Most marketers would agree that branding is a key element of distinction from competition. Hence, it comes down to the marketer to create and enforce the association of unique benefits and positive imagery with the brand of a company, which enables it to differentiate itself from its competitors.
It has been long documented that brands that evoke an emotion should increase consumer engagement and effective retention. ‘Brand personality’ is a buzz term that gets thrown around a lot. It can refer to the set of human personality traits that are applicable to brands. However, this blog entry looks at taking it one step further: making your brand human.
Expedia is launching a new global brand campaign with the tagline ‘People Shaped Travel’. According to tnooz, the idea behind the campaign is to show potential and existing customers the human side of the company. Whilst its competitors use the age-old imagery such as beaches and palm trees, this campaign uses members of staff that work for Expedia to highlight the unique benefits of booking through the online travel agent. This could be the edge that Expedia requires to take the lead from booking.com, a strong force in the Online Travel Aggregator domain.
Taking the point quite literally, the recent logo change of ANZ bank was said to ‘humanise’ the brand by giving the design properties that made it look more like a human character with its arms outstretched. This ‘humanisation’ cost ANZ an initial $15 million, and coincided with the trend of banks repositioning themselves in order to ward off negative public sentiment during the global financial crisis. Their new tagline ‘We live in your world’, served to reinforce the human side of the bank. Despite criticism of the new brand, six months later, ANZ posted a 36 per cent rise in first half profit and most recently revealed a 23% increase in underlying profit for the six months leading up to March 2011 compared with the previous corresponding period.
Other companies that have done well from humanising their brands include Apple, who personified their product in human form as a younger, trendier and laid-back guy, with direct comparison to the PC who was personified as old, out-of-date, and out-of-touch. AAMI, an insurance company that has featured a young girl in its logo and all its branding since 1976, has become a highly respected Australian firm. They updated the face of their logo five years ago to find someone fresh who ‘conveyed a friendly, approachable and credible presence – the same attributes we want customers to associate with the AAMI brand’. BankWest launched a campaign two years ago which saw animated characters with real voices talking about what makes them happy, which effectively positioned the bank as empathetic to the human needs. Dick Smith’s previous slogan ‘humanising technology’ also leverages the ‘human’ aspect of its brand to eschew its brand values of ease-of-use, approachability, familiarity and helpfulness in the complex world of ever-evolving technology.
Humanising brands is a direct attempt by the marketer to connect with their market. Marc Gobe espouses these values through his design and brand consultancy agency, Desgrippes. He says, ‘An emotional branding is approach is…the crucial defining element that separates success from indifference in the marketplace’. Consumers associate human personality traits with brands because they relate to brands as they would to partners and friends, or they perceive brands as extensions of themselves, or because they simply wish to align themselves with. The examples given in this article are all companies that have positioned themselves around the ‘human’ element to give an extra level of comfort or familiarity. Their products are typically quite complex, foreign, or intangible so they have relied on their brand to close the distance between their offering and their consumer.
As Scott Talgo once said, ‘A brand that captures your mind gains behavior. A brand that captures your heart gains commitment.’
Tracy Harber
Google*
*This blog post was not endorsed by Google and are the author's opinions, not those of her employer.