Using storytelling, data & technology to collect relationships

Brand humanity in a digital world. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not. In fact, digital is the great enabler allowing marketers to breathe life into brands like never before. As you know, brand humanity is the personification of a brand. Making a brand feel human can distinguish it from others and foster loyalty by connecting in emotionally laden ways. This isn’t new. Marketers have been personifying brands for a long time. Think of Apple, Starbucks, Nike. I am sure that you can ascribe very human traits to these brands: Apple is cool, smart and intuitive. Marketers personify products because they know, that as humans, we are hard-wired to size-up both people and brands against the same two traits. These traits are competence, how skilled we are and demeanor, how warm, caring and responsive we are. Since today’s marketplace is cluttered with lots of quality brands, building demeanor may be the best way to expand the brand value proposition and stand above the swirl of trade promotions and the flux of advertising messages.

To do this, some legacy companies are moving from product centricity to consumer centricity.

SAP interviewed 5,000 consumers regarding 50 different brands to understand perceptions between product and consumer centric companies. They found that consumers view product centric companies like Gillette, BMW and Hilton with admiration and awe. Consumer centric companies such as Airbnb, Tesla and Dollar Shave Club are viewed as making life easier. Consumers believe that these companies view them as users of the brand, not just customers, which is a narrower and more transactional attitude.

Product centric companies focus on positioning the brand in the mind of customers instead of the lives of users. Product centric companies are also characterized by emphasizing what the brand has to say to customers, prioritizing promotions and shaping brand perception along the path to purchase. This stands in contrast to consumer centric companies that employ robust user listening protocols, influencing the consumer experience at every touch-point and dedicating significant resources to post purchase activities that build advocacy. 

McKinsey warns that we are entering a highly disruptive extinction event. Many brands that fail to transform to a consumer centric world will disappear like Toys R Us, Nokia and many others. In fact, the life expectancy of the Fortune 500 has fallen from almost 100 years to less than 20 years. I believe that the existential threat is exceeded only by the opportunity. I am leading an approach to consumer centricity that relies on four things: breaking down internal silos, bringing the consumer into view, creating great experience and feeding the marketing funnel a steady diet of valuable marketing content.

In terms of breaking down internal silos, at Henkel, every consumer touchpoint is in one group. Media, Digital Marketing, Shopper Marketing, Merchandising, National Promotions, Packaging Design and the Consumer Call Center all reside in the Omnichannel team, which I am proud to lead. We are not only in close physical proximity to one another, we are also bound by the mission of collecting data throughout the path to purchase in order to glean searing insights that bring the consumer into view. Leveraging a data management platform, we are building, testing and scoring audiences. Personas are built from high value audiences and behavioral insights are derived from an increasingly deeper understanding of these groups. This enables us to sharpen our messages and improve results. The data also enables us to build consumer empathy maps that reveal the unique and predictable tension points that people experience throughout the path to purchase.

This work is leading to the creation of an engagement ecosystem that simultaneously prospects, acquires and retains brand users as well as grows user lifetime value through upselling.  Consumer relationship marketing, dynamic creative optimization, personalization and machine learning initiatives should make the experiences with our brands feel more personal and value added as consumers increasingly interact with our brands. According to Nielsen’s “5 Keys to Advertising Effectiveness” report, there is nothing an advertiser can do to drive sales growth more than delivering outstanding creative. Thus, Henkel is on the path to becoming a producer of marketing content that inspires, educates, entertains and at times, provides utility. It is important to start each content creation journey with a big brand idea that reinforces the brand promise. Then, build a content strategy that can include long form video, podcasts, editorials, user generated content and more. All of this can be edited to develop core advertising elements that feed the marketing mix such as, television commercials, display ads, six second bumpers and eCommerce brand page content.

If we do our job right, we will create content so good that people will anticipate its arrival, subscribe to it and maybe even pay for it. Look for our video series, “Grime Scene Investigators” coming soon. The aesthetic may make people think that they are watching an episode of “Crime Scene Investigators”. However, it won’t take long for consumers, searching for cleaning solutions, to realize that they are in a very different world where our detectives are solving “grimes”, not “crimes” and our products save the day.

As modern marketers, let’s start with big brand building ideas and content strategies that reinforce and amplify our messages from awareness to conversion and back again. Let’s leverage the unique capabilities of digital, data and technology to bring our brand stories to life in increasingly human and compelling ways. Let’s build responsive engagement ecosystems that continually solve consumer problems throughout the path to purchase, enabling us to collect relationships along the way.