Humanising the brand in a digital age

Humanising the brand in a digital age Received (in revised form): 9th March, 2016

James Caig is Head of Strategy at True Digital, where he leads strategic thinking for clients such as Fuller’s, Npower and Furniture Village. His previous roles include providing strategy for such clients as Kellogg’s, AutoTrader, EE, Lloyds Banking Group and Public Health England. He presently sits on the national committee of the Account Planning Group (APG), and is the Chair of APG West, a regional body aiming to bring APG’s approach to the Bristol and Bath region. A regular conference speaker, he has also been awarded the IPA Effectiveness Best New Learning Award.

James Caig

Abstract As organisations grow bigger and their use of technology intensifies, it gets harder for those businesses to retain a sense of humanity for employees and customers. Yet the value of human connection cannot be overstated — as technology proliferates, and as the range of touch points available to brands increases, competitive advantage will go to those brands that bring a sense of humanity to their dealings with customers. Customer experience is at the centre of this. Although it is expensive and difficult, it is effective communication because it counts as a brand’s body language. As more decision-making gets outsourced to technology, brands can benefit from the opportunity to create digital interactions that are valuable, rather than perpetuate the dehumanising effect of many technological interventions. This paper argues that people and technology work better together, and will help readers understand some of the pitfalls of being too technology-led. It also sets out some initial questions that brands can ask themselves to help navigate digital technologies in a way that is right for them.

Keywords brand, technology, digital, human, people, innovation

James Caig True Digital, 1st Floor, Royal London Buildings, 42–46 Baldwin Street, Bristol BS1 1PN, UK Tel: +44 (0)117 927 7750; E-mail: james.caig@truedigital.co.uk

INTRODUCTION A 2015 issue of the Royal Society of the Arts Journal featured an interview between Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of the Arts, and Steve Hilton, political strategist and former adviser to David Cameron. Their conversation explored the themes of Hilton’s recent book, ‘More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First’.

At one point, Hilton explains how organisations often inhibit their employees from doing what is best for

themselves and the people they work with: ‘Generally, people want to be kind and treat others in a decent way. When you end up in a system that gets too big and bureaucratic and removed from that, people are unable to behave in a “human” way. People want to understand your personal situation and respond to you in a human way, but the system won’t allow them. Chief executives make decisions that end up being dehumanising.

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Humanising the brand in a digital age

This is not a simplistic “small is beautiful, big is bad” argument. For many things scale is good. I think the challenge for businesses is how do you combine scale with being human. We should allow decisions to be taken closer to the people affected by them.’1

By ‘systems’, Hilton means institutions — the organisations in which people work and the public services that everyone uses. Scale is not inherently bad, but Hilton is acutely aware that scale can alienate users within the system, whether those users are customers, students, patients or employees. Employees especially can feel disempowered by the very system they are seeking to improve.

People who work in marketing may identify with this. Marketers understand the importance of collaborating across teams, and they want to build brands and experiences around genuine customer needs and desires. Yet the complexity of organisations and their legacy systems and structures can be suffocating. The tangle of stakeholders and competing key performance indicators can turn the simple act of applying customer insight to enhance services or communication into a struggle.

Digital technology should help with this. It should make insight easier to access and allow innovative ideas to spread more quickly within organisations, thanks to immediate and seamless communication platforms.

Outside the organisation, new technology has created many new touch points and channels through which customers can interact with brands.

Technology should bring brands, their employees and their customers closer together. It should make it easier for scale to feel more ‘human’.

It should, but in many cases it fails to do so. Technology has often exacerbated

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the problem. In an effort to remain visible, brands have developed new forms of communication in the spaces that technology has thrown up. These collections of digital media — websites, apps, social networks, advertising — amount to what some call brand ‘ecosystems’ — interaction networks where individual nodes are informed by and reliant on each other.

Responsibility for these nodes often sits in different parts of the brand’s owner organisation, whether sales, marketing, service or IT. Far from reducing the scale of organisations, digital technology simply reveals how alienated teams are from each other. This makes it more difficult for marketers to create a coherent experience for customers.

