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Startup


Entering Your Growth Stage: Position Your Brand, Not Your Product

Entering Your Growth Stage: Position Your Brand, Not Your Product

You just closed your Series A and you’re ready to share your story with the world. You built revolutionary technology that will be better, faster, cheaper—or all three—than anything else in the market. Now you need to hire top talent, build brand awareness, and equip your sales team to drive revenue. You know how innovative your technology is and you’re ready to create a new category. With customers in beta and limited clear competitors, you’re likely tempted to focus solely on your product and how much better your product is than anything else on the market. But a strong product vision,...
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Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Three Key Advantages of a Strong Brand Strategy

Active Brand Management A brand strategy can take what people know and believe about your business to new levels. Active brand management takes a valuable asset that may now be largely underused and turns it into a powerful competitive weapon. Regardless of how sophisticated your current approach to branding is, your business has a “brand” today, though you may have acquired it by default. Simply by being active in the marketplace, your business will have accrued a reputation, a level of fame, and a degree of notoriety (for better or worse) with your customers, and within your industry. A...
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How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

How to Find the Right Product-Market Fit

Since the dawn of man, every entrepreneur believes they have the magical product that is going to change the game, revolutionize the market, blaze the trail, and yes, make the world a better place. It’s the type of hyperbolic startup language we’ve come to quickly identify and dismiss because we know at the end of the day, venture capitalists don’t really back products – they back winning business models. So, how do you skip the tech jargon and get straight to a hair-on-fire business model? There may be no better litmus test than that of the elusive “product-market fit.” Coined by Marc...
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Great Design Shifts Perception

Great Design Shifts Perception

One of my favorite quotes about identity comes from American architect, author, and designer, Buckminster Fuller. “Ninety-nine percent of you who are,” he says, “is invisible and untouchable.” No matter how much we think we understand, there is always something unseen and overlooked humming beneath the surface. Great design can function in a similar way. A logo or a car engine each has a tip-of-the-iceberg function that appears obvious. But behind every glyph and gear, there is an invisible force that has the power to fundamentally shift how we think about and move through the world. Great...
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The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

The Role of B2B Messaging and How to Get it Right

Disruptive and Transformational Technologies Technology is advancing like never before. With disruptive technology advancements in AI, machine learning, iOT, analytics, and so much more, it’s becoming more and more difficult for businesses to keep pace. Industries are being transformed and the world we live in is changing before our eyes. So how can you develop more compelling and differentiated B2B messaging for marketing and sales teams? As an agency, we work with many tech clients who are in the midst of this change – racing the clock to get to market before the competition....
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How to Help Your Startup Thrive Internally

How to Help Your Startup Thrive Internally

Finding for the right strategies to help your startup thrive It’s an all too familiar startup sight. Your technical co-founder and engineering teams have their eyes glued to screens of scrolling code as their fingers fly across keyboards and music blasts through their earbuds. They are driving hard toward the launch date or new product release, losing themselves in their work and consuming Red Bull like there’s no tomorrow. Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO of WorkableHR.com, sets the following as one of ten helpful tasks non-technical co-founders should undertake:...
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Is an Agile Strategy the Right Approach for Brand Strategy?

Is an Agile Strategy the Right Approach for Brand Strategy?

Dynamic Times Require Agile Strategy We have seen a a large rise of requests for our proprietary agile strategy methodology for brand strategy. More than ever, sudden market changes, disruptive business models, rapid-paced technology, and ever-evolving competition demand agility. As customers change, new competition enters and new categories emerge, so businesses must be able to flex and adapt with the times. Without Agility, Less Impact Agility is becoming more and more of an expectation. And being agile doesn’t mean being hasty or impulsive. In fact, it’s the opposite. Agile strategy...
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Your Startup’s Growth Strategy Starts with Brand Strategy

Your Startup’s Growth Strategy Starts with Brand Strategy

You’re running a startup. When should you invest in brand strategy? Put another way, when do you need to grow? When do you need to acquire new customers, build your culture and recruit the right people? For a startup whose primary job is growth, brand strategy can be a critical tool. So the answer to the question about when you need brand strategy is: Not at the very beginning, but probably earlier than you think. We recently branded a stealth-mode software startup whose CEO is a highly successful serial entrepreneur. He has worked with Emotive Brand several times. This time, he brought us...
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Disruptive Technology: Paving Cow Paths or Breaking New Ground?

Disruptive Technology: Paving Cow Paths or Breaking New Ground?

What is disruptive? Is it the company that reinvents a category, or the one that creates an entirely new category? In the case of cities, London’s road system was based on paving ancient pathways, while Washington D.C.’s grid was laid out in advance of breaking ground. Both are great cities today, but their structures came from entirely different ways of thinking. The same is true of companies and brands. Innovation is swirling around the financial sector today with companies reinventing ways to buy, sell, get paid, lend or borrow money, and finance companies. But for the most part, they are...
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Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly

Why a Startup Should Invest in the Brand Quickly

Why we believe founders need to rethink their investment in their startup brand There’s the startup rush. That undeniable startup rush. That adrenaline flow that starts the moment you have an idea worth sharing. An idea that you’re willing to ask perfect strangers to fund. It’s a rush when someone says yes, and another rush when that first check shows up. The one that rents the homely first office and gets you going. After that it gets harder. The technology component of the idea might be easy for you. After all, it’s what you were trained to do. But for many startup founders, the hard part...
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