ANTHROPOMORPHIC BRANDING: WHY IT WORKS

For some of us, that title up there might leave us a little puzzled. We might be wondering what on earth it is, why we haven’t seen it much before, what does it really mean, what can it do for me and my company and what does branding have to do with being anthropomorphic in the first place anyway?

It doesn’t matter if you’re unfamiliar with the word or if it sounds completely alien to your lingo. Chances are you’ve definitely seen it before. Even if you’ve never placed two and two together. You could be familiar with branding and not the other. Or, like someone who shared to me recently, and I quote: “Okay, anthropomorphic I definitely know, right... Branding I know. Put them together and I’m like, whaaat?”

You’ve seen the Energizer Bunny, haven’t you? You know, the one ad where the toy bunny goes about beating its drum rapidly and which seems to go on forever and forever and forever. Batteries and bunnies don’t seem to be a perfect match but now try disassociating the Energizer Bunny away from the Energizer batteries. Kind of hard, isn’t it? What about the Tiger in Kellogg’s Frosties? And the Michelin man?

That’s branding. Something that most of us are familiar with.

Anthropomorphic branding takes it one step further. This is a direction that calls for characterization, meaning that the visual now adopts a ‘life’ of its own. A life that represents what you do. A life that represents your values and your marketing messages.

At Lauric, our specialization lies with anthropomorphic characterization of your brand. We live it out through our own logo.

 

Such logos of consultancies are rare. It’s not as impressive or business-like as you’d normally expect it to be, isn’t it?

What you see are a Rat and a Crow enjoying a coconut.

The Rat represents the values of empathy, bonding, honesty, hard work and intelligence. The Crow represents the qualities of intelligence, care, shrewdness, good memory, sense of camaraderie & innovation. Both of them together represent the start-ups and the entrepreneurs- those whose qualities are aptly represented by the qualities of the rat and the crow in their natural environments; those who possess such qualities that already differentiate them from the rest of the pack.

Where is Lauric, then?

We’re the coconut.

We’re the coconut that wishes to work with entrepreneurs and startups that are rats and crows.

It’s not just the logos. It’s the whole essence of what you do. Let me introduce someone else.

This is Yurin- a man with a wife and daughters who works in an office job and is also a Protector Angel in Shadow of Carthage. Here’s the question: We know him. Okay, fine. We know what he represents. But why should we trust him? And how is he going to successfully convince me to pay more attention to the safety of my loved ones?

Good question. Here’s why:

1.   We love connections. We love connecting with people, and for some of us, we connect with everything and anything in our lives, even our possessions. When we don’t receive connections, we make them. We give handbags names. We give cars and boats and bicycles names. We give teddy bears and dolls names. We call them him or her.  

2.   We anthropomorphise to make sense of the world — and in some ways to exert some kind of control over it. Not just over ourselves, but also others as well. We not only want ourselves to determine what our thoughts are- we want to infer the same to others around us too. And we do handle the inanimate things around us in the same way. When someone says, “She’s in a mood,” he or she might not be referring to a female or a female animal. It could be a car. Or a lawn mower. Or the vacuum cleaner. Or the mobile phone. Or that perfectly innocuous glass of juice sitting on the counter.  

3.   We are human. To anthropomorphise is cognitive and automatic. Put a name, a face, an action to an inanimate object and automatically our minds associate that very action or that very face to the object, as if it were communicating to us.  

At Lauric, we go beyond the branding and branding associations. We create strategies, storylines and characters that invite your customers to think of your products as alive and living… and elicit positive reactions towards them. In other words, we give your products a face, a life, a background, a purpose, a mission, a living thing with values, goals and a future. We make your products likeable and trustworthy, and replicate the power dynamics of human relationships in your product, your brand.

Business Application

How then does this apply to my business, then?

If you believe that your product is a deserving one (and we’re sure you do), anthropomorphization can enhance its qualities and its trustworthiness. Take Google’s self-driving car for instance. Designed with “facial” features to put nervous “drivers” at ease, it makes the nerve-wracked drivers feel that they’ve got a chauffeur or valet of sorts- and they place their lives in the “hands” of their self-driving cars.  

Studies too do show that for products targeted to specific demographics, say, those who have a streak of cynicism in them, those that tend to be overly suspicious and untrusting, those who have perhaps endured some form of betrayal in their lives and have trouble trusting people… a well-crafted anthromorphized product can elicit positive reactions from them.

Yurin’s done that.

 

He’s more than just a mascot. He’s an ambassador of anthropomorphic branding. Talk to us and find others like Yurin who will be more than happy to be incorporated into your marketing strategy.