In reality, the brand ‘ecosystem’ is simply another example of Hilton’s systems, ‘too big, bureaucratic and removed’ from the people around which it purports to be built. Brands’ use of technology often exists in isolation from the business needs, and it frequently fails to take account of the full context of the individual customer’s context. Digital technologies are used to reach people but they do not always connect with them.

Programmatic buying is a case in point. I recently looked at a book on Amazon. Sure enough, later that day I was served an advert for the same title — retargeted in the hope that I would ‘convert’ and buy. The trouble is, I already owned the book — I only visited the page so I could copy the URL and recommend it to a colleague via e-mail.

This is a small example, but it captures something about the programmatic uncanny valley. This is the context deficit.

When brands rely solely on technology to interact with their prospective customers, they rarely inspire them.

Instead, with no ghost in the machine, there is a risk of confusing them.

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Marketers know that eyeballs do not necessarily equal purchase intent, yet brands persist with this tactic. In today’s marketing world, attention is expensive, but intention is currency, and the more one can learn by generating behavioural data, the better one can understand, at a population level at least, how best to harness customer intent. Search, user experience and marketing generally are built on this principle, but programmatic advertising shows how difficult this is without human intervention. People are not always predictable. Their actions are rarely linear and rational.

The purpose of brands has not changed. Brands should inspire people, sometimes emotionally, and sometimes simply to purchase. And so, to paraphrase Steve Hilton, how can brands make the digital technologies they deploy feel more human?

A RETURN TO THE REAL It is easy to say that technology is the future — and marketers often do. Yet there are signs that people might not want their future to be entirely digital.

In music, for example, vinyl sales are on the increase, and have been for a while.2 The same can be said for books.

Physical sales were up 4.6 per cent year on year between December 2013 and December 2014, and up 5 per cent in the first eight months of 2015. In October 2015, Waterstones announced it will no longer stock Kindles, thanks to what it has termed ‘continually disappointing’ sales.3 There is something in the air. A hankering, perhaps, for a return to the real. Many people feel tied to their screens, almost against their will. We have all had that moment where we have looked up from our phones only to think, how long was I away? One

recent study into device behaviour found that participants switched between devices an average of 21 times an hour while at home4 — that cannot be doing anyone any good.

Even those at the forefront of technology feel it. David Rose, an MIT researcher, has written about his recurring nightmare where ‘all the wonderful objects we once treasured have disappeared, gobbled up by an unstoppable interface, converged into a slice of shiny glass, its face filled with inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives’.5 That is quite some dystopia, but it is one that deep down many people fear.

Indeed, perhaps it is why the picture of the woman in the crowd at the ‘Black Mass’ movie premiere went viral in October 2015.6 Amid a sea of star-spotters with phones in hand, desperate to capture the moment, she was content merely to be in the moment. Perhaps we envied her.

Certainly, in such a situation, many of us would have been reaching for our phones to take a picture. But the number of retweets and likes tells us something about how this idea resonates with people.

This is a thought that should concern everyone involved in brands, marketing and advertising. It is a thought that needs to be acknowledged and understood. We might even want to accept some responsibility for it.

COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY Anyone working in advertising understands that increasingly clever technology is something to accommodate within their thinking and their activity. As the Future Foundation/IPA highlighted in its 2015 report, technology will continue to

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Humanising the brand in a digital age

Figure 1:

The impact of technology on consumers

Source: Future Foundation/IPA

have a huge impact on consumer behaviour. Now that everyone has gone mobile, they will soon expect to be able to buy anything from anywhere, and soon be exposed to brands using predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to improve the services they use (Figure 1).7 Nevertheless, as futurist Tracey Follows has argued, there is a parallel and counterintuitive train of thought.8 As these technologies proliferate, the brands that let their humanity flourish will be the ones that retain competitive advantage.

It is emotions that mark the route out of uncanny valley: intuiting context, using insight and applying empathy. In the here and now, customer experience (CX) is where marketers can do most.

