Chapter 8: Human-Centric Marketing for Brand Attraction
In today’s Digital Era, a growing number of people is giving importance for human centricity of brands and products. Customers are becoming more anxious than ever as they subconsciously search for their identities and asking, “What does it mean to be human in a digital world?” To further understand the customers, digital anthropology must be put into place. Through social listening, netnography, and emphatic research, marketers will be able to successfully unveil the true desires and expectations of customers. After such methods are done, it is then the time of brands to uncover its human side in order to attract customers and build human-to-human connections.
There are six attributes related to human-centric brands: physicality, intellectuality, sociability, emotionality, personability, and morality. Physicality is about building brand identity through a well-designed logo, well-crafted taglines, compelling product design, or a solid customer experience. Intellectuality is about being innovative to be able to launch products or services that are not previously conceived by other players and by the customers. Sociability is about having the courage to talk customers, answering their inquiries and resolve their complaints responsively. Emotionality is about having the ability to evoke emptions in order to drive favorable customer actions. Personability is about brands being conscious of what they are good at while admitting what they still have yet to learn. Lastly, Morality is about having the courage to do the right thing, to become values driven which ensures that appropriate ethical considerations are key part of all its business decisions.
A good example of human-centric brand is Jollibee. For the last few months, the company released several videos/commercials closely related to the typical Filipino-family or love life-oriented type of stories. These commercials were able to successfully reach the hearts of its customers as they were able to portray their brand as something that can be part of our most special moments in life. Their emotionality strategy is at its peak and they are still continuing to embark on this type of strategy by releasing sequels to their previous commercials.
Even though a company may not be able to attain having all the six attributes for a perfect role model of a human-centric brand, having one attribute would be enough to let the brand stand out in the market and reach more customers with more ease. Trying to humanize the brand by incorporating value-driven and human-characterizations will help customers relate to the brand and thus drive awareness of what the brand is and eventually make them try and buy the product.
