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Honestly — haven’t you felt that way more than once when you’ve dealt with a business?
Either their marketing materials are so full of corporate speak that you can’t figure out what the heck they’re talking about or the service you get is lackluster at best and that’s being kind.
As consumers continue to get more jaded coupled with the fact that every business has plenty of competition out there — what consumers want and need from us is to know that we’re human. They don’t expect perfection. They just want to know that you’re real, that you care and that you’re not blowing smoke up their skirt. That’s how they are going to choose. They’re going to pick the company they like the best and they can’t like you if you are invisible to them.
So the question becomes — how do you show your human side? How do you give your customers and prospects a sense of who you are and what matters to you? If you and your brand are playful — how do you reveal that? If you have a deep passion for what you do, where does that show up?
I don’t think too many businesses ask themselves those kinds of questions. But we need to. We need to actually make a connection long before the cash register rings. Depending on your business — you might be able to do that in a one-to-one way. But for most organizations, that won’t cover it. They need to find a mass produced way of being real.
Yup — a mass produced way of being real. How?
Here are two great examples. One is the note from the company CEO that comes inside every package of Cold-EEZE. The second is a grocery bag from Capital Market. (Hat tip to Tom Narak for sharing the grocery bag photo with me)
Can’t you just hear their voices? Can’t you feel their spirit and don’t you have a sense of what it would be like to interact with them? I don’t know about you, but I want go to that grocery store. I’d expect to be completely delighted by the experience.
I can hear you now. “But Drew, those are consumer products. In the B-to-B world, we can’t do things like that.” I call bull on that. Yes, you can. Every company has a spirit. We can call it your brand or your true north or your core reason for being. But it’s there. And it’s your job, no… your responsibility to show it to us.
All of us, every consumer on the planet, desperately wants to know if there’s a human inside.
Show us.