Indeed, Econsultancy calls CX ‘the single most exciting opportunity for marketers’.9 The trouble is, really good CX is expensive.

CX is expensive because brands need to provide it across more touch points

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than ever. Those touch points are more diverse too, and cut across internal silos. A truly customer-centred approach requires collaboration and internal integration.

On top of this, people’s behaviour keeps changing. It becomes harder to track with every passing month. As Google noted back in 2012, most people do not buy a product on the device they began researching it.10 This means that as digital ‘snacking’ behaviour continues to rise, it becomes more expensive to be present — and relevant — at those moments. Many brands are struggling with understanding, let alone measuring, the full customer journey. Without cross-device tracking, it is impossible to know whether someone on your site is there for the first time, or simply for the first time in desktop mode. But even if you can afford the entry cost, is more technology-fuelled tracking really the answer to the emotions gap?

However you focus on customer experience, it is going to be expensive.

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But the investment is worth it. In his paper, ‘Exploiting the implicit’,11 Pete Buckley argues that the more costly communication appears to be, the more appealing it is. Not cost in explicit, financial terms, like a John Lewis advert or a flagship sponsorship; rather, this is ‘implicit communication’, a brand’s body language, where the cost is perceived as effort.

This, Buckley says, is how communication works between people, and it is no different with brands.

Signals are stronger when people can see they are not premeditated or self-interested — in short, when they are more human. Great customer experience counts as implicit communication — a brand’s body language. If brands can get this right, in a world where attention is expensive, then it may prove more powerful than formal communication.

HOW SHOULD BRANDS RESPOND? So, if the great customer experience is worth the expense, how should brands invest? How should they consider the balance between new technologies and ensuring the customer experience is invested with emotion?

How can brands retain their humanity as they get more digital?

One way is to invest in options that liberate automated technology into more emotional territories and give customers greater control. For example, Spotify’s Discover service makes it easier for music lovers to choose what new music listen to. It is convenient, effort-free and relieves of them of an often paralysing choice. In short, it does not worry about being human-like, but it is human-friendly.

It is also significant, as it represents a trend of people becoming increasingly comfortable outsourcing their

decision-making — most notably in an area they care passionately about, where one would normally expect them to want to maintain control.

It is worth thinking about where this trend might lead. How about outsourced grocery shopping? A digital food service that recognises shopping habits, tastes (perhaps using favourite recipe books integrated through an application programming interface) and concerns (such as food miles or the organic profile of the food) so that the customer’s weekly cognitive effort is reduced to a bare minimum?

Sounds great, right?

Not everyone is ready for such a level of automation, though. People do not want the machines to take over. In 2014, Nielson/Affinova conducted research into people’s attitudes to internet of things services.12 The research found that some consumers fear losing control. It also revealed that not everyone is interested in flashy futurism. They just want help saving money.

Brands’ use of technology is not always aligned with how their customers are using technology. In fact, there is a very common perspective on technology that does not get much airtime — many people feel disenfranchised by their technology.

They have no idea how most of the stuff they use actually works, and when it goes wrong they feel frustrated.

Instead of recognising this with valuable, enjoyable technological experiences, big organisations have developed experiences that further alienate people. Consider, for example, the supermarket self-checkout — ostensibly there for the customer’s convenience, and to give shoppers greater control, but untenable without their cooperation and effort. The customer receives no money off for this

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Humanising the brand in a digital age

Figure 2:

The four scenarios for the future of consumer engagement

Source: Future Foundation

extra (and sometimes rage-inducing) labour. Greater control for customers is often a Trojan horse for greater effort.

The value exchange is out of whack.

This is Marx’s theory of surplus value: the value generated by the labour that goes into making any product.

Many businesses are using it in a way that does the direct opposite of what it could do for its customers. John Lanchester articulates this brilliantly: ‘This is surplus value created by you, the customer. Companies transfer their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves.’13

Customer labour is encoded into so many of the services people use. Once you notice this, you see it everywhere: the post office, airline check-ins, ATMs, the time you take off work to receive a delivery at home.

So, which is the right approach?

