2017 Pepsi marketing campaign ad starring reality show star and model Kendall Jenner missed the human touch. Source: The New York Times

How to make marketing more human amid digitalization

By Michelle Chan | 27 May, 2019

MARKETING is responsible for conveying the brand message to the right audience and preparing potential customers for purchases.

Instead of spelling it out for the audience what a certain product can do, she shows it in the video. Source: Dish by Ili

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Michelle Chan | 26 April, 2019

As digital tools become easily available, businesses need to keep in mind that there’s great value in humanizing marketing strategies.

After all, it is easy to lose sight of the main goal, which is to connect with the audience base, in the digital sphere with new technologies making interactions look so seamless.

The technicalities of SEO and engagement rates are important to measure the effectiveness of marketing spend. However, it is the human element that drives and determines if the campaign will perform.

When a campaign missed the mark

For example, the 2017 Pepsi ad starring reality show star and model Kendall Jenner got pulled one day after release.

In the ad’s final scene, a policeman receives a can of Pepsi from Jenner and the protestors all cheered and celebrated the supposed symbol of truce.

Pepsi’s imagery in the ad was borrowed from the Black Lives Matter movement and was criticized for trivializing the seriousness.

While the ad did get a lot of mentions in the digital world, it shows that not all publicity is good publicity. Therefore, it is better for marketers to balance both the digital and human components.

How to make marketing more human

To start, every step of a campaign needs to appeal to the human audience. Understanding data per se will not be enough to map a marketing campaign’s trajectory.

In the end, the real work is to create and maintain the relationships with customers instead of riding on trends.

So, it should aim to keep conversations going with the audience base.

To do that, businesses should study marketing data in detail to understand nuances such as interests, motivations, and pain points.

This is something that the PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi also agreed on. It’s why data analytics is key for marketers looking for relevant information.

Video content can even showcase short clips or snapshots of the syllabus. Source: Shutterstock

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Only through understanding the audience and connecting with them will marketers be able to fulfill the real needs.

In the digital era, marketing is not a one-way street. Businesses have no reason to not actively seek out how they can better communicate with their audience base.

With automation displacing repetitive tasks, it is now —more than ever— that marketers can focus on what they can do best to add the human touch to campaigns.