Blog
The Fusion of Strategy and Design
The Best Branding Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts Since its founding in the 1950s, branding has largely been divided into two distinct disciplines: strategy and design. Strategy’s traditional role is to research, understand the competitive landscape, distill the meaning, and establish the market opportunity into a well-formed creative brief. At this point, designers typically take the brief and visually communicate against the strategic objectives. The handoff from strategy to design is not without its pitfalls. Oftentimes, key information gets lost. Strategists can work in intellectual...
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When Designers and Developers Collaborate, Everyone Wins
A great developer recognizes and enhances design decisions. A great designer understands the technology they are designing for. Both developers and designers need to have an intimate understanding of each other’s fields in order to produce better experiences for brands. In order to deliver a bespoke experience for a brand, a collaborative environment needs to be fostered. How to Actually Collaborate A key element to facilitating design and developer collaboration is reshaping the reviewing process. The traditional way is to do a bunch of design work upfront, get client approval, polish the...
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Igniting Growth and Pushing the Envelope for SaaS Brands
SaaS Brands These days, it’s a SaaS world and we’re just living in it. From infrastructure and identity to platforms and productivity, Everything-as-a-Service continues to reign supreme. But what does it take to succeed and become one of the SaaS brands that can achieve the annual recurring revenue (ARR) required to drive predictable growth in an ever-crowding market? According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud services are predicted to grow by 17% this year, from $227.8 billion in 2019 to $266.4 billion in 2020, with revenue forecasts for SaaS brands (cloud application services) expected...
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Customer Obsession: How to Put Them Center Stage
B2B Marketers, Want to Drive Higher Revenue Growth? Start Obsessing Over Customers Now. By now, B2B marketers understand first-hand that better customer experience correlates to higher revenue growth. Forrester and others have reports and studies to prove it. Leaders see it happening in real-time. Sure, the competition still matters. But businesses who are focused, and yes, obsessed, with their customers are finding more meaningful ways to differentiate, drive ROI, fuel digital innovation, and rethink how their business should really be doing business in the customer-led world of today. But...
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Feeling the Holiday Spirit: Introducing Emotive Feels
Emotion Is Everything For brands to make an impact on the outside world, they must explore inner worlds. In our line of work, emotion is everything. The most successful brands are those that evoke feeling—that ignite new ways of thinking about the world and our unique place in it At Emotive Brand, naturally, we’re obsessed with emotion. We believe every company can perform better if its brand connects with people on an emotional level. A brand that’s emotive triggers feelings, inspires action, earns loyalty, and lifts spirits. In the overcrowded business world, your brand must resonate...
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Talking Transformation: Brand, Business, and Culture
An Interview with Katie Tamony We sat down with Katie Tamony, Chief Communications and Culture Officer at Alluma, a technology non-profit dedicated to making sure those eligible for benefits and services don’t fall through the cracks. Katie talks to us about leading transformation projects: her role, why these kinds of projects excite her, and what’s critical in executing a transformation successfully. This isn’t the first transformation project you’ve been a part of. Why does this kind of work appeal to you? Building something new out of what has been has always excited me. That’s why I’m...
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Competing for Talent in a Hot Market
When you’re a young company hoping to thrive and compete for talent in a hot market, like the tech industry, it can be tempting to succumb to the table stakes of the “free” work culture. Many of the most well-known tech giants of Silicon Valley offer free food, gym memberships, massages, dry cleaning, concierge services, work activities, the list goes on, all with the intention of attracting and retaining talent. But, are the free add-ons really working? According to a 2018 LinkedIn report, the tech industry had the highest turnover rates at 13.2% with a median tenure ranging from 1-2 years....
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Looking for a Better Client-Agency Relationship? Look No Further
Sara Gaviser Leslie is a brand marketer, creative consultant, and former Emotive Brand employee. After years of thriving on the agency-side of the equation, she recently took an interim position at Course Hero to experience the client-side of things. If you’re looking to improve your client-agency relationship, here are her five tips to make sure every project is a success. *** The Client-Agency Relationship Until recently, I’ve never experienced a brand creative project from the client-side. I was always the consultant. But, recently, when I took an interim but full-time role with a client,...
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When Your Values Aren’t Really Values
Beware of Generic Values In the inboxes and Slack channels at Emotive Brand, there is a video that often gets shared before we embark on a brand video. It’s called “This Is a Generic Brand Video, by Dissolve,” and it’s a hilarious satire of when you try to make your brand stand for everything, it ends up standing for nothing. “Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement,” the narrator says, in a salt-of-the-earth grumble, “are all words we chose from a list.” Company values not only shape the external identity of your organization, they act as an internal compass for your current and...
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Company Culture Trends for 2020
At Emotive Brand, we’ve always been strong believers in the role that a company’s culture and people play in a business’ success. Yes, a sound strategy, a strong brand, and great execution matter, but ultimately, it’s a company’s people that make it happen—because without their efforts and belief in a company’s strategy and vision, even the best strategic plans will falter. Or as the saying goes: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” There are tried and true ways to build a strong culture: a compelling vision and mission; values that are co-created across the company vs....
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The New Web: How Development Tools and Collaboration Enable New Design
From 2007 until very recently, the web was infiltrated by the same design patterns. Everyone is familiar with this: a generic headline with a call to action, three icons below describing features, and a few full-width, black-tinted images with text on top. When Sketch burst onto the scene in 2010, the web design discipline sped up, but the developer hand-off process was still tedious. Dimensions were specified using redlines, and the web was built with block and inline elements. Flash was dying, and there were no tools for designers to easily bring their more expressive designs to life....
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Employer Branding Trends for 2020
Today, we’re continuing our deep dive into the most important trends affecting your business, brand, and culture heading into 2020. Following our look at content strategy, let’s examine employer brands. Remember when the common sentiment toward millennials was laden with disgust? Who were those entitled young people and their outrageous demands for flexibility, remote working, and—gasp—having a greater purpose in work than making money? It wasn’t that long ago, but oh how the tides have changed. Now, as we all know, those “millennial” demands have not just become normalized, but meeting them...
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Content Strategy Trends for 2020
As the decade winds down to a close, we’re taking a look at the most important trends affecting your business, brand, and culture heading into 2020. First up, we’re examining all things content strategy: tone, technology, and personalization. Let’s do it. Mobile > Everything Else The simple truth is if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work. There can be no compromise when it comes to the look, feel, or content strategy of the mobile experience—considering it is the dominant experience. In 2020, even more emphasis will be placed on increasing mobile user interaction. If your...
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Accessible Design Must Be the Rule, Not the Exception
In the nascent days of computing, the highly sought after feature we now call “dark mode” was the standard. Cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors got their green-on-black look from the phosphor inside of the screens. While this technology was long-ago abandoned, dark themes have re-entered the zeitgeist as the latest “new innovation.” “It’s thoughtfully designed to make every element on the screen easier on your eyes,” Apple claimed in its announcement of the feature for iOS 13. But here’s the thing: there’s no real evidence that’s true. For people with astigmatisms (approximately 50%...
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Stop Worrying About Getting Attention and Start Paying Attention
The most valuable currency in the world is the fact you’re reading this right now. Your attention is like a scarce mineral and companies will blast mountains with dynamite for the tiniest trace element of it. It’s safe to say we live in the attention economy. In exchange for everything being “free,” we have transitioned from being customers to the product. The phrase “time is money” has always rung true, but never before has it been so monetized or measured. As a result, naturally, brands desperately want to know one thing above all else: how do we get attention? How do we differentiate, go...
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