Is it worth humanizing brands?

Is “branding” an idea of the past?

If we take a quick look around the world of brands at an occident level, it seems that branding, this sometimes elusive concept, has become the creation of practical logos and their redesign from time to time, and its value has been relegated by other concepts. But let's go deeper, what is behind this? What role does branding play today in the communication universes of brands?

The brand new model

In the words of Marty Neumeier: branding today is about creating customers (fans), not products. A few years ago, the brand was the starting and ending point in its communication through services, products and advertising. Today it is the audience who builds the brand by extracting and assigning meaning to it through its consumption. So the first change we can point to is that your brand is not what you say it is. It is what they say it is. And here we are presented with a new question: how to make these two visions coincide?

If for the exercise of our conversation we take one of the definitions of branding as the perceived personality of the brand, we can agree that personalities are malleable depending on the context in which they are and, even if their essence is maintained, their characteristics can change. Taking this into account, one of our greatest lessons has been to understand that a large part of what we define today as branding is about listening to our audience and acting accordingly so that they perceive it and collective construction environments can be generated that sustain the brand.

In practical terms, we mean that today communication channels and contact points should invite conversation. Feedback should be the food for brands, something very common in other areas of the business but still little adopted when it comes to branding.

To humanize or not the brands

Since time immemorial, humans have been closely linked to stories, as they move us, motivate us, and captivate us, and this is still a constant: people want to hear stories. Humanization is a supremely powerful resource when telling brand stories, but it should not necessarily be applied in all cases in a practical and literal way. The important thing here is to tell a good story and it is the audience of each brand who will decide how it should be done.

The principles on which the humanization of the brand is based are: empathy, ethics and establishing a position. Each brand decides how to apply these elements according to its purpose and by doing so it will allow the audience to access other more intimate facets of the brand, behind the scenes, which will affirm the relationship.

And the business?

This all sounds good, but how does it contribute to business growth? How does it impact sales? How do we convince the finance department to approve the budget for this purpose?

If you are here, you are probably aware that the tone of communication, corporate identity, line of sight, positioning and other branding elements have an impact on the operation of companies that is often difficult to measure. We can give many answers to these questions, most of which are valid, but we like one in particular: people no longer want to buy a product or service, they want to be part of a brand's community with all that this implies. Companies that continue to resist evolving their branding, their personality and their positioning, will end up relegated from customer consumption and lose their market share.