Blog
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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Discourse Analysis: A Powerful Tool That Ensures Your Strategy’s Success
Missing a Piece of the Picture A powerful brand strategy that drives business forward requires more than an understanding of what customers say motivates them to engage with your brand or your competitors. It requires understanding the larger cultural forces at play that shape those same motivations and comparisons. That’s where discourse analysis enters the conversation. For example, in our work with a major cyber security company, analyzing the discourses at play revealed shifts in the larger security conversations happening in our culture. We discovered we were moving from conversations...
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The Benefits of Purpose-Led Company Cultures
Purpose-led Company Cultures What happens when all the people in your organization feel better about the work they do? When they know they’re helping others achieve greater well-being? When they have a shared belief and feel a kindred spirit with their co-workers? For your business, the benefits are multifold. There’s more alignment, engagement, and motivation in play. Collaboration and innovation become more natural and prevalent. So everything runs more smoothly. New ideas are popping up all the time. Blank, confused, and dispirited faces are replaced by purpose-driven looks of...
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Emotive Brand Happy Hour: Kyla Discusses Her Inspiration
Emotive Brand Happy Hour! Today, our Studio Manager, Catrina Morbidelli, sat down with our Director of Operations, Kyla Grant, to learn more about what drives and inspires her. If you checked out the Facebook video, read the full interview below. What is your biggest motivation to keep working in this field? The work we do at Emotive Brand is never the same. Companies of every size, from industries I never knew of, come to EB to solve their problems – and the solutions are always different. That’s what’s interesting. We are constantly learning, constantly evolving, and constantly moving at...
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Workplace Behavior Helps Brands Compete
Brand strategy that is not activated meaningfully within an organization can fall flat. The best way to ensure employees know how to bring a new brand strategy to life and live its brand promise is to develop a strategy for addresing workplace behavior. When we set out to build our methodology for brand strategy, we had two bold objectives in mind: 1. Reduce the emotional distance between people and brands, to make lives more meaningful, and brands more successful. 2. Go beyond simply stating a meaningful ambition for brands, by showing the executive team, the management, and every employee...
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