Brand Humanization: Why It Is Important and How to Do It

Businesses seeking to optimize results, increase sales, and build a good relationship with their customers shouldn’t think twice about investing in brand humanization. Have you ever heard of it?

The term is one of many business strategies used by brands to become closer to consumers, generating connections through empathy and ethics. This creates an understanding of users’ needs, feelings, and motivations.

Consequently, engagement is optimized, as is brand popularization. This is because users don’t like interacting with businesses with robotic, cold, and impersonal services. Nevertheless, many businesses only have a buying and selling relationship with their customers.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to invest in brand humanization. But first, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the topic and how to apply it. Keep reading to learn about how to humanize your brand!

What is brand humanization?

A humanized brand seeks to humanize its processes to establish connections with its customers, suppliers, and society in general. In other words, it’s a socially responsible brand and strives for a more egalitarian and inclusive world.

Brand humanization has emerged from the reflection of consumers’ desire to have a positive experience throughout the buying process. People always want more than the basics from a company.

Therefore, brands that adhere to the strategy go beyond the basics and not only present themselves as humanized, but also seek to act in a humanized manner, centered on people and organizational culture.

In other words, merely communicating in a humanized manner isn’t enough. Brands need to adapt the business structure to their users’ needs throughout all stages of the sales funnel.

 

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Why is brand humanization important? 

To understand the importance of the term, we need to understand where it came from. To a large extent, brand humanization arose thanks to the internet. This is because, in the digital environment, users play an active role in marketing products and services.

In seconds, users can learn about various business options to satisfy their needs and solve problems. This rules out price and quality as the most important aspects of a product.

Now, consumer behavior has changed. They prefer brands that are committed to their causes. Brands need to have empathy and communicate more closely with peoples’ reality, in addition to providing constant and personalized support.

A humanized brand is valued more by users – that’s why it’s important to adopt this strategy.

Did you know that these brands also have common characteristics?

What are the characteristics of a humanized brand?

Brand humanization has attributes related to user satisfaction, such as accessibility, social responsibility, natural communication, and concern for consumers.

Let’s understand a little more about each characteristic, shall we?

Accessibility

A humanized brand is accessible. This makes the process of interacting and sharing concerns, needs, and dissatisfaction much simpler. Bureaucracy is abandoned and replaced by caring and affection during all stages of the sales funnel, even after the sale has been made.

Additionally, accessible companies respond promptly and happily to users’ requests for help. This speeds up the time between the problem and its solution, without leaving room for complaints.

In order to be accessible, you need to be online on the digital channels that provide ways of interacting, such as Twitter, email, and other instant messaging services.

Social Responsibility

Social responsibility is characterized by a commitment to employees, consumers, and society – made by the business – with the aim of making a positive impact around it.

Besides giving employees a sense of purpose in their work, it attracts and retains consumers who want to be part of something trustworthy.

As a result, the brand is valued and the perception of the business’ image changes, according to the social actions taken. For example, certain companies are concerned about operating without negatively impacting the environment and ensuring ideal working conditions for their employees.

Natural communication

Another common characteristic is constant and educational communication with audiences. By doing so, brands become references on the subject and convey proximity and transparency.

However, it’s a fine line – a brand shouldn’t be invasive or use very persuasive methods to simply sell. They must invest in educational content to inform and add value to their customers.

Concern for consumers

A humanized company goes beyond its sales strategies. It’s also concerned about its consumers. It takes their problems and needs into account, as well as encompasses the other aspects mentioned above.

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5 tips to improve your brand humanization

Humanizing a brand should be a comprehensive plan in the brand strategy process since it requires different actions. Moreover, there’s more than one way to implement humanized marketing in a business.

Nevertheless, certain pillars help in this process of organizational culture change, let’s take a look:

1. Invest in storytelling

A narrative with words and visual aids, better known as storytelling, is a good way to humanize your brand. You can record behind-the-scenes videos and the daily routine of employees telling the company’s story, for example.

Producing materials such as these, help users feel part of the business, and this brings more people together. 

2. Give your company a face

In order for people to know that your business is made up of people – not robots – why not give your brand a face? Introduce an employee to represent the brand to your audience.

It can even be someone from the marketing department or the entrepreneur themselves if it’s a small business or sole proprietorship. This helps increase consumer empathy and identification.

3. Show the fun side of your business (but be careful)

Everyone knows that laughter is the best medicine. In addition, laughter allows us to create bonds and strengthen relationships. Therefore, every brand that wishes to humanize itself can show its fun side, as long as it is not vulgar or offensive.

Thanks – once again – to the internet, you can create humor in a simple manner, by sharing memes, for example. Social media offers countless possibilities to create mood, all you have to do is position yourself in a creative, yet respectful manner.

Here’s a tip: it isn’t necessary to hire comedians to bring out the business’ fun side, just keep up to date with events, memes, and media situations.

4. Invest in less invasive marketing strategies 

Earlier, we talked about light and less intrusive communication, remember? This should be part of the marketing strategy of those who want to be more humanized. Therefore, focus on not sounding like your brand is only interested in sales.

Invest in inbound marketing and content marketing strategies, since these practices don’t aim to generate sales or immediate results.  Instead, the goal is to build solid relationships with users in order to address their pains and solve their problems, through educational and transparent content to promote a good experience.

5. Build an identity for your brand humanization

One of the paths to humanization is to build a unique identity, differentiating brands from their competitors.

To do so, start by defining your own style of positioning, tone of voice, topics that can be covered in the content, visual elements, logo, etc.

In this way, your business can be easily recognized, which helps to establish it in the audience’s mind as a benchmark that can be called upon for information in different situations.

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Are you ready to invest in brand humanization?

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably interested in humanizing your brand, right? Nowadays, brand humanization has become an essential factor in order to stand out on the internet and increase your company’s connection with its audience. So make sure you invest in the tips mentioned throughout this article and follow us on Instagram to keep yourself updated on the best practices for the growth of your business.