Your Brand is too formal. A Social Media evangelist???s perspective.
Measuring and defining abstract concepts by projecting human traits onto them is not new. We can point to many areas of our lives in which this technique is employed to great effect. Cars have faces; think Volkswagen Beetle, with its classic eyes and smile. High end BMWs have super-aggressive, predator like looks, presumably dreamt up by astute marketing teams to appeal to the personalities of those who drive them. In literature we use a narrative device called anthropomorphism where the storyteller attributes certain human characteristics to inanimate objects in order to make a point about our relationships with each other or those of the characters in the story to that of the world in which they exist. Japanese vacuum cleaners look like cute little friends. It???s even popped up in psychology; Freud called it projection, although he used it in a negative context, in which the human organism projected unwanted feelings and desires onto some external aspect of the world, often another person, as a psychological defence mechanism.
When we ask the question, ???if a brand were a person, what kind of person would it be???? we???re naturally looking for descriptors that our audience can associate with; characteristics that we hope will encourage familiarity, even intimacy between our audience and our Brand.
It???s a powerful way to create connections. In the marketing world it ???s called personification, and it remains highly effective tool in our marketing box of tricks.
Problem is, the personas that many brands portray are too formal. The conversations that they have with their consumers occur primarily through formal channels and in formal settings.
I certainly wouldn???t want to have a beer with the stiff, client-meeting version of myself. But I???d love to interact with the cheerful, Facebook posting, nonsense-tweeting version of myself. He looks like fun. I may even ask him round for lunch.
See where we???re going with this.
It???s not enough to simply say that we want our brand to be friendly, outgoing, cool, (or any amount of marketing mumbo jumbo) if we???re not actually allowing our brands to go out into the world and meet the people they???re designed for.
If I were a Brand it would be difficult for me to be any of the above things if I were stuck in a print ad, with my logo a certain size and distance from the edge of the page. My tone of voice would never change, since by the extended metaphor emerging here, it would always be determined by the official corporate typeface. And perhaps most distressingly of all, I would always be square (or rectangular, at any rate).
Inflexible corporate websites are no better. I become positively grumpy when I???m confined to one of those.
Let me loose in the Social Media, and that???s where you???ll really get to know me. Allow me to lose my necktie of a logo for a change. Ditch the corporate typeface so I can speak to my consumers in their language.
Let me be social, my friends.
Formality has its place. But if you really want your customers to get to know your Brand, close the CI manual every now and again. Your Brand will thank you for it.
