Blog
The Power of Good Research for B2C Businesses: Interview with Emotive Brand Strategy Director
As Strategy Director, Taylor Standlee is an expert at identifying business challenges, creating strategic solutions, and driving business growth. Taylor offers thoughts on the changing landscape of good research for B2C businesses today. How is consumer research evolving? Businesses are constantly looking for new ways of understanding, reaching, and connecting with the people important to their success. This includes customers, consumers, investors, and employees. And we’ve never had so many tools or so much data at our fingertips. The challenge, as always, is to be smart about how we go...
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5 Common Mistakes in Brand Design Today
The Brand Design Journey If you’re looking for a brand design or redesign, you’ll need more than a logo or a new website. Brand design is bigger than that. Designing a brand entails designing every moment and experience people have with your brand. It’s about every touchpoint, and these days nothing goes unnoticed. Brand design reflects how your brand looks and how it feels. This means colors, graphic language, typeface, photography, and your logo. In the end, brand design is what brings the brand to life. It’s what makes your brand recognizable and powerful to the people that matter...
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Purpose Drives Financial And Competitive Advantages – Deloitte
Purpose-Driven Companies Deloitte is the world’s largest audit, tax, and consulting firm. They have done extensive research on purpose-driven companies and the role of purpose in them. And according to their report, companies at which people agree there’s a “strong sense of purpose” perform significantly better than those that don’t. Specifically, these purpose-driven companies have: • Excellent financial performance • Distinct and differentiated brands • Strong workplace cultures • Highly satisfied customers Three Drivers to purpose-based performance improvements: 1. Create a Purposeful...
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Why Your Brand Needs to Be a Sustainable Brand
Being a Sustainable Brand Is Now An Expectation What does it mean to be a sustainable brand? Sustainability measures have become table stakes for Fortune 500 companies. People now expect every reputable business to have a sustainability department and as a result, some level of corporate sustainability reporting is the norm. More and more companies are becoming B Corp because they believe in the inherent value of using business to solve social and environmental problems. A shift is underway to make sustainable business something every department needs to get behind. But Where’s The Brand?...
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The Need for Trust and Transparency with your Employees
Demands of Transparency In many ways, we live in a time of extreme transparency. From product reviews and political opinions to knowing exactly what your coworker ate for dinner – not much is hidden. But with so much out there, people are more skeptical and less trusting, constantly questioning: What’s real and who can I trust? As a result, people are demanding more from the businesses they work for and the brands they buy from. People don’t want a sea of information and opinions. They want real, honest, authentic, and transparent brands that ring true at every moment. The Need for...
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Brand Decisions: Rational, Emotional, or Both?
Brand decisions come down to neuroscience? Neuroscience is telling us that every “rational” decision is surrounded and influenced by emotions. So what does that mean for brands? Brand decisions are neither rational or emotional – they are invariably both. But how do you work with an insight like this? How do you bring an emotional dimension to your brand, especially if today it is emotionally neutral? How do you change the behavior of your brand – and the people behind it – so that every interaction is either striking, or responding to, a relevant emotional...
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Writing: When Do You Just Start Over?
Step #1 to writing better: Chuck your first draft. Step #2 to writing better: Start over. The next time you write something, at that exact moment when give yourself a figurative pat on the back for “finishing” a first draft, close the document, drag it to the trash bin, and empty the trash. Seriously. Then take a much-deserved break and forget about that piece of writing for awhile. When you’re ready to try again, open a new document with its proverbial clean slate. And start anew: rewrite from scratch. You will soon notice this reality: You won’t be rewriting from scratch. The document may...
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Brand Guidelines: An Interview with Emotive Brand Senior Designer
The Importance of Brand Guidelines Emotive Brand hinges itself on the ability to transform businesses through brand strategy and strategically informed design. Miguel, a senior designer in the studio, works to bring brands to life by creating clear, inspired, and emotive brand identities. In this interview, Miguel discusses a process of branding that is often overlooked: building brand guidelines. Read to learn more about the importance of having a roadmap for your brand and how it should be used to create maximum impact. Why might businesses overlook the importance of brand guidelines? They...
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Agile Brands Break Through
Agile Brands are the New Norm More than ever before, people expect brands to evolve around their needs, anticipate their desires, and cater to the ways they want to connect with the world. The expectation to keep up with market innovations and business trends translates into a demand for agile brands. Customer behavior is always shifting, and values are changing faster than most companies can keep up with. Consequently, people dismiss brand communications that are behind the consumer curve. For businesses, this mean it’s often hard to keep up. Fittingly, Wired calls this an ear of...
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Is Your Brand Working to Positive or Negative Energy?
Strategies for addressing the energy of your business in good times and bad: We came across this interesting insight by John P. Kotter in his post entitled “To Create Healthy Urgency, Focus on a Big Opportunity” on the Harvard Business Review blog. “There are two basic kinds of energy in organizations. Energy triggered by a big opportunity, can create momentum in the right direction and sustain it over time. Energy based on fear or anxiety, might overcome complacency for a time, but it does not build any momentum or maintain it. Instead it can create a panic, with all the obvious negative...
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Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Writing Feedback
Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Comments and Corrections when Receiving Writing Feedback Writing a solid first draft of something is genuinely difficult. It’s a herculean triumph of creativity and endurance over self-doubt (and procrastination – though the strategies I set forth in the first two posts in this series can make it easier to start writing and plow through to the first draft). Unfortunately, “a solid first draft” is not the same as a finished, publishable piece. You have bosses, reviewers, and editors to deal with before your ultimate audience reads your deathless...
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Brand Behavior Matters for Transforming your Business
To Transform Your Brand, Transform Your Brand Behavior In the end, brand behavior is what drives results. No matter how smart and inspired your brand strategy may be, it’s just strategy. And oftentimes, it’s just not enough. In fact, we’ve seen many brand strategies fall short because they failed to move beyond brand identity and communications, and didn’t provide the guidelines, tools, and processes needed to actually bring the brand’s defining attributes to life through meaningful behavior and action. Brand behavior is all about how your brand reaches out to people and how they respond...
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Embracing Authenticity
Authenticity Is In “If you’re willing to tell me about the bad, then I will trust you when you tell me the good.” In an increasingly staged, contrived, and media-saturated world, people are seeking meaning and authenticity in every facet of their lives. From the employers they work for to the businesses they buy from and the brands they support. Authentic Business Globalization and technology have created a new level of consumer awareness. According to a 2014 survey by Cohn & Wolfe, when consumers rated more than 1,600 brands on authenticity, the three key attributes listed were:...
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The Modern Workplace Requires a Revamp
The modern workplace requires new ways to connect, inspire, engage, and bond with employees like never before. Over the past few years there has been quite a lot of research and stories on worker happiness (and the startling lack thereof). One talked about the story of an employee who, after two decades of service to a financial institution, decided he couldn’t take it any more: “I felt like no one cared about me as a person there, and finally decided to extricate myself from the grind. I know many of you feel the same way now in your jobs…trapped and unappreciated.” The modern...
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Building the Employee Experience
It’s no secret that the employee experience with HR has developed a bad rep. The reality is that most people associate HR with two things: hiring and firing. For many organizations, HR is rule enforcement, the behavior police, gliding in when the people problems arise. And even when employees do have a positive experience with HR, it’s often limited to the brief experience of onboarding. Building Responsibility We’ve mentioned that attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent is the top priority for executives today. And for most businesses, this responsibility falls on HR. It’s no...
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