Blog
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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Embrace Agile Learning and Set Your Business Up For Success
Learning as a Competitive Advantage More and more, a workforce’s capacity for learning is becoming a competitive advantage for businesses and brands today. Staying relevant, fresh, innovative, and creative hinges on a culture’s openness to new perspectives, ability to embrace of different ideas, and willingness to take risks. As businesses look for new ways to compete, stay agile, and move business forward amidst new challenges and fast-paced changes, having agile learners leading and fueling your business matters now more than ever. Without Learning, You Risk Losing Relevancy Research has...
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Autonomy and Accountability: A Balancing Act That Fuels Innovation
Higher Demands for Innovation Today Across industries today, businesses and brands are realizing the need to embrace an innovative mindset in order to compete. In today’s shifting times, agility has never had so much value. And brands who want to be positioned to thrive need to be able to move fast and smart enough to stay ahead of the competition. This hinges on having motivated, inspired, and productive people behind you. Innovative businesses today are fueled by people who believe in their purpose, are given the freedom they need to experiment, take calculated risks, and work creatively...
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The Value of Mapping Business Strategy to Brand Strategy
Business strategy and brand strategy should be closely linked There’s a perception among many executives that business strategy is strategic, and brand strategy is a marketing tool – and not a strategic asset. As a result, businesses set ambitious goals, but don’t consider how investing in and developing a brand strategy could help get them there. As a brand strategy agency, we rely heavily on our client’s full disclosure of their business strategy – their goals and objectives, pitch decks, revenue reports, exit strategy – to build a meaningful, emotive brand that will transform their...
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Rethink How Your Brand Makes People Feel
Emotions and feelings Right now your brand is making the people important to its success feel one thing or another. The question is, are those feelings a help or a hindrance? If sales are slipping, good employees are leaving, loyal customers are defecting, or it’s getting harder to recruit top talent, it’s time to rethink how your brand makes people feel. Feelings and emotions lie at the heart of emotive brand strategies. In our most recent white paper, “Transforming your brand into an emotive brand”, we explain that emotions and feelings are key drivers of our approach to brand...
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Going Global for Inspiration: Unfamiliar Spaces Yield a Fresh Design Perspective
A Design Perspective on Finding New Inspiration As a designer working at a fast-paced agency, it’s easy to feel tethered to the computer. It’s easy to get stuck in the same patterns of designing, looking at the same sources of inspiration, and working from the same perspective each time. But what many people forget about is the value of altering your surroundings – seeing something new, changing your pace, looking elsewhere for inspiration, or just widening your lens of seeing. Being truly creative, inspired, and innovative – as the top designers, business leaders, and brands today need to...
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