Hi everyone, I hope that you had a brilliant week.
Today’s post is on the psychology of human branding so this incorporates social psychology and cognitive psychology as human branding draws on the knowledge about how social group and individuals interact with the environmental and other social factors, as well as it draws on cognitive psychology because it involves the way we think about brands and organisations.
What is Human Branding?
Human branding is where a business or brand makes themselves more human in order to connect with customers as humans connect with humans; hence the social psychology.
Additionally, customers can improve their human branding a number of ways. Such as: being human in emails and using voice marketing.
For more information, please check out Human Branding for Authors: How to be Human in an AI World?
The majority of the information applies to both authors and other businesses.
The Social Psychology and Cognitive Psychology of Human Branding:
Below is the extract of the psychology of human branding taken from my book and this passage clearly explains the social psychology of human branding.
CHAPTER 1: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW
In this chapter, I’m going to be briefly telling you about the social psychology of affiliation and the social need to connect, and I’ll mention some other important factors to know about for the rest of this book.
Social Psychology:
Below is an extract is taken from my Psychology of Human Relationship 2nd Edition book that discusses the importance of affiliation.
“Human relationships are very important to humans because human relationships but especially close relationships; such as sexual relationships or relationships with close friends; are the centre of human existence.
We cannot thrive without them.
I know from personal experience that I prefer to have close relationships and the relationships I have had have been very important in my life and as humans, we have a fundamental need to affiliate (Baurester and Leary, 1995)
In other words, humans are a social species, so we need to be with others and humans are constantly thinking about affiliation, relationships and being with others.”
The takeaway message from the extract is that your readers want to affiliate and form a friendship with you, so the point of human branding is to let them connect and affiliate with you.
Recommended reading: if you’re interested in more about the psychology of human relationships or social psychology. Then I would recommend checking out my psychology books at:
Other information:
Now that we've looked at the social psychology behind human relationships and connection.
We can have a look at some basic marketing principles that don't just apply to human branding but book marketing as well.
Marketing Rebellion:
After reading the amazing book Marketing Rebellion by Mark Schaefer; you can find the link in the back of the book; I learnt some very important human truths that I feel like you should be aware of before you continue reading:
· Humans want connection and to be loved.
· Brands; like your author brand; are people that people can connect with.
· People form attachments to brands.
Tips from Marketing Week:
During the research process of this book, I came across a very good website that gave me two important facts that highlight the importance of building a human brand.
“Consumers who perceive your brand as human are 2.1 times more likely to love the brand”
“Consumers who perceive your brand as human are 1.6 times more likely to purchase from it and 1.8 times more likely to recommend it”
Source:
www.marketingweek.com/how-human-is-your-brand/
Therefore, I think that these facts clearly show the benefits of making your author brand more human.
Other need to know factors:
Know, like, trust:
I have briefly mentioned this in the previous chapter but you need to know this concept as it is a fundamental of marketing. This is because people are drawn to people meaning we do business with people we know, people we like and people we trust.
And this links back to The Creative Penn example in the introduction.
Methods for using the know, like and trust principal will be the basis of this book and it will be shown throughout.
The compound effect and this is a component:
Firstly, I would definitely recommend the book The Compound Effect by Perseus.
The compound effect feeds very well into the ‘this is a component’ idea meaning that all human branding and other marketing activities will add up over time to deliver you results.
For example, by doing podcasting, Twitter and other things that we will explore throughout this book. Over time all these activities will add up.
However, that statement that you were meant to be doing more than just human Branding is not meant to scare you because you can learn and develop the skills over time as I have. It has taken me over the best part of a year to do what I'm doing now.
For more information on book marketing, I highly recommend How to Market A Book by Joanna Penn.
Although the message to take away it's if you do a bit of all these methods each day over time you will start to see that it can take weeks months or even years, you will receive results.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed today post on the social psychology of human branding.
If you want to know more about human branding, then please check out my book: Human Branding for Authors: How to be Human in an AI World?
Also, please consider signing up for my newsletter to receive more psychology content.
Have a great week everyone.
Kind regards Connor.