You Ask, I Answer: Being More Human in Marketing?

In this episode, Katie asks, what does being more human in marketing mean? That's uh a big question because being human is itself a a big question. Um there's a couple different ways to tackle this, but I want to start off with a caveat. Being human isn't necessarily the uh aspirational goal that it initially sounds like. It sounds great.

It sounds very positive. Until we remember that human beings are in general kind of a blight on on the planet, right? Um we are as a species highly self-destructive. Uh we are destructive to a lot of other things too. We're we're incredibly self-destructive.

We've had something on the order of 28 days of war for every day of peace. Um, and uh we're generally not very good at making decisions, uh, particularly decisions over the long term. We tend to be fairly short-sighted creatures, highly emotional uh and problematic in a whole bunch of different ways. Um when we say be more human, I assume we're trying to be more like, say, the Dalai Lama and not so much like uh Hitler. But both of them are human, right?

Both of them are are we human beings. So we want to be very sm very specific when we say let's be more human in marketing. Now, on to the actual substance of the question. Um being more human in marketing can mean a couple of different things. Uh first, it means using automation sensibly, right?

Uh using automation to save time where it makes sense to save time and where it doesn't impact our ability to uh interact with other humans in productive ways. So there's a trend, understandably right now, to automate everything possible so that uh you have as little human interaction as possible, particularly in customer service, because humans are expensive, right? We cost a lot of money. Um healthcare benefits, salaries, machines cost substantially less. So that's one aspect.

Um but the part they think that really defines humanity in business in the sense of being more human is that it's scale or the opposite of scale. Human beings don't scale well, right? But that lack of scaling is what communicates value to us. It communicates that this is this is a valuable interaction, right? When you sit down to have dinner with somebody, um you cannot be sitting down to have dinner with more than a certain number of people, right?

There's a limit to how many people you can have dinner with and have a productive conversation. Uh, certainly if you want to have a very deep conversation, you're probably only going to have dinner with what three, four, five, maybe six people at the most. After that, it's start you get starting a lot of side conversations. Um, you want to have the most direct conversation, you have dinner with one other person. You can't scale that.

There's no way to scale the have dinner with a million people. You can email a million people, but you can't have dinner with them. Um, you can send a million emails, you cannot sit down and write handwrite a million letters. Even you just wrote the person's name in hi, right? Hi, Chris, next letter.

You're not going to write out a million of these in in any reasonable time fashion. But yet, we value a handwritten letter. We value a phone call made by an actual human. We value a video chat with an another person. One of the reasons why you know apps on our phones have so there's so much messaging is because we're messaging people very specifically, very intentionally, in a way that doesn't scale, right?

We might have a group chat with maybe 10 or 15 or 20 people, but probably not a thousand, right? Probably not 10,000 people in a group chat. I hope not. Your phone would never stop buzzing, you'd never get any sleep. It is easy to send a blanket social media status, right?

You post a tweet or you post something on LinkedIn. It's a lot harder to individually direct message every single person. Even if you have a hundred, just a hundred friends, that's a lot of, it's a hundred messages to send at a time, right? And yet that lack of scalability is what communicates value. When you get a direct message from a friend that is just to you, it's like, hey, this is pretty cool.

Um, this person is just reaching out to me. Being more human, you know, machines and AI can generate uh things that sound good but are but lack the actual judgment behind the scenes. Humans do judgment, machines generally don't. And judgment means knowing what the rules are and when the rules don't apply. Um, on the scalability front, it's easy to use these really cool AI systems to generate you know a thousand cool looking oil paintings.

It's really time consuming to paint even just one by hand. So being more human means doing things that don't scale, right? It means showing that you care, showing someone you care by doing something that's difficult or time consuming, something that you have to trade off, right? If I paint you a painting, that is time I spent on that painting. I could have been doing something else.

If I write one email but I send it to a million people, everybody knows, yeah, I didn't really write that for you. I just wrote that. And being more human means in in the in a positive sense, means having empathy. Empathy, we use that term a lot and it gets misused a lot. Empathy means knowing what someone else is experiencing and taking action on it.

Sympathy is expressing emotions uh in support of somebody else's feelings. But empathy is knowing what someone's going through and taking action on it, right? So if you see somebody who is sitting down and tired uh after walking a whole bunch, you get them a bottle of water, right? Because you know what they're going through. You recognize what's going on and you take action on it.

And that is a key part of being more human that machines are not capable of doing yet, right? They can emulate it to a certain degree, but it's still not quite there. So that to me is what being more human means. It means exercising empathy, exercising judgment. Um, and it means doing stuff that doesn't scale, right?

The the less something scales, the more valuable it is to us. Um, and the more something scales, the less personal it is. So if you want your marketing to seem more human, try doing things that don't scale. Especially if you're a small business, if especially if you're starting out and you don't have you know a million people on your client roster, just start doing stuff that doesn't scale, that but that shows commitment to that you understand the other person. Real simple example when I'm about ready to publish a new piece of research um or something, I always send it out to our clients first.

They get it before our Slack community, they get it before our newsletter list, they get it for social media content. Even if it's just 20 minutes before, I always want our customers to know you are first in line. Our paying customers are first in line. And a lot of companies don't necessarily do that, they don't think that way, like, hey, here's a new study, right? Our customers get the new thing before anybody else, and they don't have to fill out any forms because we already know who they are.

Um so they get they get that special access. They're made to feel special because that's empathy. I know what someone else is experiencing, and I know and I can take action on it. When you get an announcement, hey, download this new paper, right? You know what's gonna come.

And you're like, uh, yet another form to fill out, and someone from sales is gonna call me and so on and so forth. If I take action, say, hey, here's the new thing, you don't have to do anything else. I'm just giving it to you. That short circuits that loop and makes people go, oh, yeah, you get me. You you get where I'm going with this.

You you understand that I don't really want to fill out another form, but you're just giving me the thing. Like, yep, that's because I value you as a customer. So that's what being more human in marketing means. Now, there are many, many more dimensions of it because there's so many more dimensions of being human. But that would be uh my first take on it.

Good question. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.