The Challenge

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Making companies personal

Published by Esteban Glas on April 24th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs, Business, Web Marketing

In a world where marketing has become conversation, how do you make people talk with an abstract entity, such as a corporation.

You can’t.

Don’t waste your time giving a corporation a human face in the form of traditional ads, it simply won’t work any more.
So, what do you do?

Basically what has been happening so far, giving corporation human faces that people can relate and talk to. This faces come to life in the way of blogs. I’m not talking about anything you didn’t know already.

For quite some time, we’ve seen marketers try to provide human faces to corporations using very public figures, this works quite well for some industries (like sports: of course I want to use Federer’s tennis racket, Michael Jordan’s basketball shoes and the car Michael Shumacher drives), but not quite so in other industries.
Some praise must be given to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, each of them where very visible and public faces of their companies, opening ground to what we see today, I think there’s no need to say they both excelled in their PR roles. People could relate to them (both loving and hating them) since they are human and they stand for what they do. This guys have become celebrities (weather they like that fact or not), and it’s impossible for the public to divorce Microsoft from Bill Gates, Apple from Steve Jobs, and for those of us a little bit more geeky than the average: Linus Torvalds from Linux (I mean the OS does carry his name after all!!).
Human beings have a hard time relating to an abstract concept such as logo or a punchline. We need something more familiar, more close to our primitive feelings. Buying, after all is a compulsive behavior, it’s psychology is deeply rooted inside our very primitive brain (the lizard section of it, as Carl Sagan would of put it). Thus, a familiar face helps a lot in this relationship.
But how do people such as HP’s Eric Kintz, Lenovo’s David Hill (or David Churbuck, I think he should have his own official blog), Dell’s Lionel Menchaca, -Michael Dell is in a similar league as Gates or Jobs- (just to name a few from the industry I work at) become familiar faces? In a lot of senses it works just like cultivating friendships.

It starts with a healthy amount of lack of confidence, in the form of “now what is this guy going to try to sell to me?”. As time goes by, and if you are careful with what you write (not in the sense of being too “corporatively correct” but rather not too “Marketer 1.0“) speak openly and politely you’ll build up a following (I assume what you are going to write about is interesting to a given number of people), they’ll relate to you, and will eagerly await for what you have to say next.

Now, there’s a downside to this. There usually is to everything in life. Corporations don’t own their human faces, they only hire them. And it might happen that someone might move from company A to Company B, taking with him a big portion of his/her following. No workaround for this, just a matter of life.

The question that surfaces then is how loyal are followers to the face vs the company. I’d say it depends on the approach each blog / individual / company has. The more personal (as in first person) a blog is the more loyal people become to the human behind it. With the opposite approach it is harder (but not impossible) for readers to relate, yet, when they do they’ll be more interested in the content than the messenger.

The final thought on this post revolves around honesty. And it will take the form of advice to bloggers (corporate or otherwise). Be honest in what you write and you wont deceit  your readers, your employers and, most importantly: yourself.

I’ll explore some other ways companies become personal in a sequel to this post.

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