Blog
Marketing vs. Brand? Do You Know the Difference?
Marketing vs. Brand People are sometimes confused about the difference between marketing vs. brand strategy. This is not surprising, because they are not mutually exclusive ideas. They are interdependent strategic activities that feed, inform, and drive each other. The important distinction to make is in the intent and desired outcome of each area. Brand Brand defines how people should ideally feel about your business and products. It strives to find how to optimize belief in what you do offer and what you stand for in the world. It is an abstract idea held in the hearts and minds of people...
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The Role of Insights in Brand Strategy
The Role of Insights As a strategist at Emotive Brand, Carol Emert leads client engagements with a focus on close collaboration, deep insights, and compelling storytelling. Her passion is to deeply understand the unique truths of each client – their goals and vision, challenges and opportunities, people and purpose – and create strategy that propels them toward their highest aspirations. In this post, she offers her thoughts on the powerful role of insight when it comes to creating a resonant and meaningful brand strategy. What’s your best definition of an insight? Insight is, by its...
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Professional Services: Elevate Your Firm By Embracing Purpose
Professional Services Brands When it comes down to it, strategies to ensure credibility, expertise or commitment don’t make a professional service firm to stand out. We expect law firms, management consultancies, and professional services brands to be credible, to have expertise, and to be committed; they shouldn’t need to be reminded of these attributes, and this type of positioning holds no sway in an already overcrowded, homogenous group of competitors. Many professional services firms “brand” themselves around ideas of client-centricity and attentiveness. For us, this simply isn’t...
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How to Make a Business and Brand Transformation Successful
Emotive Brand hinges itself on the power of business transformation through brand strategy, and brand strategist, Jo Schull adds a honed strategic mind to our team. By working directly with clients to help understand the true essence of their business, she uncovers the necessary internal and external strategies needed to transform the potential of their brand into a reality. In this interview, Jo offers her thoughts and expertise on how to make a brand and business transformation successful. People are always talking about business transformation – what does that mean? Business...
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Meaningful Millennials: On Millennial Advertising
Millennial Advertising We’re back with our ongoing installments of “ Meaningful Millennials ,” where we interview millennials on a variety of different subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio. As a brand strategy firm, we work with a lot of clients who are looking to reach, connect, and engage with millennials in productive, positive ways. Millennials now represent the largest group of consumers within the U.S., and thriving brands today are highly aware of this. When millennials are wielding over $170 billion per year in purchasing power, there’s no ignoring us. I heard fourteen...
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Building the Perfect Team? Is it Even Possible?
A recent New York Times Magazine article, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” went viral and became one of the most emailed and widely shared stories for days – for good reason, in our opinion. Building a good team is a difficult task for most companies, organizations, agencies, classrooms, and families alike. And building the perfect team? That often feels impossible. So why do some groups thrive? Why do others falter? Is there a key to team success? These were the questions Google set out to answer. Here’s our spin on what Google discovered. Teams = Teams The...
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Why are Feelings and Purpose so Important in Business Today?
Feelings and Purpose-led brands Why are purpose and feelings so important now for brands? A meaningful brand is the persona-driven presence and experience of an organization that has proactively decided to orient itself around an authentic purpose. Such brands do so with the intent of emotionally connecting to people on a deep level, by addressing core human needs. Most significant, a meaningful brand strives to forge these attitude and behavior changing connections both inside and outside their organizations. To summarize, a meaningful brand is: – Proactively meaningful across all...
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Consider This Before Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy
Preparing to Develop Go-To-Market Strategy Developing a strong go-to-market strategy (GTM) is hard to get right – especially for any startup in high-growth mode. The right GTM requires bringing together all of the strategic assets that address your business and growth strategy: sales, marketing, product, channel, brand, and vision. The benefits of developing this kind of strategy are huge, but a lot of pieces have to come together in order to properly prepare and ready your organization for investing in it. Bringing in experts to help create a GTM strategy brings both a strategic and a...
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Why Brand/Artist Collaborations Are Taking Center Stage
Brand/Artist Collaborations In the Spotlight The rise of brand/artist collaborations in recent years says a lot about where branding is headed. What were once two separate playing fields are now overlapping more than ever before. And for brands and artists alike, it’s a powerful joining of forces. The list of recent brand/artist collaborations is ongoing. French visual artist, Ludo, collaborated with cutting-edge fashion brand MINOTAUR to create a capsule collection that tied the brand to Ludo’s unique, hybrid style of juxtaposing the natural world with technology – helping MINOTAUR live up...
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Positioning Strategy for High-Growth Tech Companies
High-Tech Companies Have Banished the Word Brand Strategy I’m not sure when it happened. I only know it has. Brand strategy is no longer something the tech world is asking for. Well, let me be clear, they are still asking for it, they just aren’t using the term brand strategy. Positioning strategy is the new brand strategy, at least for high-growth companies where time is of the essence. I’ve felt the shift first hand. As a co-founder of an agency, I’m the person who takes the incoming calls from prospects looking for an agency. It used to be that I would patiently listen for the words...
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Brand Evolution: Keeping Greatness, Adding Appeal
What is brand evolution? I think I found a solid example. I recently came across these photos showing two models of the classic Porsche 911. 50 years separate the two models, yet the clarity of the design concept are obvious in both generations. It is a brand “evolved”. Emotive Brand is about taking what is good and great about your business and brand today, and evolving it for a new generation, a new audience, or for the addition of a new product. It is about transforming the presence and feeling of your brand to make it more relevant and appealing, given how the rest of the...
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The New Measurements of a Successful Business
What does it mean to be a successful business? In the new age of meaningful business, it’s time for more inclusive forms of value. It’s no longer enough to measure financial impact. Companies, brands, investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers are asking: what’s the social impact of your business? What’s your environmental impact? Your emotional impact? In other words, people are asking: Why should I care? Why does it matter? And they are also wondering, can you communicate the value of these impacts to me quantitatively? In any successful business, there is value outside the actual venture....
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If You Want a Meaningful Brand, Make a Meaningful Impact
Being a Meaningful Brand The data is in, and to be a meaningful brand, you must make meaningful impact. It is inescapable. The most powerful and profitable brands – regardless of sector – are brands that enhance well-being and enrich peoples’ lives. The Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham University recently published “The V-Positive Report,” which ranks brands according to how they affect consumers along seven dimensions of human needs and wants. The dimensions of the study span from basic physical function to the capacity for building relationships. The most “V-positive” brand in 2015...
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Creating an “On-Brand” Community for Developers
The Value of an Online Community Building an online community is a great way for companies to encourage deeper relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and most especially – developers. Technology companies are particularly adept at leveraging active participation, good will, and sheer word-of-mouth power of the cloud crowd. Many sponsor technical communities for developers like teaching, customer support, and newbie coaching. People flock to well-structured, well-run forums for advice, problem-solving, and to share their work and ideas. Some communities spring up of their own...
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Entrepreneurs — Why You Need This Advice for Your Next VC Pitch
The Entrepreneur Pitch Every day, in offices up and down Sand Hill Road, founders meet with venture capitalists to make their pitch. For entrepreneurs, these aren’t mere meetings. They are defining moments, perhaps life-changing ones. Only the truly clueless would be unprepared for meetings of this magnitude. Rock-solid business plan? Check. Technology road map? Check. Go-to-market strategy? Market analyses? Financial projections? Check. Check. Check. And yet…despite all that exhaustive effort, many entrepreneurs are not truly ready for what might one of the most important meetings of their...
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