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Why brand storytelling is good for business

Every time I go to my hometown, a small dusty place in Uttar Pradesh, I always visit a particular watch shop to buy a new wristwatch. It’s not a one-dimensional buy-and-sell transaction. Each time I go there, I experience a special warmth, renew an old bond, and come away with a unique piece, immensely satisfied, even happy. My passion for collecting watches apart, there’s a reason I take the trouble of visiting this modest showroom, as opposed to buying well-known brands from opulent showrooms or from an online marketplace: my connection with the business. The owner is an old friend and I know his story from the earliest days. Making a purchase from his shop adds yet another bead to our shared story. It’s a deeper connection that defies argument and reasoning. When a customer buys something from a brand, not only are they fulfilling their immediate need, they are, at a deeper level, connecting with the brand and saying, “Yes, I identify with you and what you stand for.” It’s not just about a superficial feeling – it’s a close identification with the business, its ethos and values, its principles of engagement with the world, its commitment to issues that are close to the customer’s heart. Storytelling to highlight the human aspect Businesses need their stories to differentiate them in a forest of same faces. Facts are impressive: jaw-dropping profits and revenues and all the ‘new business in the last year’ coupled with the imposing range of products and outlets in the country or world. Facts tell the growth story of a business with absolute certainty. Excellent! But then, the brand’s real achievement shines through that one story of how a disadvantaged person was supported and put on the road to happiness, or how an initiative by the business brought a smile to a widow’s face, or gave a family a new home. These are the human stories that actually move the customer and help to forge an emotional link. The customer now sees the business as a complete entity, that works not only for its shareholders but also for people and society. It is how the customer puts a face to the business they can connect with in a meaningful way. After all, our brains are wired to respond to stories – a story always sticks in our memory, long after those shiny figures and facts have faded away. Being human and profitable are not mutually exclusive In our age of ‘positive-deficit’, in a time when people all over the world are surrounded by bad news in different shades, building a ‘tribe’ around your brand makes total sense, right?! After all is said and done, becoming a part of and changing people’s lives is no small goal to aspire to. Increasingly, as customers demand that businesses support real people and causes, they also desire to know the impact of such corporate-level engagements. When customers know that a business is greater than its revenues and profits, it’s a powerful incentive for deeper engagement, recommendation to their friends, and thus, the circle expands. We must also not forget that trust in a business is greatly cemented with the help of real customer stories and especially in sectors that engage with human emotions or require the human touch like hospitality, healthcare financial service and insurance companies. When organisations use brand storytelling, they are cementing customer trust for the long term Employees need more than salaries In this age of the Great Reset, when employees are seeking greater motivations than salaries and perks, brand storytelling could actually help give employees the pride of association with their organization. It gives meaning to their daily jobs, and the sense of being part of a greater purpose. As the pandemic wanes and people return to their jobs, they now desire more than a job – and this is where the brand story is reassuring evidence of the larger purpose and impact of the business. As more and more businesses reinvent their digital selves in the glittering age of Web3 and metaverse, a human soul, and a real human voice comes to gain more significance than ever before.   Published on 22 April 2022. Body image by Kanchanara on Unsplash Featured image by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

