Practical ways to Humanize your Brand
Over the years, it’s been established that your customers are innately social beings. They live, breathe and desire strong connections with things that appeal to them.
Davido, one of Nigeria’s biggest music stars, would attract a mammoth crowd, if he decides to walk through the streets of Lagos today like every normal human being. His fans would gather, hug and jump on him helplessly, which may cause go-slow in such vicinity.
The illustration above, about Davido, succinctly explains how his fans are deeply connected to him. This same connection mirrors how customers are emotionally attached with products they love most.
Humanizing your brand could be described as a friendship-approach that makes your customers feel like they have known your brand for donkey years. Being relatable, consistent, desirable, reliable, warm and magnetic should be the goal you strive to achieve when humanizing your brand.
Below are ways you can humanize your brand:
1. Don’t Sell Products; Tell Stories:
Storytelling has been proven to be the greatest marketing tool ever adopted by brands to build a human-centric experience for its customers. Stories sell. Every customer loves stories but dislikes the idea of selling to them. It’s advisable to avoid the traditional approach of trying hard to sell your product to your customers. Weave an emotional brand story and embed your product or services in the story. That way, you win your customers over without selling to them.
2. Educate, Inform & Repeat:
Every customer that settles for a particular product, does so from an informed decision. There is a high probability for your customers to trust your product when you tend to provide solutions to their pain points. Tilting towards the angle of educating your potential customers is a better approach that makes your marketing effort easy.
3. Humor is Human:
In the first quarter of 2021, the Bitcoin market garnered significant attention that brought about a large pool of people delving into bitcoin business, regardless of the risk involved. In Nigeria, the Bitcoin trend was up on the Twitter trend table and other social media platforms for weeks. At some point, many brands, in an attempt to join the conversation, dished out humorous content on their social media pages using the Bitcoin dip theme. The one that stood out was PiggyVest’s push notification that playfully advised people to safelock their house rent before buying any Bitcoin Dip. As funny as it sounded, the content of the push notification was PiggyVest’s way of being ‘‘human’’, but in a rather humorous manner.
4. Maximize Visual Content:
Going by data, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. The brain processes visual information 60% time faster than text. It is clear that visual content gets more engagement compared to text content. So, go all out in dishing out visual content to your customers as this is a workable strategy that would make your audience not only perceive you as being human, they’d definitely see, feel and interact with your brand stories or video content.
5. Take Your Customers Behind the Scenes:
The idea of ‘seeing is believing’ still suffices as a workable model for humanizing your brand. Every customer wants to see, touch and experience your products beyond what meets the eyes. Imagine a food vendor that shows you the behind-the-scenes of how food is being cooked and packaged in their kitchen. From letting into a live video of when the food stuff is being purchased, to how it is prepared. Such approach works seamlessly for your brand. It makes your brand authentic, unique, trustworthy and above all — Human.
