Topics

Business

Editing Your First Draft: How To

June 6, 2016 —

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,...
Read more >
Breaking Through Writing Anxiety

May 23, 2016 —

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...
Read more >
Purpose-Led Brand Strategy Optimizes Business

May 21, 2016 —

Purpose-Led Brand Strategy Optimizes Business

Purpose-led Brand Strategy that Masters the Intangibles, Masters Markets A purpose-led brand strategy has the power to optimize the present and future value of your business. When your brand actively embodies all the true and meaningful aspects of your corporate decisions, policies, and actions, it not only brings new energy to your current competitive efforts, it also signals a brighter and more energizing future to the people vital to your company’s success. Your brand houses your company’s intangible value Everyone knows there’s a link between the perceived value of your...
Read more >
Fast Forward Your Startup: Agile Strategy for High-Growth Companies

April 21, 2016 —

Fast Forward Your Startup: Agile Strategy for High-Growth Companies

A new approach for supporting high-growth companies We work and compete in a fast-moving world, driven by an accelerating pace of technological and social change. The markets we compete in shift quickly, competition intensifies, and expectations rise. Flux is the new normal. This increases the pressure on high-growth companies and brands to evolve and implement strategies in shorter and shorter time frames. As a brand strategy firm, we discovered that many of our high-growth companies, especially those operating in crowded, in-flux categories, needed a much more agile approach to addressing...
Read more >
How Being a B-Corp Truly Matters in Business

April 14, 2016 —

How Being a B-Corp Truly Matters in Business

Is their value in evaluating the idea of your business becoming a B-Corp? A B-Corp is a newer breed of businesses that is founded on an amazing set of principles. B Corps are for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Today, there is a growing community of more than 1,600 Certified B Corps from 42 countries and over 120 industries working together toward 1 unifying goal: to redefine success in business. “The B Corp movement is one of the most important of our lifetime, built...
Read more >
Top B2B Business Problems We are Asked to Solve

April 14, 2015 —

Top B2B Business Problems We are Asked to Solve

When you’re a brand strategy firm with a B2B technology focus, there’s no better place to be than the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. Silicon Valley has extended everywhere the bay waters touch the shore, so our location on the Oakland waterfront puts Emotive Brand at the epicenter of the action. Living and working in the middle of this incomparable start-up mecca, we’re surrounded by some of the greatest technology companies ever built, with leading VCs and amazing entrepreneurs as friends and neighbors. For many years, we’ve used brand strategy to solve business problems. Since we...
Read more >
Is Your Brand Holding Back Your Business?

March 4, 2015 —

Is Your Brand Holding Back Your Business?

There’s a price to pay when your brand simply languishes. It’s the cost of lost opportunities. Are you missing the opportunity to change the way people feel about your brand, and hence, what they can do to make your brand more successful. By people, we mean customers, employees, partners, investors, communities, influencers, and so on…. Indeed, we mean all the people who are vital to your brand’s succcess. It’s their decisions and actions that determine your fate. They think and act based on what they feel. If your brand doesn’t make them feel something,...
Read more >
Purpose-Driven Business

November 13, 2014 —

Purpose-Driven Business

McKinsey’s Vision of Businesses as Problem Solvers We recently came across an older and rather interesting article from McKinsey that speaks to the imperative of business to become increasingly purpose-driven. The article starts with the words, “Capitalism is under attack.” It then offers new definitions for prosperity, growth, government, and capitalism itself: a conscious capitalism. Then it goes on to explain what business needs to do: “We believe that a reorientation toward seeing businesses as society’s problem solvers rather than simply as vehicles for creating shareholder...
Read more >
Is a Misunderstood Brand Holding Back Your Business?

July 29, 2014 —

Is a Misunderstood Brand Holding Back Your Business?

  There’s a price to pay when your brand simply languishes. It’s the cost of lost opportunities. First, you are missing the opportunity to change the way people feel about your brand, and hence, what they can do to make your brand more successful. By people, we mean customers, employees, partners, investors, communities, influencers, and so on…. Indeed, we mean all the people who are vital to your brand’s succcess. It’s their decisions and actions that determine your fate. They think and act based on what they feel. If your brand doesn’t make them...
Read more >
Leadership at a Time When People Know as Much About Your Business as You Know About Them

April 29, 2014 —

Leadership at a Time When People Know as Much About Your Business as You Know About Them

Welcome to transparency, whether you like it or not. This is the time when people have access to unprecedented amounts of information, including deep insights into what your company is up to. And they are using this information to form opinions – opinions that shape their attitudes toward your business; attitudes that drive their behavior with respect to your business. Be they employees, customers, partners, investors, or industry pundits, what you do, how you behave, and why you do what you do all become factors in deciding your company’s fate. Hence, our advice for leaders wishing to...
Read more >