Human Design and more: Interview of HUDE founder with Great Companies

Nazim Iqbal, Founder of HUDE Studio, and a thought leader in the realm of Human Design, was recently interviewed by the publication, Great Companies. Following is an excerpt… Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business? Nazim Iqbal : During my journey of 20 years in the digital industry – I have seen the digital evolve from the days digital footprint used to be just a bundle of scrambled HTML pages to a time when digital now powers every process of the organisation functioning and every touch point of its customers. Along the journey I have, for long, felt a silent human disconnect that has crept in with increasing digitisation of processes and business functions. Increasing automation has ensured standardisation, availability of data points, and an improved revenue for businesses. But for the users and for the organizations as well increasing automation has meant less and less human interaction. For most organisations, digitisation and digital transformation has meant more and more adoption of technology. But for technology to be successful, design is central to make it usable and to add an experience layer to it. Without these two, technology with increasing digitisation will continue to deliver greater cognitive load to the users. I call it the “Digital Debt” and the organisations will be forced to pay it back sometime in near future. Digital till now has ridden on the technology crest without putting mindscape to the ‘digital debt’ that it is creating by delivering technology that demands more and more from users to remain relevant. But if you look at it, digital is no longer limited to the fulfilment of functional needs of users. The users subconsciously expect, during their interaction that apart from fulfilment of their functional needs, the digital interface and interaction should respond to their emotional needs as well. This is a latent need, but as digitisation increases further, the emotional needs will evolve to become a key set of needs that digital will be asked to fulfil. I am increasingly noticing this among the users and citizens who constantly interact with digital. More so with the generation z, for whom digital services are an integral part of their lives. The good development is that some of the meta brands and organisations have started to realise this. And they have started to give design a key chair in their digitalisation roadmap and digital transformation journey. We are already witnessing the big shift from semantic text and visuals to more emotionally rich content like voice and catch-my-mood videos in user generated content. In fact, across the age categories use of voice command is rising and in some age categories it now owns upto 51% of the share Second most important thing I have noticed, especially in digital communication & social space, is mis-contextualising. Not understanding the users, business objectives and framing the communication approach with vague understanding of users categories and behaviour. Or on the other end becoming too obsessed with data science. Data without emotions consideration will continue to build functional relationships. All this has meant that users vis-a-vis brands continue to have mis-matched expectations between what they expect and what they get from the digital presence and their outreach programs. From the digital service providers perspective, this is a matter of ethics and it is binding on them to invest in understanding the ever-evolving digital landscape, the expectation of the organisation, aligning with their goals, the emotional landscape of the users before setting expectations. Bundled with this is the rising awareness and concern about mis-information, fake news, misuse of personal data and sustainability – so you now have a very different dimension of digital which is emerging. From being the poster boy in the organisations’ growth and strategy – it now pulls in corporate governance, business ethics and even CSR with circular economy coming into play. HUDE Studio (HUDE is an acronym of Human Design) was conceptualised against this background – to be a design studio that will use design to make technology usable, services more user-friendly and humanise the digital presence of organisations and brands. In short, prepare organisations for the future. Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by HUDE Studio? Nazim Iqbal : HUDE Studio is a pure play experience design studio and we offer design and experience technology services that respond to the brand and human experience needs across the digital ecosystem. The team carries an experience of building digital platforms starting from a single line brief to doing ground work that involves carrying out field research, developing new digital playbooks, and conducting fusion workshops with business stakeholders. Our services range across from UX audit, conversation design for bots, product design, mobile applications, web presence, digital branding, communication design, UX-led SEO and interaction design for digital IOT interfaces. Importantly beyond the digital presence and digital transformation is the ongoing narrative which will continue to be owned and driven by content. For us, content design is a big engagement space and we are excited about the emerging opportunities. Businesses are realising that tons of semantic content is not taking them anywhere as far as active user engagement over the life cycle of the product or service is concerned. It is here that the emotionally rich content has filled in – but designing emotionally rich content requires an evolved design acumen. But above all these, we offer to bring a human touch to the digital transformation journey that an organisation or brand is undertaking. We are human design specialists and we ensure digital continues to retain human relevance contextual to the organisation and transformation. Read the complete interview. Published on 8 April 2022.

