Blog
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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Digital Health: A Future With Millennials
Digital Health At Emotive Brand, our work with purpose-led healthcare companies has expanded our vision of how digital health can change people’s relationship with how they manage their health. Today, most patients, across all generations, still depend on long-established ways of connecting with healthcare providers. According to Salesforce’s report, “2015 State of the Connected Patient”, 76% of people call to set up appointments, 62% rely on a doctor to keep track of personal health data, and 40% review the data with their physician in person. However, this is changing rapidly and the...
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Minimalism: Not a Passing Trend
Trendy Business Design can be a trendy business. It’s easy to fall into the trap of following what others deem exciting – moving with the grain rather than against it. However, there’s a problem with trendy design: it gets old. Recently, there has been a resurgence of simple geometric forms in branding: simple color blocks of type in packaging, white book covers, and clear lines. And it may seem like this minimalist way of designing is a new-ish trend, popularized via Behance or famous design blogs, when it actually is just a reach back into a real movement etched in art history books. So...
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Brand Purpose Drives Trust
Brand Purpose Drives Trust How does brand purpose play into building trust? As customers become more connected, more involved, and more engaged than ever before, it becomes more and more difficult for brands to earn their trust. And this trust is key to successful business today. High-trust companies “are more than 2 ½ times more likely to be high performing revenue organizations” than lower-trust companies. One of the strongest drivers of trust today is purpose. People want the brands they buy from and the businesses they support to work in line with their values, goals, and greater...
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Leading a Digital Transformation: The Requirements of Today
The Strength of Digital Today Across the globe, digital innovations are disrupting industries at lightning speed. And brands who want to be positioned to thrive, need to move fast enough to stay ahead. As a result, businesses leading digital transformations today are digitally innovating, digitally connecting, and digitally disrupting at record paces. Moving Digital Forward Accelerating into the future at this speed and competing in a landscape where every touchpoint is interconnected is hard work. Many CEOs are under a lot of pressure to locate and install the right technology as fast as...
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Creativity: The New Competitive Advantage for Businesses Today
The Rising Demand for Creativity at Top Businesses Today Over the last couple of years, top companies have shifted their mindset about creativity and its value. It’s now clear that creativity drives business success today, and brands who want to stay ahead, foster innovation, and stand out in a competitive marketplace need creativity to fuel their business forward. As a result, creative people are more in demand than ever before. However, what it means to be creative is hard to define. It’s a wide spectrum. People stay creative and approach creativity in unique ways. And being consistently...
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Negotiating the Competitive Social Media Landscape of 2017
A Changing Social Media Landscape In November of 2007, brands and businesses were given the opportunity to have an official Facebook presence. The same day, Pages for companies launched and 100,000 companies joined the social conversation. Established brand names, new businesses, local companies – they all felt ready and fired-up about social media and the magical aura that surrounded its impact for businesses at the time. As we enter 2017, social media – for many – feels like it has lost a bit of its magic. What were once feelings of excitement that surrounded the influx of platforms,...
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The Power of Creating a Compelling “Brand Vibe”
We humans are very proud of our ability to think rationally. This cognitive power not only lets us understand and use facts, it also helps us build elaborate creations and fantasies. We use our rational brains to conduct business. Cognition helps us sort stuff out, compare options, and rank priorities. Our rational, conscious brain is so “upfront” in our day-to-day work lives that we begin to believe it is our only way of thinking and acting at work. Yet, as neuroscience is finding, it is now clear that this cognitive ability is not a stand-alone factor in how we perceive, sense,...
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Stronger Brand Building: Why Emotions Matter
Our brains encode emotional memories more forcibly than other data. Looking for the keys to stronger brand building? Want people to remember your brand in deeper and more enduring ways? Wish they would act more deliberately on your brand’s behalf? According to brain science, emotion is the key. I’ve long been preaching the idea that brands should generate a specific emotional aura as part of their every day brand experiences. I have urged them to evoke these selected positive emotions across the many interactions they have with people. My thinking has been that by evoking emotions within the...
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Fresh Perspectives: Refresh & Energize in 2017
2017, A Different Year Each new year marks a new opportunity for reflection, change, and asserting goals and objectives. 2016, like many years in reflection, was a whirlwind of ups and downs, successes and challenges, learning and progress. By stepping away from the office and our workflow for the holidays, we gained distance from the happenings of 2016. And at Emotive Brand, we believe this space and time away is critical to gaining the clarity we need to take 2017 by storm. There is great impact and value in stepping back in order to see things with a fresh perspective. Everything comes...
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Top 10 Brand Strategy Articles of 2016
Top Brand Strategy Articles of 2016 In 2016, we created a lot of content meant to help you position your brand and business to thrive. These are the buzz-worthy posts that resonated the most this year. Enjoy our top 10 brand strategy articles. The Role of Company Culture in Business Success What is a Brand Promise and Why Do You Need One? Brand and Marketing? What’s the Difference? Brand Narrative is a Necessary Part of Brand Strategy Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard? HR and Marketing: Building Your Employer Brand Together Investing in Brand Strategy Is Only Step One...
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Magical Holidays from Emotive Brand
As the year closes in on its end, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank you. Thank you for reading our blog. Thank you for engaging with us. Thank you for sharing our posts and adding value to the conversation around all things brand related. This blog wouldn’t be possible without our readers. You add meaning to our purpose, and we are so thankful for all of our readers of 2016 and all to come in 2017. Each year, we look forward to creating our holiday card. It’s another way for us to share our brand with the people who matter to us and for us to have a little creative fun along the...
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2016 San Francisco Branding Agency: A Year in Review
Looking Back As I look back on this year and reflect on the work we did, the shifts our agency made, the clients we encountered, and everything else in between, I can’t help but share some significant insights and lessons I learned working in a San Francisco brand agency. Agile Strategy Meets Actual Reality This year was about meeting clients wherever they were on their brand strategy journey and finding tangible ways to deliver impact to their business and brand. Luckily, we saw this coming. We developed new ways to adapt our more linear brand strategy methodology to the changing needs of...
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Girl Scouts: Embracing a Purpose Bigger than Cookies
Girl Scouts Girl Scouts have always been bigger than the cookies they sell. In fact, Girl Scouts of the USA is currently the world’s biggest organization dedicated to girls. Founded in 1912, a long list of prominent women today were Girl Scouts – Celine Dion, Venus Williams, Nancy Reagan, and even Michelle Obama (a big fan of the organization and its impact). Slipping Membership The organization currently has 1.8 million members, a drop from the 2.1 million members three years ago. And many are asking why the drop? Slipping membership can be explained in several ways. The organization may be...
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