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What makes a workplace emotionally meaningful? It’s a place where people feel their work is worthwhile. They feel that what their company does, how it does it and why it does it is both respectable and admirable. As a result, they feel proud to be associated with the company. They also feel that what their company does is both helpful and valuable to people. As a result, they feel part of something purposeful. It’s a place where people feel their work experience is gratifying. They feel that they and their colleagues work in a committed and focused way. As a result, they feel...

Commerce is all about give and take. Your brand holds out a bundle of value, people offer their time (as employees) or money (as customers or investors) and your brand takes. The game, of course, is to ensure your bundle of value is seen as something desirable, and well worth the time or money to be invested. But what happens when your bundle of value isn’t seen as being especially desirable? Even worse, when people start to question whether it’s worth their investment? It can happen easily. Your competitors are constantly playing catch up with whatever you do (welcome to the era...

 We came across a fascinating workplace story in The Washington Post by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle. Over the past 15 years, the team has tracked diary entries of 238 executives in 7 different companies. Their bottom line:  What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making progress in meaningful work.  Consider this: on one-third of those 12,000 days, the person writing the diary was either unhappy at work, demotivated by the work, or...

Your brand plans to launch a new product or service, code-named BigHope, with the goals of increasing revenues and expanding your customer base. To this end, you have asked Emotive Brand to describe how it would approach this challenge. We believe that the most successful brands and products help people get what they want and need – ways to create new meaning in their lives. We are in the business of finding relevant meaning within brands, products and services, and bringing that appealing and differentiating power to light. For BigHope, our goal will be use the kitchen of emotive...

We recently came across this great story about bringing corporate values to life inside and outside a brand. Frost Bank is in Texas, but when Terri, a customer of ten years standing, moved to San Francisco, she kept her accounts in place at Frost Bank. This is just one of the many stories Frost Bank uses to substantiate it’s claim for superior customer service. Frost Bank employees are guided by a manifesto of short, but telling, statements about things that truly matter to customers: Bankers should know their customers by name and vice versa. Courtesy should not be based upon the size...

We enjoyed reading Tom Asacker’s recent post, “Does your brand impute.” As usual, Tom makes important points with grace: “Leadership brands understand that brand success is not about winning a debate; it’s about signaling meaning. It’s not about convincing people with well-reasoned arguments. It’s about unearthing what people need to feel good, smart and special, and then giving it to them.” The message is clear: there’s a gift you can give people “that just keeps giving”. We believe that gift is already hidden inside your brand. It’s...

How do you take a brand operating in a marginally interesting and commodity-prone category to a meaningful position? You look deep inside what the brand does on a human level. You pull that out and shine light on it. People suddenly see something that wasn’t there before, something they like, something that helps them create meaning within themselves. You change how people feel, and they change how they feel about your brand. What human meaning is hidden within your brand? What could it mean to your business if people felt more emotionally involved with what you’re really all...

 Hugh MacLeod orginally did this drawing for a commission, but brought it out again after being inspired by a speech he heard about brands as platforms. As he puts it: “When you create meaning, understand your purpose, creating something worth talking about comes pretty easily.” Through our emotive branding process, we provide our client’s employees with new and helpful stuff to talk about. We give them a statement, which we call a “Driving Idea,” that urges them to reshape what they do to better align to the brand’s business and emotive goals. Built...

We came across this on the Truly, Deeply blog: US film maker Walt Thompson spent 22 hours shooting 2,600 pictures along with unmentionable hours of editing to create a Lego inspired marriage proposal for his girlfriend of four years. As Dave Ansett, the man behind Truly, Deeply put it: “Can there be a much higher tribute to a brand than to be woven into the most important and valued moments of our lives?” We agree. Lego has attained a truly meaningful position in the hearts and minds of people the world over. And while not every brand may have the intense emotional...