Why financial & banking sectors need human touch more than others: Part 2

In Part 1 of this article series which you can read here, I mentioned how an organisation or brand makes the customer feel is central to their long-term relationship. In that sense, each interaction should be seen and designed as a conversation. Financial institutions should invest to ensure that digital touch points are designed as conversations – real and human. Which means banking digital transformation needs not just technology, but a design which can infuse human feeling in clicks and bring conversational warmth to every interaction. Designing the organisational voice and role of the AI  In the branch and people led banking, every bank had a voice and a unique human touch. This enabled a customer to distinguish, and bond with the bank. In the same way, central to humanising digital interactions is a ‘voice’, both in the literal and figurative sense. A voice that customers can relate with, and one that can be used to weave conversations across digital interfaces, social messages, automated teller machines and live agents. This goes a long way to establish the feeling that there is a real human behind every interface and social message. To the customer, it communicates warmth, builds trust and makes the institution approachable. Soon Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a key role in bridging this gap between the digital and human, and can be trusted to bring human tonality to each organisation’s digital ‘voice’. In that sense, chat bots will need to be much more than new-age emails. Chatbot conversations should be designed to respond to human fallacy and feelings.  Today most chat bots are deployed as functional forms and do not really provision for human conversation. The focus needs to now evolve and expand to include emotions, feelings and building conversation layers that engage in some depth. Chat bots, as the name itself indicates, are less about drag and drop features and more about designing human engagements and responding to human curiosity and interests. The way communication unfolds shapes the understanding and confidence of people, while also influencing their feelings and future actions.  Putting people at the centre and humanism in the system In a country like India, a good number of customers are still uncomfortable with the process of opening a new account with a chat bot or online form. A voice-led journey, video-based chat or the ability to call an agent from live chat brings a personal reassurance. These are not elements to be plugged in and plugged out. On the other hand, these should be bricks with which financial organisations fundamentally design their content and user engagements. Or like in the branch-led banking relationship, a broad conversation base approach should be adopted. This can be enabled by AI and should be leveraged to map the customer’s current financial state, future financial plans and desires. This will enable banks and financial organisations to design personalized financial solutions that align with customers’ life-goals and aspirations. The future demands that business-as-usual cannot continue, and organisations have to look beyond just serving customers and maximizing profit.  To build a sustainable business, organisations need to scope for giving back to people and society. For a start, designing transactions as humanized interactions and additionally, provisioning for conversations, privacy, safety, integrity and occasional emotional ennui is a way to give back to society. This will earn businesses trust, spread the feel-good with word-of-month and also inspire pride in their employees.  Financial institutions that are looking to bloom in future, should evolve from designing financial products to offering solutions that fit customer life goals. As the pandemic rages on, customers are increasingly becoming demanding and getting primed for remote and AI-enabled experiences – reassurance of human warmth, trust and a warm human voice. Also read Part 1 of this article. Published on 30 March 2022.

Evolution of human digital needs

Human needs are ever expanding! The war is turning out to be a conundrum not just for me, but I believe for many others as well. The virus and the lock down over the last two years had forced humans to soul search. There was greater ‘human-ness’ businesses and organisations started to bring to the world. Globally, there was greater thrust for a cleaner, more sustainable and more humane way of doing business. But the war has come right when the world is still recoiling from the after-effects of COVID-19. It has driven a wedge in the collective human soul. The pandemic accelerated digital adoption, and the war will further accentuate it. The need to be digitally astute and accessible now cuts across sectors, and is seen as a basic attribute of organisations. But most significant is that, human consciousness has started to occupy space in the digital verse of products, platforms and organisations. The COVID-19 acceleration During Covid-19, humans in today’s digitally-enabled society were forced to spend most of their time in the digital verse: watching films and news, socially connecting with new people, having conversations and ordering food and health services. During the last two years, digital has become a human companion like nothing before. Enabling needs fulfilment, providing access to emotional succour, instilling a sense of belonging and providing confidence of existence. In a way, the evolution of this platonic relationship provided the impetus for the metaverse to come into being. In fact, human behaviour during the pandemic is a sort of a window to the future of human digital needs. Demonstrating as it does over the last two years, about how organisations will be forced to respond, evolve and expand to serve the growing needs of humans. Digital now offers spirituality moorings In the early days, digital was about fulfilling human functional needs like process requests and status updates, communication over email, and having discreet conversations. But soon the digital verse expanded to have social networks and the whole matrix of social bonding, belonging and myriad emotions came in. Brands now need to occupy the digital sweet spot, that fuzzy space at the confluence of functional, emotional and ethical needs of the 21st century human The emotional matrix provided the bedrock for humans to start looking for spiritual mooring in the digital ecosystems. Trust, intentions, responsibilities, values, promises, and behaviour began to matter – not just of humans in positions of influence, but of entire organisations. No longer is it sufficient for designated people to contain themselves to fulfilling defined functional roles and for organisations to respond to brand-centric needs. All are now expected to be more human and put forth their feelings and come forth with their moral outlook. For the digital fraternity, the thought cloud about inclusivity and diversity was settling down and the awareness about ethics and sustainability was building in the digital consciousness. Unfortunately, the war threatens to undo the progress. It is a threat that could stall the humanising of digital, with the conflict pushing a dehumanising narrative, what with fake news and data privacy breaches becoming unavoidable.  Published on 15 March 2022.