MotiveLab is Alive!

After a long, long road through a grinding transformation, MotiveLab is finally launching as a reincarnation of Cymbic. It seems appropriate for the first post to be the entry from our history “page”, to say a little bit about how we got here and where we’re going.

MotiveLab was launched in 2006 as a restoration and revolution of the integrated marketing firm Cymbic, a San Francisco-based agency with a long and respected reputation in strategic marketing, branding and interactive. Cymbic enjoyed a 17-year career designing some of the most recognizable business and consumer brands, extending those brands into innovative interactive experiences, and developing a number of strategic marketing and branding methodologies, including a well-known marketing ROI formula and the Touchpoint Mapping process for brand management.

We spent many years struggling along with our clients over the dramatic changes reshaping business and marketing, until we decided it was time to fully embrace an entirely new approach to marketing and agency services. The trend in social media has been a breath of fresh air for us. Sure, a lot of pundits see the idea of social media being practiced by an agency as an oxymoron, but not us. We’ve always been strong advocates of an authentic approach to marketing and branding that far transcends packaged messaging, and you can find that ethic throughout our portfolio, which we’re retaining as an open archive of our professional roots. Similarly we’ve always been strong advocates of marketing technology. We were partners with Macromedia in the early days of Flash, we worked on a DVR interface before Tivo, and we worked with Motorola on an Internet television interface many years before YouTube.

Social Media, an intersection of marketing and technology that repositions each business as a participating member of a market community, is not our vision. It’s the market’s vision. The moment we recognized it we knew marketing would never be the same, and we knew it called for a total transformation.

Why MotiveLab? We see marketing today as an exploration of market needs and opportunities that takes place in real time within your market community. Each market is a laboratory where businesses discover through engagement what motivates their customers. Each market is a motive lab, and our renovated mix of technology, marketing and consulting services are engineered to help our clients embrace that discovery in their own way.