Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #13

Brands should be human.

When presented with a list of human characteristics, people can readily associate them with brands.  Is your brand warm?  Approachable?  A leader?  Is it cold?  Sterile?  Customers associate human characteristics with brands.  That’s why you should describe the human characteristics you want associated with your brand in the brand personality section of the brand positioning template.  From real world practice and the marketing classes that I facilitate, it seems to me that the brand personality section of the brand positioning template is something with which marketers have difficulty.  When instructed to complete the section with words that one would use to describe a person, some people include phrases like “technological leader”, “high quality”, etc.  These people revert to describing their product and/or company rather than their brand.

A colleague once pointed out to me that in addition to human descriptors, one may also include descriptors associated with other animals in the brand personality section.  I never pressed him for details, but it seemed logical to me.  Ever since the exchange with my colleague, I’ve tried to think about animal descriptors when working on brand positioning.  I must confess that I’ve never been successful.  My thinking always defaults to descriptors that also apply to people.  Jungle cats are muscular, but then so are people.  Foxes are sly, but so are people.  So I’ve never been successful in applying my colleague’s advice.

In the middle 1990’s, the brand on which I was working had a marketing research supplier who also worked on the Mercedes Benz brand.  From research we knew that my brand and Mercedes Benz shared many common personality attributes in the minds of consumers.  Both brands were thought of as being leaders, innovative, and superior.  They differed in that my brand was perceived as approachable, warm, caring, and human.  On the other hand, Mercedes was thought to be aloof, cold, sterile, and impersonal.  I was told that the marketing people at Mercedes envied my brand’s human attributes. 

Mercedes’ marketing communications reinforced these negative personality traits in that it focused on technical product characteristics.  Not long after this exchange with the research supplier, I noticed a change in Mercedes’ marketing communications.  Mercedes’ advertising began to incorporate the human element … more of what the brand does for its target customers with product features supporting the brand rather than product features being the brand.  From their very product-focused advertising Mercedes evolved people-focused commercials including a few that contained a music bed in which Janis Joplin asked, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”  Here are two examples that are on YouTube:

1995 U.K. Commercial:

Most recently, there was a 2011 Super Bowl spot featuring Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.  Note how the lyrics have been abridged so that the reference to Porsche isn’t sung.

So the learning point of all of this is that brand should be human.  How do you add a human dimension to your brand?