Humanizing Your Brand
No matter what form of Public Relations, Advertising, or Marketing you’re involved in, every single person needs to have a basic understanding of how to humanize a brand. When interacting with customers, humanizing a brand requires avoiding the use of standard business jargon and instead adopting a communication style that is more approachable and conversational. Imagine this process as one in which you are cultivating the personality and values of your brand through the establishment of meaningful connections with your audience.
It is essential to first establish a relationship with customers to make sales, achieve a higher conversion rate, increase levels of engagement, and cultivate brand loyalty. For the relationship with the customer to flourish, brands need to develop a rapport with the customer and earn their trust, just like relationships with new friends. Customers will feel a stronger connection to your company if you add a layer of personalization and strive to humanize your brand. It is vital that the messaging on your website and in all your marketing efforts are crafted in a way that allows you to connect with your target audience. Without it, you run the risk of being seen as a distant, faceless entity that encourages indifference rather than loyalty from your clientele.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, social media apps have aided in the development of the modern idea of humanizing the brand. The main goal of recent humanizing campaigns is to provide an appearance of the brand possessing a living soul. One of the best examples of this can be found with the Duolingo TikTok account. The main goal of this campaign was to provide people with a sense of being heard by the company. They used the mascot of the company, an owl, and brought it to life. The Duolingo Owl would post TikToks of its daily life and follow different trends from the social media app. They also created a more direct relationship with followers by responding to people commenting on their TikToks in the persona of the Owl. Similar to the Duolingo Owl, your school district can use your mascot as a way to humanize your social media presence and increase engagement. Posting videos or pictures of your school mascot at different events or showing him congratulating students and teachers for accomplishments is a great way to highlight what’s going on in your district while also bringing some personality to your page.
Another, older, example of a brand humanizing itself is the Twitter campaign by Wendy’s. This campaign was best known as the Wendy’s Clapback Campaign. The basic idea was that the Wendy’s Twitter account would roast and troll different Twitter accounts of other fast-food restaurants. As this was one of the first campaigns of the modern idea of humanizing a brand, Wendy’s initially received some short-term backlash, but they continued to push forward with the campaign, and it proved to work in the best way possible. In financial terms, this proved to be an ingenious marketing move by Wendy's as their net income increased from $129.6 million to $194 million. This campaign paved the way for the modern idea of humanizing the brand, where brands form a real identity and soul so that audiences can form deeper, more long-term connections. When looking into ways to humanize your brand as a school district, you can’t necessarily copy the same techniques larger businesses and corporations can; however, you can take inspiration. While you certainly don’t want to be “roasting” anyone on your school district’s social media pages, you can develop a humanized voice that is very personal. Use language that shows you care about your students and staff, and that you’re proud of how awesome they are!
Humanizing the brand, with modern methods, allows your school district to reach new audiences that the older forms of marketing were unable to reach. With younger generations, brands require the ability to connect on a level that really hasn’t been done before.
Without a basic understanding of how to humanize your brand, your marketing techniques, advertising methods, and any other forms of promotion for your district are likely to be much less successful. When you form a genuine connection with your consumer audience, you set yourself up to have the utmost success and respect from the consumer.