Authentic Marketing

CHAPTER 6Humanize Your Brand

To be truly authentic, one essential element that underlies everything is making your brand more human and operating with more humanity. If you are genuine and good at the core, it will flow through every aspect of your business and reveal itself in everything you do. Be aware that you can’t silo authenticity to your moral purpose efforts, only to behave differently in other aspects of your business.

Humanizing your brand involves taking on character traits customers value most in their relationships with other people. Qualities like honesty, empathy, openness, and being respectful are among the behaviors companies should embrace. This process will make your brand more real, more relatable, more likeable, and more authentic. Most importantly, displaying the right human qualities help consumers feel a connectedness to your brand. This elevates your company from one that people can simply buy products from (transactional) to one they also admire, respect, relate to, like . . . maybe even love (relational). The difference in this equation is the emotional connection, and it’s huge.

Generally speaking, businesses have been built to be anything but human. We talk in corporate speak, rely on numbers to tell stories, strip emotions out of the dialogue, essentially operate like a machine. I’ll reference back to the words of Mark Fuller, chairman of Rose Global and co-founder of Monitor Group (now Deloitte Monitor): “We can comfortably talk numbers, but ...