Metaphor, Meaning, and Human-Centric Brands
What creatives, customers, and companies need now.
Is it a bit absurd to think that a brand has - or even can have - a soul?
Brand building follows a particular and widely adopted process that has been proven effective by global agencies and brands alike. It starts with the conception of the thing (the product itself), followed by the assignment of a backstory and initial attributes to help us make sense of why this thing exists and what this thing will do. In order to define how it will live in the world, we craft a persona, personality, and tone of voice. We give it language, an ethos, and a core message to champion. We define its positioning in the market. We create a visual identity that the world will know it by, and we cultivate its inner life - a company culture with values and beliefs.
In my own process, I have taken this even further by thinking of the business operations and team as the “brain”, the product as the “blood” or lifeline, the customers as the “heart”, and of course, the WHY as the very “soul” of a brand.
Why are we so insistent on humanizing a creative process and attributing life to an inanimate product? Is all this heady metaphor and complexity really necessary? Aren’t we running the risk of taking it all too seriously and too far, leading to a kind of brand solipsism? Wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the data, understand what people want, then simply create that and sell it?
I would suggest that it’s never been more urgent to anthropomorphize the creative process of branding, and brands themselves. Infusing more emotion, crafting more meaningful stories, and creating more human-centric brands that are relevant, resonant, and relatable is exactly what creatives, customers and companies need now.
Creatives
When a founder first conceives of a new brand or product, it is often ignited by a spark of intuition, imagination, or frustration. It comes from within, and it’s nothing more than an idea. If the idea goes unattended, it will, as Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, “move on to someone else.” But if the idea is pursued, it begins to take root, take shape, and take on a life of its own.
The personal WHY of the founder is authentically woven into the WHY of the brand. It informs the brand’s worldview, values and beliefs. It guides the mission, vision and promise. It rests at the very center of the core message, infusing the brand narrative with emotion and meaning. This becomes the foundation for the brand universe, and all activations and interactions can be traced back to this reason for being. This WHY is the soul of the brand.
Customers
The soul is a metaphor for meaning. We instinctively like metaphors that provide a familiar framework so we can easily understand how to relate to it. When a brand is built around a clear and powerful meaning that is masterfully threaded through the brand universe via storytelling, design, product experience, marketing, and community building, we as customers experience the brand as authentic, credible, consistent and cohesive. Best-in-class brands invite us into an imaginary world where story and aesthetics inspire our own identity. They reflect back to us an image of who we want to be and how we want to feel about ourselves and our life. Often it’s not even the product, but the brand universe and what it symbolizes, that draws us in. These are the intangibles that stir emotion, conjure memory, and illicit desire, the very attributes that make us human. Brand is a way to self identify.
Companies
If it is the emotional experience that makes us human and separates us from, say, robots, then shouldn’t all companies be obsessed with creating human connection and making us feel something? Yet when we hear company leaders talk about “customer centricity” and “knowing our customer” and “identifying our core customer segments”, what they are often talking about is data. Think of it this way: every customer exists on two planes: the physical plane where we have wants and desires and an emotional experience, and a technological plane, where we are nothing more than a data set of our clicks and conversions. Our technological self has no agency, no nuance, no consciousness. We’re just points plotted on a chart. Yet, it is this “self” that is more valuable to most companies today.
This is evidenced by cultural phenomena like the rise of dupe culture, or rushing to market with an also-ran product to capitalize on a fleeting trend, or addictive algorithms sucking us in to a dopamine-driven feedback loop with promotional content. We begin to see it’s all the same strategy at play: leverage consumer, trend and sales data to illicit a desire for instant gratification.
This strategy has nothing to do with a brand’s unique and ownable reason for being. It offers no meaning to customers. It’s void of vision and values and a worldview. It rarely inspires a sense of identity outside of a desire to fit in. And it adds very little to the industry landscape or culture at large. Yet, it is ubiquitous.
The antidote is soulful, human-centric brands with cohesive brand universes that are able to start conversations, stir emotions, and create meaningful connections. Their authenticity is felt at every touchpoint, even as they navigate the ever evolving cultural landscape, because it is rooted in something more lasting than a trend. And when these brands leverage data and social algorithms, they use them to create culture, not follow it.
We humanize the creative process of brand building and attribute life to products because we’re designing for the human experience. Personality and voice and story are infused into an otherwise functional product because the purchase is not ultimately driven by the product attributes. Purchase is driven by how the customer self identifies with the brand. And when companies create strategies with the real customer at the center, they can forge real relationships, share real experiences and earn real cultural relevance.