between the romcoms, reality shows, and “Steamy Thrillers” of Netflix, you can find Meat Eater. In its tenth season, the show centers on hunting and fishing across multiple continents. There’s a clue to Meat Eater’s ambitions in its name: a determination to...
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Category Leadership: Branding at the Edge
The thrill of discovery One of the more exhilarating aspects of working with emerging technology companies is helping them map new ideas, evolving business models, and innovative technologies onto the existing brandscape. Sometimes there’s a clear way to position their offerings that gives them unique ownership of a positioning territory. But there are many times when a company’s offering is unique, original, or revolutionary to the degree that an existing category doesn’t describe them. We call this “branding at the edge” and it requires reframing the brand landscape in a way that allows...
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Your Verbal Identity Has Never Been More Important
If I’m doing my job right, this first sentence should jump right out and ring the little bell in your heart. Margaret Atwood once said, “A word after a word after a word is power,” and how brands utilize that power is often the difference between cutting through the clutter or simply adding to it. So, how can you wield communication tools to supercharge your business, crystallize your strategy, and foster conversations that create deeper, more meaningful connections? The answer lies in your verbal identity. Words in a Sea of Pictures Here’s something people love to say: show don’t tell....
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How to Slay a Creative Block Monster
August 16th, 2021. I find myself sitting in front of my oversized monitor, surrounded by the predictable Apple devices. My hand is resting on the mouse, Coldplay sings “Yellow” through my overpriced Air Pro Max headphones, while I stare at the white artboard spread across my screen. My left hand rests on the keyboard, while my index finger taps the “T” key. Tik, tik, tik… is it just me, or is my monitor getting bigger and the artboard getting brighter? Two big sinister eyes appear on my screen and before I know it, the Creative Block Monster grabs a hold of me and sucks me into a bright...
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Blowing Up the Typical 9 to 5
Adapt. Modify. Restructure. Sometimes, it feels like these three words are all anyone in the workforce has been doing since the pandemic started. We adapted to working from home, we modified our work schedules to include a hybrid of in-office and at home, and we restructured our workdays to allow all of us some flexibility in the chaos. As an agency, we’ve gotten pretty good at navigating unknown, potentially convoluted problems and finding actionable, savvy solutions. We’re in the business of turning straw (complexity) into gold (opportunity). At Emotive Brand, one of the good things to...
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Connect the Dots with Alignment: A Designer’s Perspective
There’s a method to the madness when it comes to how we approach brand strategy at Emotive Brand. We look at the bigger picture, get all of the necessary information, and dive headfirst into making something that speaks clearly to what our clients need. We asked our design team to shed some light on what works for them when it comes to alignment and how our clients can best prepare for a new project. Design is a team sport and a new site is often the vehicle through which brands are launched. So, no matter how big, small, long-term, or short-term the project, the success of your end product...
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Excuse Me, But Can I Get A Little Transformation With My Brand Strategy?
Change. It’s a bitch. It’s also axiomatic in our industry. Whether you’re a startup emerging from stealth mode, an industry disruptor going public, or an enterprise business in the middle of a merger, every organization is learning to succeed amidst exponentially complex, relentlessly rapid change. We get it. These growth moments force business leaders to rethink everything from value chains to backend technologies. They sometimes require reorganization. And they almost always mean revisiting the brand strategy that got you from where you began to today. More importantly, they force a...
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Too. Many. Choices. Yes, Over-Branding Is a Thing.
I walked into my favorite hair and body care store last week, looking for my usual hair product — you know, the one that protects hair before you heat-style it. I couldn’t remember the name of the product but I figured I’d easily recognize it once in the store. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turns out, the product I use is just one member of a family of products prone to over-branding that all have adjacent but different uses. The family has a common name but each sub-product has a distinct name to indicate its use. Easy, right? No, not easy. A knowledgeable and patient...
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Your Brand’s Competition? The Last Great Brand Experience Your Customer Just Had
When creating a brand strategy the competitive landscape audit is an essential part of the process. You must know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and understand consumer perceptions in order to effectively differentiate your brand and create a compelling brand experience. A competitive audit of your immediate competitors only tells half the story. Your Real Competition Is The Last Best Brand Experience Your Customer Had While your customers will always compare your products and services to your direct competitors, they’re also constantly comparing the experience they’re having...
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Is What You Offer In Evolution? Adopt A Progressive Brand Positioning Strategy
Brand Positioning, While In Evolution Our studio works with a diversity of clients, but most come to us in evolution: at pivotal points in their growth, maturation, and offering. For instance, we’ve worked with Series A companies that want to go to market with a compelling brand but don’t yet have a fully realized product, companies looking to emerge out of stealth who have a big vision for tomorrow but want to focus on their current product to prove results today, and maturing organizations at pivotal points in their trajectory who are facing existential decisions about how to evolve their...
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Need Purposeful Brand Transformation? Let the Data Be Your Guide
Re-Imagining and Evolving Your Enterprise Brand for Its Next Phase of Growth There comes a time in most companies’ growth cycle when they realize they’ve evolved from a company into an enterprise—and that the brand positioning and messaging that got them to where they are today isn’t going to allow them to make the transformation to where they need to be tomorrow. In some cases, the ‘1.0 brand’ is actually doing the enterprise a disservice by not accurately representing their new or emerging position in the marketplace. The challenge, of course, is that evolving a successful brand can be...
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From Strategy to Storytelling: Realizing the Bay Area of 2070
In our line of work, we’re constantly thinking about the future. What’s the vision? What’s the ceiling? How does it scale? But seldom do we get the opportunity to engage with the future on a deeply human level. How will the Bay Area — this complex region we call home — actually look, feel, move, and grow over the next 50 years? In the Spring of 2020, SPUR, a non-profit public policy organization based in San Francisco, had just completed their Regional Strategy research. The body of work was a 50-year horizon project that proposed ideas and actions on everything from revamping our...
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Simplicity Does Not Mean Simple: An Outside Perspective on the Art of Simplification
Legend has it that Hemingway once won a bet for the shortest story ever written by crafting a six-word story, “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” True or not, what resonates from this tale is that simplicity does not necessarily mean simple. ‘Less’ can actually mean ‘more’. When you strip everything away except the most meaningful parts, it forces those remaining parts to tell the whole story. It supposedly took Leonard Cohen five years of rewriting lyrics until—80 draft verses later—he settled on the final version of his song “Hallelujah”. The art of simplification—from words and stories to...
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Move On: The Magic Quadrant Should Not Guide Your Brand
If you’re a startup CEO/Founder/Marketer, you might have read that headline and thought, “What do you mean I shouldn’t care about the Magic Quadrant? I’ll take a Vendor Briefing call on vacation if I have to!” Sure, tech companies strive for a mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant—or better yet—placement in the top right corner as a “Leader”. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant will tell you who’s product sits on the cutting edge of the technology, identify the ankle biters, show who’s falling behind, and identify the leaders in a category. That recognition matters as you develop your product. But, the...
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Ensuring Our Clients’ Success: Change Management and How We Help
Helping Our Clients Be Successful As a brand strategy agency, it’s our job to ensure that our clients are successful. The strategy and strategically-informed design we create is meant to position our clients’ business and brand to thrive. But at the end of the day, it’s not just about how smart or groundbreaking the strategy or design is. There’s a lot of planning and change management that goes into making sure the project is successful and followed through from start to finish in the most impactful way possible. Operations and project management are key to any brand strategy project....
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