Blog
The Secret to Thriving Business
Purpose-Led Business, Now the Expectation Surviving – let alone thriving – in today’s uncertain economy is hard. Successful companies share one unifying factor: they are purpose-led companies. Purpose is the driving force of thriving business today, a key mobilizer for employees, and the key attribute for well-built and sustainable organizational cultures that can grow, thrive, and shift with the times. Research shows that people are demanding and craving more from the businesses, brands, and companies they work and buy from, and leading with purpose is not a bonus but an...
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Why Integrated Reporting is Inevitable
Integrated Reporting These days, integrated reporting is a corporate dog everyone loves to kick. People will tell you it’s a bore, a chore, a snore. It’s another corporate cost center, a straightjacket on corporate communication, a full-employment program dreamed up by do-gooders to give jobs to bean counters. To its harshest critics, integrated reporting is not even a dog. It’s a tail that wants to wag the dog. A dozen years ago, people said all these things about the Global Reporting Initiative, known as GRI. The first time I wrote a corporate sustainability report, one of the client’s...
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Sustainability Reporting Trends
Keeping on top of sustainability reporting trends is not easy. The field of corporate sustainability reporting is maturing and evolving, making it important to keep up with the changing standards and expectations long after you complete this lesson in Sustainability 101. As you get more experience in this discipline, continue to watch what the leaders do. Keep up with issues on the horizon through the conversations on blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. And, attend conferences to hear from the experts when you can. At Emotive Brand, we strive to keep our finger on the pulse of the industry in order...
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Editing Your First Draft: How To
Time For Editing In an earlier post, I wrote about the anxiety that can accompany writing and how you can overcome it with some simple steps designed to jump start your drafting. In this post, I’ll tell you how to get from the first draft to the finish line. The key to this: editing. So you’ve got a first draft. Congratulations. A first draft, no matter how rough, is cause for a minor celebration (coffee, maybe, not Cristal). A break helps you make the mental transition from writing mode to editing mode. Editing is how you get your rough draft to the finish line. Your mileage will vary here,...
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What’s the Right Wellness Program for Your Brand?
The New Rules of Wellness Programs The EEOC recently issued new rules for employer wellness programs that have made a big splash in the media. With all the recent buzz around wellness, we began thinking about the overall value of these programs and how to build programs, as Obama hopes, that benefit employers and employees alike. What are the best practices for businesses as they incorporate wellness programs into their benefits packages? How can employers encourage wellness, while simultaneously respecting and protecting individual’s personal privacy and making sure employees never feel...
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Sustainability Reporting: Preparing Your Organization
Preparing for sustainability reporting Our advice before starting sustainability reporting, is to prepare your organization before you do anything else. First things first. Before setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to write outlines or strategies or any text at all, there are a few important steps that will help build the foundation for a quality corporate sustainability report (CSR). Most people won’t see the report’s foundation. But, just because you can’t see it, doesn’t make it any less important. Any builder (or homeowner with a leaky basement) will tell you how critical it is...
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High-Growth Software Firm Looking to Accelerate Business Quickly
Metal Toad: a high-growth business needed to be aligned to create maximum impact Metal Toad is a successful, high-growth software business with a highly regarded reputation and big ambitions. As technology consultants, Metal Toad works to modernize businesses by building strategic applications for clients like Sony, Cisco, PBS, Verizon Wireless, and ABC. When they came to Emotive Brand for help, the management team was at a crossroads. As often happens in the midst of a boom, an enthusiasm for growth left the business pursuing too many diverse initiatives. They needed to quickly realign and...
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Top Ten Sustainability Acronyms
Several years ago, I got a new assignment at work and suddenly found myself immersed in sustainability reporting. As I set out to learn my new job, I discovered an alphabet soup of sustainability acronyms that made my head spin on a daily basis. I tried to make sense of what the experts were saying, but the language seemed to barely resemble English. So, one of my first orders of business was to learn the key acronyms of this new discipline. It was clear to me that if I didn’t understand these, I would continue to be lost and confused a good bit of the time. In this field, there are...
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Brand Narrative : The New Origin Story for your Business
Is Your Origin Story Enough to Make Your Business Stand Out? Origin stories have been embedded into modern marketing’s rulebook for as long as we can remember. And for good reason. Historically, they did help companies stand out. Origin have traditionally been the place where a brand explains what business ventures meant to their leaders and for the greater world – personally, historically, economically, and culturally. They helped make brands more human and emotive. People could empathize with stories embedded in the American Dream and felt connected to self-starters, underdogs, and...
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Using Metaphors to Communicate on Behalf of Your Brand
Meaningful Connections Even the most complex brands need to make meaningful connections with customers. At Emotive Brand, we work with a lot of brands that have complicated technology, products, or services. As we dive into these brands, we often find that even company founders struggle to clearly explain what their brand does and why it matters in a way that truly resonates with customers. Oftentimes they use a metaphor to describe their offering. Metaphors are powerful communication devices. They help us consider new ideas or concepts in a relatable way. They help us move away from talking...
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Breaking Through Writing Anxiety
Writing Anxiety Unless your name is Stephen King or Karl Ove Knausgård or Aaron Sorkin, writing anxiety can feel like an integral component of the writing process – and a hugely toxic, paralyzing one at that. I know I feel it. Most new writing projects come with a sense of challenge, the promise of reward – and an unhealthy dose of torment. Which is, frankly, a little weird. I’ve been writing professionally since I graduated from college in the early 1980s. You might think I’d be well past feeling even a hint of anxiety in facing the brutal starkness of the blank page – that I could stare...
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TV Wars: Linear vs. Digital, A Brand Relevancy Battle
A Brand Relevancy Battle It’s a big week for TV broadcast networks as they unveil their new lineup and advertisers strategize where to invest valuable dollars. With all the buzz around the hot shows on air, we’re captivated by the parallel conversations around how linear TV is fighting to keep up with digital TV. Because on-demand television has taken over as the norm, the quest for traditional networks to maintain brand relevancy is paramount. In just a few years, the ritual of sitting down to watch your favorite program at its scheduled time has all but disappeared from American culture....
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Is Your Company Primed for Sustained Growth?
Growth is always good. But sustained growth is always better. It’s not just a matter of a stronger will or more ambition. Sustained growth companies are more agile, more resilient, and more innovative. Our work with a group of mid-market clients, along with a growing body of academic research, indicates the companies who enjoy sustained growth have embraced their purpose, and have built a culture and a set of practices that “live it”. Purpose sharpens vision, inspires teams, and empowers people. Purpose helps every person find fresh ways to think differently, to see how market dynamics can...
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Strategy for the Strategy
Strategy from a strategist. When I started my career, I had some mentors who warned me that my world was going to be different from theirs. The main change was that due to downsizing, client companies no longer had people on staff to manage creative agencies. Instead of working with people who knew communications and branding, I would be working directly with vice presidents of marketing or human resources who had only vague ideas about how they work. That was good advice. But it missed an even bigger change. My mentors believed the clients would have a strategy, and it would be my job to...
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Purpose-led Brands and the Role of the CEO
Purpose-led leaders lead thriving businesses. If you are a marketer faced with the task of re-branding or leading a brand strategy for your business, think about the person most influential to its success. Wondering who is essential to be part of the team? Ask yourself: Who has the greatest insight into where your business needs to go? Who can make sure that the company’s brand strategy embodies, and brings to life, this vision? Who sees how the people, processes and policies of the business need to evolve to address future issues and opportunities? Who is the best person to lead the...
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