Forever it seems—well, at least since somebody first developed a computer—people have been trying to create humans out of machinery. Whether that be through robotics on assembly lines or AI doing every other job under the sun – how else are we going to get those damn supply chains working again?
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are helping us get closer to creating humans that increase our productivity, without having to triple our staff to get all that pesky work done. The goal is impressive, no doubt, as is our progress to date. Just ask any number of industries who are successfully automating.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are helping us get closer to creating humans that increase our productivity, without having to triple our staff to get all that pesky work done. The goal is impressive, no doubt, as is our progress to date. Just ask any number of industries who are successfully automating.
But this isn’t the solution we need. We’re cheating. Lowering the standards. Moving the fences in. How so, you ask? We’re dumbing ourselves down. Turning ourselves into robots. We force every issue into a binary question. You’re either pro-this or anti-that. A one or a zero.
In the marketing and advertising world, we like to tell business owners they need to humanize their brands. We talk about it ad nauseam. Just type “humanizing your brand” into your favorite search engine and see what comes up. In less than a second, you’ll get millions of links to articles and blog posts whose authors are all pretty much echoing each other. Ironically, much of it is probably AI-generated or assisted, and it all sounds the same.
Marketers are not wrong. You do need to humanize your brand- by being human. If only we all understood what being human really means!
Well, we have to start somewhere, so we’ll start here: Your brand needs to feel. Your brand needs to care about something. Believe in something. Stand for something. Have compassion. Want to help. Want to share. Love a little. Hurt a little.
Your brand needs to have an identity, and that identity needs human traits.
Creating a strong identity often starts with creating a brand personality traits list—a structured approach that helps identify the emotional and behavioral characteristics your brand should consistently embody.
First, let’s take a quick step and make sure we all understand what the brand is. And if you don’t know already, it’s not the company name, your logo or tagline. Your brand is the perception your various audiences have of you. And that’s true whether you make soft drinks, hard plastics, upscale shoes or downhole tools.
Which brings us to the next key point: you don’t own your brand. At most, you’re in a partnership with your various audiences. Do you think your fans—current and potential customers, vendors, suppliers, stockholders, etc.—want to be partners with a robot or some faceless corporate entity? Of course not.
They want a relationship with someone they think is smart, funny, honest, cool, talented, trustworthy, compassionate, helpful, or better still, a combination of several or all those things. In other words, someone they like. That’s why you need to humanize your brand. So how do you make your brand more human?
You’ll recall when Apple had this easy-going, smart young guy personify Mac, while having a somewhat less “cool-seeming” guy embody the PC. If computers were people, this is who they’d be. Which would you want to work-play-create-game-explore-discover with? IBM doesn’t just offer AI, it introduces you to Watson. M.D. Anderson – a prominent cancer center in Houston – flips things a bit, turning a disease into something you can talk to, threaten and, eventually, kick its backside.
As the customers, we’re no longer relegated to comparison shopping product specs. We can develop feelings for these companies and products. Feelings that, they hope, blossom into a relationship.
And that relationship is strengthened when brands speak in distinct, recognizable voices using intentional brand personality words—words that evoke specific emotions and signal who the brand is and what it stands for.
Go through these steps and write down your brand personality. What traits do they have? How do you want your brand make people feel? What human words can be used to describe your brand personality– young, mature, vibrant, calm, active, relaxed, vivacious, steady.
Another tactic is to employ a spokesperson like when HP used Christian Slater to tout the importance of cybersecurity. HP is a highly-technical company marketing opaque services such as cybersecurity. It makes sense to put a well-known actor in an engaging ad to represent itself, because let’s be honest, cybersecurity from a typically stuffy brand is not a subject that’s going to move our emotional needle.
To be fair, most tech companies probably, on some level, suffer from unfair stereotyping as awkward, unemotional, even robotic and algorithmic in how they present themselves. Making them more human will help them connect with customers and cast a broader net beyond the typical subject matter experts who may already be in the market and acquainted with their products.
This can manifest in several ways. One is through testimonials. Let your employees be the spokespeople for the company or product. That way, your potential customers aren’t getting a sales pitch from an actor, they’re getting it from the people responsible for the company or product.
Another way is to just call attention to what your people are doing, whether it’s winning over new business, completing an important project, volunteering in the community, or even just having fun together at happy hour. The social outlets are the most common channels for this. If you’re business partners with local charities and sponsor events, social posts, preferably with photos, can demonstrate how your company, and therefore your brand, is concerned and compassionate. This same kind of content is valuable on your website, both to your customers and, perhaps just as importantly, to potential employees who’ll appreciate an employer with a heart. While these aren’t ads about your product or service, these human moments get associated with your brand.
This approach will take a little more thought and effort and require the participation of more than just the marketing team. There are companies in almost every business sector that simply sell stuff. Often, the stuff they’re hawking isn’t all that much different from what their competitors are pushing. In those cases, all else remaining equal, success comes down to selling price. And no self-respecting brand wants to be stuck in a race to the lowest price. In such a case, humanizing the brand may involve rethinking how you sell, and perhaps how the company, or at least part of the company, operates.
For example, you could be a business that sells various analytical reports on oil fields. Or you could be the expert counsel for oil field intelligence and comprehensive information about everything related to a piece of property and its current and potential value. Rather than just taking an order and giving the customer what they asked for, let your brand take on the personal of an advisor or trusted confidante. After all, you’re someone who’s learned a great deal about their business, where they are on their journey, what their goals are, etc.
Humanizing the brand isn’t just about hiring a spokesperson or employing testimonials. It’s about developing and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
None of this is easy. If you don’t choose the right spokesperson or attempt to portray brand characteristics that aren’t true to your company, your audiences will know.
Early on, leadership needs to make an honest assessment of your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Then, based on what that exercise reveals, you have to decide what kind of persona or archetype the company is. Or wants to be.
That’s a process requiring a great deal of consideration and deliberation, and one made easier by a branding and marketing firm… or should we say, a helpful guide who’s walked others through it before.
It’s a difficult process but worth it. Humanizing your brand helps lead to loyalty. Here at PlatinumBlack, we walk with our clients in deciding who their brand is , or needs to be and it’s always deeply gratifying to work with them on answering the fundamental question: what does it mean to be human?