Spotify or self-checkout? Should brands make it easier for people to outsource their decision-making or work harder

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to bring humanity back to everyday interactions?

Navigating this new territory, this uncanny valley of expectation, is going to be difficult.

The IPA and Future Foundation report outlines four ways a brand might redefine its role in people’s lives in light of this technological change.14 Their model is determined by two factors: whether the engagement is emotional or functional, and how active the consumer is in the relationship (Figure 2).

So, this is one way: decide how you want your brand to add value and build the appropriate services and communications to bring that ideal relationship to life.

HOW HUMAN DO YOU WANT TO BE? Another approach would be to consider what degree of ‘human’ you want your brand to convey.

One option would be to be like Nest (http://nest.com) — programmable but also adaptive, showing the

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pseudo-human characteristics of memory and care, conveyed by a cute name and an inviting interface.

Another would be like Sizeable (http://www.sizeable.com.au), an e-commerce brand from Australia that attempts an empathetic approach by acknowledging the issue of body shape, a dimension ignored by the category convention of body size. Unfortunately, focusing on this induces a de-humanising effect, reducing women’s concerns to body image only, ignoring more personality-driven elements such as style, trends or price.

How about Lark (http://www.web.lark.com)? An anthropomorphic digital service that acts as coach and friend to help users reach their health and fitness goals. You communicate with Lark with text and voice, and it answers back in a nonjudgmental way — the superhuman motivator to mitigate your all-to-human fallibility.

Consider also the following experiment from Smart Car (http://uk.smart.com). It takes one realm of human expression — dancing — and applies it to another very human characteristic — our failure to act in our own best interest, in this instance road safety.

As ever with digital, the opportunity is overwhelming. The options seem endless but experience suggests that it is easy to over-promise what technology will be able to do. So where should one start?

The first step is to answer two questions: what kind of digital brand are you and what does your brand do that machines cannot (yet)?

In response to the first question: • Is your business native to the internet?

Your business may exist with a model originated and built around the

behaviours and patterns of digital attention. You are not replicating a pre-digital business model, but are of the internet rather than merely on it.

• Are you having to reimagine your service for a digital age? Has digital disruption presented new opportunities and challenges not only for your online business, but also your business as a whole, by creating entirely new paths to purchase and customer expectations?

• Can you use digital to provide new points of interaction? Perhaps you do not need the internet to exist for your product or service, but you can use digital services to retain customers and establish new forms of contact with them.

• Are you fighting for attention amid the information overload? You maybe run a bricks-and-mortar business that also needs to be discoverable online as people’s options and access to information about the things they love each expand.

These are four very different digital challenges. Deciding which best represents you can help frame the digital expectations of your market, understand your competition, and bring focus to your efforts.

As for the second question, people crave connection, and human interventions can create emotions in ways that machines cannot. Machines cannot organise, lead or support groups of people. They cannot rally people to a cause, or set out a purpose. Technology can facilitate behaviour change, but it cannot inspire it. Machines cannot use intuition. They cannot read between the lines.

People and machines work in unison.

It is people that develop new digital technologies. It is people who ensure those technologies meet the genuine

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Humanising the brand in a digital age

needs of other people. It is people who can assess the impact of these technologies on other people’s lives, and who can ensure the experience created by these technologies feels sufficiently human.

All of which brings us back to Steve Hilton. Maintaining the ‘humanness’ of brands presents a challenge not just in their use of technology, but for the systems and structures within organisations. Customers want technology that works and people that understand. When complaining to our television or broadband provider, we look to the humans on the other end of the phone to hear our frustration and respond to it. We want them to understand our context and empathise with us as fellow humans. It is not necessarily because they cannot solve our problem that we get angry, but because they have failed to communicate that they understand how we feel.

Brands are enabled by technology, but ultimately made of people. They are two-way entities — the interaction between brands and their customers goes back and forth. Getting that right is maybe the human characteristic we need most. As Peter Drucker says, ‘the most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said’.14 In the end, making brands more human is not exclusively about technology. We do not just want machines to be more people-friendly — we also need people to act less like machines.

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