Blog
The Age of Meaning: Break Through the Commodity Barrier
Moving Your Brand Into the Age of Meaning: It’s Not a Trend, It’s Survival The Age of Meaning has significant impact on business visions, brand management, and marketing execution. In today’s fast-changing and competitive marketplace, it is hard to maintain a distinct and meaningful difference in the hearts and minds of people. It seems that as soon as you make a product improvement or change your service offering, your competitors are there either matching you or upping you one. There is another playing field available for your brand; one that most brands are blind to. It’s the...
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Creating A Meaningful Workplace: It Doesn’t Happen By Messaging Alone
Eighth in a series “The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine It was earlier noted that people today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives. This shift has not only prompted companies to reconsider their business models, product offerings, and workplaces, it has made them re-think the terms on which they engage people. Messaging alone won’t pull employees in This is especially true when trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the...
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Time to Reconnect Your B2B Brand to Your Bottom Line
Is your B2B brand disconnected from your daily operations? Do your senior executives consider your brand as they make decisions, sell to clients, hire staff? Are your employees able to draw from your brand the inspiration and motivation they need to be effective and gratified in their work? Do your partners know enough about what your brand is trying to achieve to offer the best possible assistance? Are your investors believing that your brand is building value for them? Do your customers resonate with your brand in ways that distance you from your competition? If your brand is simply a logo...
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Making Everyone a Brand Champion
Developing brand champions is critical Good brand strategies don’t stop at defining why the brand matters. They go further to define the attitudes and behaviors that will define the brand experience in ways that truly matter. Behavior is best defined on two levels: brand and workplace. Brand behavior Brand behavior focuses on the tangible and controllable aspects of your brand. These include the brand’s visual identity and it’s voice in marketing and advertising. Brand behavior identifies the shifts that will generate the feelings with which the brand seeks to be...
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Meaningful Millennials: On Purpose Beyond Profit
This is the fourth installment of “Meaningful Millennials”, our weekly series where we interview millennials on a variety of different subjects that are top of mind for us in the studio. At Emotive Brand, we believe brands that connect with people on an emotionally meaningfully level perform better and matter more to people. We believe that every brand should be meaningful, empathetic, authentic, emotive, consistent, and purpose-led, and we work with brands to help them to act and feel these ways at every touch-point. In the studio, the idea of purpose-led and purpose beyond profit are...
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Meaningful Workplace: Master Plans Create Employee Alliance
Creating employee alliance Seventh in a series. A Meaningful Workplace is built from the company’s master plan – a strategic platform used exclusively by senior management – that defines the three core elements of ambition (purpose), feelings (values), and behavior (building a culture). This master plan drives all subsequent activities, which include: Macro Plans – how the business itself will be evolved; Group Plans – how groups of employees will be engaged; Solo Plans – how individual employees will be personally engaged. Building something great and enduring Macro Planning puts the...
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Doing Good Feels Good – Is Your Brand on Board?
Action for Happiness is a movement for positive social change. We’re bringing together people from all walks of life who want to play a part in creating a happier society for everyone. This video from Action for Happiness spurred some thinking on brands and what people are looking for today. Let’s start by defining “happy”. It can be superficial – like what you feel as you watch a TV ad that makes you laugh or brings a tear to your eye. It can be profound – as in what you feel when you know that what you’re doing is doing good for others. We’ve...
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Building a Meaningful Workplace Culture
Sixth in a series on workplace culture “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” – Albert Einstein A business’ fate is determined in large part by its culture. A business culture is the reality created by how people act, react, and interact with each other based on their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions. The most damaging business cultures are those in which aggression, neglect, and punishment leave employees feeling they have no reason to commit their energies and skills, share their ideas, or help the company advance....
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Meaningful Millennials: On Brand Loyalty
This is the third installment of our weekly series entitled “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 our clients to help create and roll out strategies that enable their brand, their business, and their workplaces to be more meaningful. We believe that with meaning comes loyalty. And with loyalty comes sustained and successful business. This month, we have been focusing on how brands can build loyal relationships with millennials that inspire connections,...
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Using Values to Build Engagement and a Meaningful Workplace
Fifth in a series. “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou The goal of employee engagement is to drive employee attitudes, behavior, morality, and ethics in such a way as to improve their productivity, morale, satisfaction, and usefulness within the organization. However, many companies have struggled with converting their proclaimed values into compelling, work-changing experiences for their employees. Often, the problems have been that the values are typically expressed with meaning-neutral (if...
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Implementing Brand Strategy
Investing in Brand Strategy Is Only Step One Creating a brand strategy that maps precisely to your business strategy demands resources. Money, of course, but also time — the valuable time of your senior executives. But the best and most meaningful strategy in the world can only make a positive impact on your business if it’s implemented thoughtfully and effectively. Don’t waste your precious resources developing a brand strategy if you don’t have a strategy for a proper roll-out. Building a brand strategy is, of course, hugely valuable. Companies do it because they recognize the impact it...
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The Meaningful Workplace: It Takes New Ways of Thinking, and Acting
The Meaningful Workplace is the fourth in a series. How do you build an workplace where people are willing to bring their gifts of initiative, creativity, and passion?” – Gary Hamel You can’t build a workplace that is meaningful to people using the old mentality and outdated tools. Old techniques are no good if they have rendered your current workplace meaning-neutral or, at worst, meaningless. To forge meaningful alliances with meaning-seeking employees requires new ways of thinking and acting. Familiar business constructs that have formed the foundation of employer/employee relations are...
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How Do You Define the Purpose of Your Business?
Seeing Profit as a Consequence, Not a Purpose Like many, you probably default to saying, “To make profits”. And while that is certainly an aim of every capitalistic enterprise, it falls short as a useful and motivating driver of an enterprise. Too great a focus on profits draws attention away from the triggers of success in today’s world. Successful leaders see profit as consequence For more and more leaders, another North Star is rising. By embracing the notion of “purpose beyond profit”, these leaders don’t forego their obligations to generate profits for shareholders. But they subjugate...
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Meaningful Millennials: In the Workplace
This is the second installment in our weekly series entitled “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 our clients to help develop strategies that enable their brand, their business, and their workplaces to be more meaningful. This year, there has been a lot of work in the studio around employer branding, improving employee engagement, shifting culture, recruiting top talent internationally, and understanding how to create a meaningful workplace for millennials....
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Brand and Marketing? What’s the Difference?
Brand and Marketing? Leaders are sometimes confused about the difference between brand and marketing. This is not surprising, because they are not mutually exclusive ideas. They are interdependent strategic activities that feed, inform, and drive each other. The important distinction to make is in the intent – and desired outcome – of each area. Brand Strategy Brand strategy defines how people should ideally feel about your business and products. It strives to find how to optimize belief in what you do offer, and what you stand for in the world. It is an abstract idea held in the hearts and...
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