In our digital-first world, your consumers have near instantaneous access to your brand via numerous digital touch-points. This means it’s never been more important to build brand trust. Consumers want to engage with and buy from brands they believe in. Building this trust requires consistent and successful interactions, delivering proven experiences that breed familiarity, expectation and results.
The good news is, brands can engage directly with consumers more frequently than ever before, and those interactions are largely happening over digital channels. This direct communication is a fantastic way to build brand equity and relationships with end users, but it can also be a challenge to move beyond the technology to create a brand essence that feels real and relatable.
In order to cross this chasm and find connections with today’s finicky, on-demand consumers, it is critical for brands to put their human side front and center. Humanizing your brand may require a broadening definition of what your brand is all about and a deeper examination of your target audience. Most importantly, it requires a dedicated effort to convey those human-like attributes that help us all better relate to one another.
Authenticity.
The Millennial generation has largely been credited with demanding authenticity from the brands it supports. While this is certainly true, I would argue it has more to do with this generation being the first to grow up in a digital-first world, one where the actions, attitudes and behaviors of everyone representing a brand is on full display. Today everything from a CEO’s opinion to the social media content of an employee can have a direct impact on a brand—often a far more significant impact than a customer’s experience during the normal course of doing business.
Your brand must consider what its mission and values represent, then seek to incorporate those values from the top down. Authenticity extends beyond the company mission to include your brand voice and image, the type of audience you seek out and the entire consumer experience from beginning to end. To be truly authentic, your brand engagement must be far more than lip service or something represented in your product offering. It has to be intrinsic to everything you do.
Emotion.
The most powerful predictor of human connection is emotion. Whether it sparks joy, incites humor or elicits warm fuzzy feelings of empathy or nostalgia, tying your brand to emotion can prove its most powerful tool. This emotive engagement should be included across everything from advertisements to marketing materials, social content, and even the way individual employees represent your brand. After all, there is sound, scientific proof that positive emotional connections increase consumers willingness to buy.
One of the most effective ways to engage emotion and better humanize your brand is through storytelling. Find the story within your business—perhaps it’s told through the eyes of the customers you serve, or the employees who represent you, or how the business got its start, or the impact of your product and services in the world. Find ways to turn communication into storytelling. Remember, consumers care more about how your product will improve their lives than what that product does or how it works. Tap into their loyalty by tying your brand relevance directly to their personal needs, wants and emotions.
Vulnerability.
This last human attribute can be the most challenging one of all for companies to navigate. How critical is vulnerability and just how much should you be willing to show? There’s a famous ad from the 1980s for women’s deodorant that admonished the audience to never let them see you sweat. As catchy as that is for an ad slogan, the truth is it’s an idea now past its prime. Navigating today’s on-demand, 24/7 digital appetites means it’s nearly impossible for a company to control every aspect of its brand, or mitigate every failure or setback, without sometimes facing a “crisis” or two.
Consumers are far more forgiving than often given credit for, however in order to do so they need to feel a sense of transparency and ownership from the brand itself when mistakes are made or obstacles can’t be overcome. Vulnerability, a trait seen by the majority of individuals as authentic, is one of the most relatable human emotions. Companies who find the right balance of showing vulnerability without focusing on failure have a fantastic opportunity to build real loyalty with their customers.
There’s a lot of talk among companies about how to win over customers in an age of on-demand expectations. Building brand loyalty is critical in rising above the competition, and allowing your brand to demonstrate a more human side is one of the most effective ways of separating yourself from every other company vying for your customers’ attention.
