How to Boost Your Brand Humanity?

What are you doing to give your audience a glimpse into your backstage to show your brand humanity?

After a long history of advertising & marketing that kept producing largely a utopian and buttoned up image for brands, in recent years a new approach has emerged.

But first, you need the setup for this story to appreciate better this approach.

As you may know, along with the arrival of broadband Internet access, social media, and mobile adoption – we now have wider pipelines to consume and produce richer content, social networks to share them on, and the last blow – now we’re all doing it on-the-go thanks to the massive global mobile adoption.

The result is that these days brands have to compete not only with their competitors but also with a new breed of competitors – their audiences that some aptly call prosumers because they both produce and consume content.

The immediate impact of this new landscape is that prosumers have now significantly increased the communication noise and further fragmented the average human attention span that in a recent study from Microsoft came to 8 seconds, 1 second less than a goldfish…

In a society where everybody both consumes and produces content, overtime prosumers that started early or caught on a super hot craze – surfaced as mega influencers and built formidable audiences and profit centers.

So naturally, major brands have already started leveraging these yesteryear’s average consumers-turned-mega-influencers – to connect better with their audiences.

When making changes to your visual narrative out in the open,
becomes part of your authentic experience.

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Now that you understand the WHY and the problem we’re dealing with, let’s talk about what you can you do to rise above the noise to regain your audience attention.

The new approach I mentioned at the top is a response to this overcrowded communication landscape and is all about sharing with your audience your brand humanity by opening up your backstage.

Here are a couple of backstage ingredients you may want to try with your business:

• Vulnerability: Forget about yesterday’s utopian picture of your ideal customer happily consume your product, people don’t buy product features these days. These days they’re looking for brands that can first solve their problem while showing brands’ imperfections. Yes, that means the good and the bad. This type of authenticity boost brands’ humanity and creates empathy and believability that better translates to behavior change.
• Co-creation: Inline with prosumers’ tendency to not passively only consume content but also be on the driving seat of the production end, what active role such as user-generated content programs can you offer your audience in your visual storytelling strategy?
• Off-screen: With people bombarded with over 5000 advertising messages a day according to LinkedIn, you need to offer your audience offline programs to get to know you on a human level without a single pixel mediating the conversation. What are your tech detox tactics to personally engage them?

What do you think? Need help boosting your brand humanity? Schedule a FREE conversation to learn more about our Visual Storytelling Workshop.