Blog
A Black Perspective On Discomfort, Design, and Doing Something
A Thought Piece from Keyoni Scott, Designer at Emotive Brand. Demanding Change Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, the list goes on and on. The murder of George Floyd has been a trigger for a lot of people to finally stand up and demand change. People are flooding the streets and protesting. Signing petitions and sending emails to government officials. Sparking conversations they used to avoid. Donating money to Black Lives Matter and other impactful groups like Campaign Zero, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU, Black Visions Collective. Racial...
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Innovation: You’re Thinking About It Wrong
Let’s Reimagine How to Innovate: A Thought Piece by Robin Goldstein, Part 1 Robin Goldstein has been a part of some great teams learning and thinking about innovation and disruption at companies like Apple, Zoox, multiple startups, and now, the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign. In this series, she offers her accumulated wisdom around how to reimagine innovation, shift your mindset from ‘what and how’ to ‘why and who’, build the right team, and create a future that isn’t simply the past with fewer bugs. This week is the first installment in her feature. Please keep posted each week for new...
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Return on Meaning: Five Evaluation Criteria for Your Business
Brands Rooted in Meaning Win Big Return on meaning for businesses and brands is a compelling notion. In today’s world, it’s important to reconsider the ways you matter to people that are authentic to your brand’s purpose in the larger world. Now is the time to return to core human needs and evaluate where your brand fits in. This is why savvy leaders are taking a different approach to brand strategy. They are embracing the ideals of purpose, empathy, and meaning. They are creating newer, deeper, and more enduring connections with the people vital to their brand’s...
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Talking Purposeful, Global Leadership in a COVID-19 World: Interview with Emily Chang, Senior Executive
An Interview with Senior Executive, Emily Chang: Purpose and Profit, Meaningful Global Leadership, Commercialization, Innovation, and Mentorship in a COVID-19 World We sat down with Emily Chang, a Senior Executive with 20 years of global experience in Customer Experience, Business Strategy, Cross-Cultural Team Leadership, Change Management & Organizational Renewal, and Brand Building at enterprise organizations such as P&G, Apple, IHG, and Starbucks. Emily is in the midst of writing a book that focuses on ideas of purposeful leadership, community, and culture. In this interview, she...
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Kick the Door Down with Your Brand Manifesto
Building a successful brand can feel like building a ship in a bottle. There are so many delicate and interlocking pieces to monitor and keep safe within a defined system. It’s a process that rewards research, meticulousness, measuring twice, and cutting once. Yet in nearly every project I’ve been part of, there comes a time when the kid’s gloves come off. People get restless, get sick of being extra careful, and want to kick the door down with their idea. Maybe everything feels technically right, but nothing is resonating in an impactful way. The fact is, when it’s time to go to market,...
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Talking Marketing Strategies in a COVID-19 World: Interview with Joshua Schnoll, Marketing VP
An Interview with a VP of Marketing: Marketing Strategies, Growth, Innovation, & Teamwork in a COVID-19 World We sat down with Joshua Schnoll, VP of Marketing at AppDirect, a subscription commerce platform that gives businesses the freedom to grow, to talk about marketing strategies in a COVID-19 world and beyond. Joshua shares insights and thoughts on how strategy has shifted, the implications of this time on growth, brand, innovation, and teamwork, as well as what kind of mindset leaders should be adopting as this crisis continues to unfold. Obviously, our world has been greatly...
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The Meaningful Workplace: Employee Engagement for the 21st Century
The meaningful workplace is an idea which seeks to address many of the pain points businesses are feeling as they try to get their enterprises fit for the future. This white paper will set out the advantages of building a purposeful, values-driven workplace with a meaningful culture that better balances the needs of both the employer and the employee. It will explore how businesses can reach out to their employees on a new and more engaging human level that reduces the static inherent in typical company/employee interactions. It will argue that when senior management seeks more meaningful...
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Brand Strategy for Turbulent Times
Business is in Flux Brand strategy matters now more than ever. COVID-19 is a health crisis first, but also, an economic one. Many businesses that we work with are feeling uneasy about the current economic situation and the long-term effects of COVID-19 on business. Financial markets are no doubt showing extreme symptoms. There is an unignorable sense of shutdown and although the world has faced other economic crises before, this time is different. Business leaders, VC funders, investors, consumers, and employees are unsure how long this will last and to what extent they must shift...
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Emotional and Meaningful Brand Connections Matter Right Now
The Time for Emotion and Meaning Is Now Battling the arduous winds of COVID-19 will take more than a shift in your communications. It will require a real change in behavior. Right now, people are experiencing a whole slew of complex and contradictory emotions. Some of these feelings are ephemeral and are changing every day; others like uncertainty are staying around for the time being. So to truly connect with people where they are, you have to speak their emotional language. That’s why having your brand behave in a more emotionally charged way and putting the focus on building truly...
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Transforming Business Through Empathy
Empathy and Business? Some say no, we say yes. There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy. Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own. Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position to one that is robust in meaning and purpose. Empathy as a driver of brand strategy When you’re close-in to a business’s daily operations it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the...
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Fast Forward Your Narrative: COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant?
COVID was a catalyst for change. Is your corporate narrative still relevant? At the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, companies were scrambling to respond to the moment. But as recognition sets in that these changes are here to stay, we must respond to a new movement: one that moves fast, with feeling, for the future. The landscape of brand, business, and culture has been undeniably transformed. So, we must figure out how to communicate in ways that were empathetic and relevant, contextually aware, human, and sensitive. Given our new normal—a constant state of change—today’s leaders, brand...
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A Letter From Our CEO
These are the words I shared with our team at our last in-person meeting before we air-hugged our goodbyes until who knows when. Our carefully thought-out plans for 2020 were instantaneously put on hold as COVID-19 took its grip. Like everyone else, we’re now creating plans for the unknown, but our approach to this pandemic is the same approach we’ve always practiced as a business. People first, empathy always. Every decision we make is made through the lens of: what is the right thing to do for our people? Our employees, clients, partners, friends, and families? I believe there has never...
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Adopting a Human Mindset
Over the past weeks, we’ve transitioned to a new life at home, the place where everything now happens with little exception; a blurred, ever-shifting diagram dividing work, our relationships, family life, and rest. In this way, coronavirus has become the great equalizer. The pandemic has also clarified the differences between how we live our lives and the support we’re able to receive, or not. It has swiftly and single-handedly altered our needs as people. It has forced us to prioritize what matters most and accept what’s out of reach. As a result, we have competing practical needs;...
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Cultivating Empathy: Essential in Uncertain Times
Empathy in Uncertain Times These days, everything feels unsettled. We’ve watched travel discontinue, lively offices expeditiously shift to remote work, restaurants and small businesses shut their doors, cities still and quiet, as the landscape of our global economy shifts on a daily basis. Recognition that this COVID-19 state of living, working, and doing business will not be ephemeral is settling in. We’re seeing first hand as our clients are forced to quickly adapt—make swift decisions, innovate new solutions, and reimagine the way they’ve always done business. It’s clear that the weight...
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Global Growth, Local Success: Your Employer Brand Can Do Both
Level Setting: Employer Branding Is a Must-Have As a brand agency whose work revolves around transforming business by changing how people feel about brands, we’re naturally true believers in the impact of employer branding. We think of employer brand as the practice of ensuring a company’s external branding efforts are supported by a corresponding and complementary internal brand that speaks to current and prospective employees. When companies do succeed at successfully articulating an emotionally meaningful proposition of what it means to work for their company, recruitment, retention, and...
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