September 22, 2015

Humanizing Brands in a World that is highly Emotional

Branding in the Arab World

Companies should be looked at as a living soul rather than a corporate body. The fact that brands in the Arab World are still being considered as blocks and bricks and a few chairs floating here and there in a place where someone on the top makes more money and the employees being treated as cogs in the machine, makes it extremely hard to create brands that could actually compete on the international arena, simply because there’s no emotive and the “I” belong sense is missing.   Fact, Every Company has a date of birth (The day it was founded). It has a name (The name dealing under), image (The logo and its application wherever relevant), soul (owner/s), the body (the individuals/teams selling the product/service), home (The place/s the products/services are sold at), has a society (the sector it belongs to), and country (the country of origin). This concept can also be better proven if we examine couple of scenarios:   Fact: when a new employee “usually referred to by fellow employees as bad apple” is hired, he/she disturbs the work atmosphere, the performance goes low and the general mood is down. This scenario can easily remind us of a virus hitting the human body. The body will suffer and the morals will be down until we get rid of the virus or learn how to live with it.   Fact: If we prematurely launch a brand, there will be high risk of failure. Just like premature birth, the newborn usually end up in the ICU.   Fact: A brand cannot sell if it cannot interact, understand, and be useful to the rest of the family. Brands become vulnerable and at risk of extinction if it cannot grow.   Fact: Brands, just like humans, have children. Some more than the others and some have none… Just themselves.

Humanizing the brand.   In his book “The Nature of Human Values, p 20”, Milton Rokeach stressed on the importance of human values saying: “Man is the only animal that can be meaningfully described as having values. Indeed, it is the presence of values and systems of values that is a major characteristic distinguishing human from infrahuman. Values are the cognitive representations and transformations of needs, and man is the only animal capable of such representation and transformations”.   Values are the cognitive representation not only of individual needs but also societal and institutional demands. They are the joint results of sociological as well as psychological forces acting upon the individual-sociological because society and its institutions socialize the individual for the common good to internalize shared conceptions of the desirable; psychological because individual motivations require cognitive expression, justification and indeed exhortation in socially desirable terms. The cognitive representation of needs as values serves societal demands no less than individual needs. Once such demands and needs become cognitively transformed into values, they are capable of being defended, justified, advocated, and exhorted as personally and socially desirable.   In conclusion, if we succeed in creating humanized brands we will be creating stronger bonds between the brand, the employee and the consumer. The employee will know exactly what he should and should not be. The consumer trust will increase as the signals sent by the brand will be stored and accordingly translated into perceptions about “the professional” offering such product (even if they do not actually see them). Hence, their needs will not only be met, but also they feel assured on both personal and human levels.   So, don’t you just go and create bakery business, create the “Baker shop” capitalizing on the Baker rather than the business.  IT’s worth considering.