❤️A lot of ink has been spilled (and money spent) on trying to convince companies that the goal of having a brand is to get people to fall in love with your business. While nobody's going to argue that having customers who love you is a bad thing, too much focus on this from the outset could distract brands from more important work that creates more enduring sources of value for customers and the companies that serve them.

📣Having points of difference is the lifeblood of branding. Without it, you're a commodity. Finding those points is the easy part, the hard part is finding ones that others are unwilling or unable to imitate. Differentiation is exponentially harder in professional services, where the barriers to entry and imitation are almost non-existent. One of the ways we have achieved differentiation in this market is through a greater willingness to stick our necks out in an industry that's notoriously risk-averse.

📉 In almost every category of business, the current approach leads to managers seeking to squeeze a few more percentage points of revenue out of business practices that they have already optimized, over and over again, in many cases going back decades. Managers end up ignoring bigger opportunities because they don't fit neatly into the established paradigms implied by existing measurement systems. Put simply, the needs of the measurement system start to outweigh the broader need of the business (to grow, to add value, to win).

📱Many brand managers are happy to talk about disruption. Talk, as the saying goes, is cheap; too often, actions fail to keep pace with good intentions. Until more brand managers embrace the transformational opportunities of mobile, social and the emerging Internet of things, the future will remain unevenly distributed.

👩🏼‍💻Highlights from Social Media Today's Expert series, featuring Mary Elise Chavez, discussing 2014's notable trends across emerging technology, mobile and social media.

⌚️Highlights from a MillennialTalk wearable tech panel featuring Emotif's Managing Partner, Simon Pearce, and ECD, Mary Elise Chavez.

💸 "The internet has squeezed the end user to the product" - this has fundamentally changed how brands are built today. Originally presented at the WinWin Business Accelerator Conference 2014, Mary Elise Chavez’s Keynote explores the many facets that create a truly great brand of today.

👀 First there was WoW, then there was Second Life, now there’s Oculus. Exploratory worlds can be a place of escape, but also a place of great inspiration. When Linden Lab created the platform for Second Life, it was exactly that, a platform on which to build - this is a great study of where a passionate audience can take a platform. Literally building out this virtual world brick by brick, the documentary Life 2.0 takes you inside this world in which many people live many hours of their real lives.

🥞Emotif @ SXSW: Panelists at Social Media Today's #SocBizShakeup Breakfast discussed how to build a socially-engaged workforce today, utilize big data, and empower employees through relationship-building tools. Here are a few highlights from the panelists.

🍎Emotif’s Simon Pearce caught up with IBM's Sandy Carter at this year's SXSW Interactive conference to talk about the ROI of social media, overcoming the social "fear factor" in the boardroom and what it takes for an enterprise to be ready for social. 

🍫As much as we may scowl at the likes of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we live in an instant-gratification society - specifically, if you live in a highly-populated urban environment (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles). You’re probably familiar with this way of living - you want it now, and you’ll pay for instant convenience. 

🚕 Whether traveling, commuting or working abroad these are a few go-to apps that keep our Creative Director, Mary Elise Chavez, productive and connected while working on the road.

📈 This astounding chart shows what happened to referral traffic to Buzzfeed network in the past two years. If this is not an isolated incident (and there’s reason to believe that it is not) then we may be witnessing social’s coming of age as the dominant paradigm for how content is organized and discovered on the web. The implications are profound…

🔮 The veneer of perfection that once separated the world of marketing from the everyday customer experience has cracked. Internet transparency is breaking down the artificial barrier between collective aspiration and personal experience. The best brands don't fight this inevitable tide of history, they embrace it.

💻 Digital media represents a huge challenge to the theory and practice of branding. Some have even questioned if brands are now "dying". We don't think so, but we do think that many tactics used for brand-building are being rapidly replaced by new approaches. The way forward is about more than just adopting the latest digital tools, it requires a new way of thinking about, and managing, brand value. The following article explores this topic in depth.

🏃🏻‍♀️ The web is disrupting the historical dynamics of customer loyalty; merely adopting new social media tools is not enough to resolve this issue. In order for brands to adapt successfully, the use of social media tools must be accompanied by a stronger customer experience orientation. This slide show lays out the challenge and offers some suggestions for future focus.

🍵 This weekend, we paid a visit to the Canadian upstart brand “David’s Tea” in New York City. Since it’s founding in Toronto in 2008, David’s Tea has grown rapidly in Canada, and now in the United States. There are lots of reasons to love David's Tea, here are our top six.

⏰ It goes without saying that we’re living in interesting times. One of the things that I’ve noticed about living through a period of significant change in business and culture is that concepts that feel counter-intuitive one day (because they are new, unfamiliar and sometimes downright strange) can turn out to be self-evident the next day.

📲 We are living in a new era for brand-building. Digital technologies are making "Word of Mouth" more important than ever. In this presentation, find out about the implications of all of this change for your brand as well as some examples of how leading-edge brands are thriving under the new rules of branding.

⚡️Getting your brand to awesome. A slideshow about how to create a winning brand in the digital age. Includes helpful data and case studies, by Simon Pearce, Managing Partner of Emotif.