Humanizing Brands: When Brands Seem to Be Like Me, Part of Me, and in a Relationship with Me!
I’m Viola, 25 years old, graduated from Business Management in Harvard Business School. I recently have made my Master Thesis on “Humanizing Brands” and I would like to share with you my insights that I’ve been developing this past 2 years.
I will take the example of my family as they represent quite well what brands seek (and don’t seek) in the market.
Starting with me: as a proud shopaholic, brands are my passion. Brands make me feel powerful, part of a community, socially accepted and, although it is tough to admit, makes me happier. Moreover, if I think about brands as Dior, Harley Davidson or Apple for instance, they make me feel respectively glamorous, powerful, and futuristic. I discovered that his phenomena has been called antropomorphization and it is related to the self: a process of giving human-like features to a brand. All of these features activate an agent knowledge by visual cues (eg. brand logos), verbal cues (eg. Siri in Apple) or rhetorical devices (eg. a Fairy tale ad that let everything super cleaned at home). People connect strongly with a brand when they see similar personality to their sense of self which creates a closer commitment and loyalty to that specific brand.
By contrast, my father doesn’t like brands since he felt betrayed by his car provider, Mercedes-Benz. However, before this event, my father tended to be more relationship-focused. Briefly, that’s what happened with Mercedes: he was a client for more than 15 years, 1 car renewals, 7 workshop interventions. As he said several times, he was brand-attached. Mercedes had the power of giving him a feeling of freedom, self-control, and power at the same time as it reminded him of his childhood. This relationship satisfied his life goals so the brand’s loyalty level was very high.
However, in the last workshop intervention, Mercedes charged him the diagnostic before the intervention (almost the same price of the intervention) and they never did that without any warning. My dad thinks that was not the proper treatment nor the procedure to a client who has been with them for that long period of time.
Brands as Mercedes-Benz with human-like minds representing communion-oriented consumers compromises their fairness to a client that feels the company is taking advantage from him. We call this process as a brand aversion or brand betrayal.
Now, it’s time for my mom: i’ve always found interesting that everytime we needed batteries for TV control or any other device we had at home, the only option was to buy Duracell. As my mom said, they would last longer exactly as the rabbit last longer at running than the others. Quite amazing right? The brand personification with something that is super energetic and always win, raises trustworthiness and an advocacy process. In this case, we talk about of brand attachment based on a positive exchanging norms: low prices and time-investing for the greater benefits the brand offers.
What other case can I show you? Yes, my grandfather. He could not be left aside. My grandfather, as a huge football supporter of Chelsea, goes every 15 days to the stadium to see “his” Chelsea win with his friends. Moreover, as he says, it is a place to hang out, socialize, support a common interest, and enjoy the show. Social motivations move people to create a strong relationship with a brand and to start to advocate it. When Chelsea loses, it feels like something is taken away from my grandfather. The impact of brand attachment and self-connection have these effects by giving him the feeling of failure as a member of the common group.
What about my sister? Yesterday, she came home with a bunch of cosmetics’ products. When the talk refers to loyalty, she is the example of self-connection to a brand — BodyShop. I don’t remember my sister buying other cosmetic products in other stores. She admits, as she cares about animals and Body Shop supports them, it gives her more reasons to support BodyShop and feel better to buy their products. Therefore, these brand actions influence her to have a better brand self-connection rather to other brands and also have positive emotions towards it.
Finally, my uncle! He has a very interesting opinion about the trend of humanizing brands. He considers that humanization of brands is a contemporary phenomena. He thinks that technological innovations interact with societal changes to offer more opportunities for consumers to view brands in human-like terms, because this technological advances cue human knowledge schemas, they offer a way to exert control over and increasingly complex world. It is essential to point out as he well mentions when we discuss this issue, that society is suffering disruptive changes in terms of what motivates people, their beliefs and opportunities. Also, convenience came to the top of brands’ priorities. Perhaps brands’ connection through technology leads people to interact with brands differently and increase their degree of dependency. Algorithms nowadays perform tasks that previously required human hands. For example, many of us use Google Maps instead of reading a paper map, we use the app for translating rather than asking people or reading a glossary.
From all this familiar cases, we can understand consumers perceive brands as having human-like forms, minds, and personality characteristics. Furthermore, a consumer like us perceives a brand as being congruent with or connected to the self. Finally, a third highlight is that consumers can view brands in ways that are analogous to the types of relationships they have with people.
To wrap this up, we can see that this connection towards brands have been developed through time and all of this perceptions/reactions towards them applies to brands they can “own” or have been watching them “taking actions” in certain moments of time. It is likely that this feeling has suffered a lot of phases from feeling power over the brands and ended up to feeling controlled by them. However, it is important to mention that everything my family mentioned has to do with the brands and not with product. Actually, to know their feelings about the products they advocate, it would require another article. Next time folks!
Viola
