“Smart marketers earn consumers’ trust when they are willing to self-disclose,” said Randy Siegel.
Tired of the impersonal quality of their daily lives, Americans are seeking to reconnect and develop stronger relationships. “In all walks of life, we see a trend toward wanting to convert impersonal transactions into personal relations,” reports famed futurist Daniel Yankelovich.
Connection, or the feeling of belonging, is one of the top three human needs, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow, soon after physical needs. In our well-fed society, nearly all of our physiological and safety needs are becoming met, but for quite a few the need for connection just isn’t, and smart businesses are responding.
The image of company today is being altered, says futurist Faith Popcorn in her bestselling book Clicking. “Business will be no longer seen as a war to be won by trouncing the competition, but viewed as being a complicated mosaic being developed, one particular relationship at a time.”
Sharp marketers forge stronger connections with their constituents by building deeper relationships that result in confidence, and this confidence in is built on the four Ps of higher voltage communications.
Personhood: Personhood calls for corporations to be self-aware, self-accepting, and self-disclosing. To be able to be self-aware and accepting, many marketers use a tool referred to as “gap analysis.” During a gap analysis, investigation is conducted to figure out if a company’s recent reputation matches its desired one: if it doesn’t, further exploration is necessary to uncover why. If it is due to consumers’ perceptions, entrepreneurs know they need to do a greater job of advertising, and if it is a real problem, they understand changes must be made.
Personhood also calls for staying authentic, and right after the corporate scandals of 2002, staying authentic has by never been so significant.
“In the recent environment, it is time for brands to rethink their simple brand foundation and contemplate adding a pillar to rely on. They need to clarify their company’s values and synchronize them with their customers’ values,” says Ed Keller, CEO of RoperASW, one of the world’s most respected market research firms.
Smart internet marketers earn consumers’ trust when they are self-disclosing about themselves. A great example is when Jaguar confronted its reputation for mechanical issues and turned its business around by promoting, “We kept what you loved. The rest is history.”
By putting a face on a item, issue, or organization, high voltage marketers use personhood to personalize their products. But a pretty face is just not adequate; they’re also using storytelling.
“The electricity of the story is upstaging the power of the sound bite in advertising,” writes Melinda Davis in her book The New Culture of Desire: Five Radical New Strategies Which will Change Your Organization and Your Life. A good story is more personalized and credible than a contrived advertising slogan, and we will bear in mind a story long after a catchy tagline has faded from our memory.
Dave Thomas of Wendy’s, Scottie Mayfield of Mayfield Dairies, and Chrysler’s Lee Ioccoa are excellent examples of how marketers have used personhood to promote goods. These CEOs are comfortable talking about themselves and are capable to connect their stories to customers’ demands. Personalizing and storytelling work mainly because they help men and women form emotional bonds with the organization and its inventory.
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