When was the last time you met someone for the first time? Perhaps it was a new colleague, or even a first date?! What was your first impression of them? Were they cold & standoffish or were they warm & inviting? Perhaps, you couldn’t quite tell.
Unearthing a person’s story, their emotions, intentions, ideas and beliefs is what motivates us to form valuable connections with people who we believe will enrich and enhance a part of our lives.
The most interesting aspect of this behaviour though, is that we aren’t just applying it when communicating with other ‘people’. Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon which occurs in our psychology, causing us to attribute these humanistic traits onto objects and other non-human entities. This is why some people name their cars (FYI mines called Freida!), or declare themselves as being ‘in love’ with a particular brand.
But if these things aren’t actually a life-form capable of physically communicating with us, what is it that’s determining the gender of your car, or whether or not you have an emotional connection with a brand?
The answer is astonishingly simple, it’s all just clever marketing known as ‘Brand Storytelling’.
Brand storytelling involves marketers infusing their marketing comms with relatable human emotions. For example, Volkswagen with their recent commercial featuring their new VW T-Roc car that was supposedly ‘born confident’, or M&M’s with their humorous, living, talking candy characters.
This type of anthropomorphic marketing has become more significant in recent years due to our new digital landscape causing markets that are saturated with choice. Many marketers can no longer just rely on products and services to sell themselves when competitors are selling the exact same thing, they need to induce brand personalities that consumers will warm to.
Take Apple vs. Android, both companies sell extremely similar products, but have very different brand personalities. I’ve even witnessed raging arguments over whether someone considers themselves to be an ‘Apple’ or an ‘Android’ type of person!
Working in B2B tech marketing, this got me thinking, that thus far, I’ve not known of many campaigns that have used brand storytelling as a technique to sell their technological solutions to other businesses.
It makes sense for B2B tech marketers to have previously taken a more logical and less emotional approach to selling their products and services under the belief that they are selling to ‘businesses’ and not ‘people’. But as the shift in purchasing power is transferred to millennials in the workforce (Google think, 2016), this perspective on selling could be a cause for concern!
According to Forbes (2017), the millennial generation have opposing purchasing habits within the B2B tech arena compared to that of their Gen X predecessors, with 94% of millennial B2B tech purchasers declaring that they value the ‘reputation’ and the ‘mission’ of a company over price competitiveness and product/service compatibility.
So are millennials bringing their natural anthropomorphic tendencies into the workplace now? Do they just want tech vendors to have a ‘nice’ and ‘honest’ story?!
It certainly seems that way, as B2B marketing (2017), reported that millennials have a far greater tendency to ‘get to know’ a business technology brand via channels such as social media and thought leadership pieces before making any form of official contact with the company. This is a direct contrast to previous Gen X decision-makers, of whom the majority have a preference towards face-to-face meetings to discuss negotiation tactics with the vendors themselves.
What’s the upshot of these findings? Is there going to be a Tinder app for millennial decision makers to ‘get to know’ B2B tech brands before meeting them?!
Well actually, Cisco might be on their way to doing this! Just check out the B2B ad they created for Valentines Day, a great example of how B2B tech marketers can still infuse emotions such as humour into their brands, humanising their otherwise cold products and services to fulfil our anthropomorphic needs!
Perhaps, it is time for more B2B tech companies to consider the psychology of their new millennial purchasers, and focus on telling their brand stories in emotive and compelling ways.
