‘The Human Brand’: Our Relationships with Companies
Oct 24, 2013 Books North America
Customers describe how they feel about companies and brands in profoundly personal ways. We hate our banks; we love our yoga pants. We can’t stand the cable company, but we consider our smartphone one of our very best friends. How are we making these judgments? According to a new book titled, The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies, by Chris Malone, an expert in customer loyalty, and Susan T. Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, our perceptions are the result of spontaneous judgments on warmth and competence – precisely the same elements that drive our impressions of other people. As a result, customers evaluate, judge and form relationships with companies in ways that are remarkably similar to how they evaluate and behave toward people. Malone recently talked to Knowledge@Wharton about his book. To achieve success in the future, companies must build more genuine relationships with customers that display warmth, competence and worthy intentions, says Malone, who got his MBA at Wharton and has held senior marketing positions at companies such as Coca-Cola, ARAMARK and Choice Hotels. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: Your book’s hypothesis is that we relate with companies in much the same way that we do with people. Explain.
Chris Malone: In their struggle for survival, primitive humans were forced to develop a genius for making two specific kinds of judgments quickly and accurately. One: What are the intentions of other people toward me? And two: How capable are they of carrying out those intentions? In the academic world, these dimensions of perception are called warmth and competence. Warmth involves whether we view others to be honest, trustworthy, kind or friendly, while competence relates to whether they seem capable, intelligent or skilled. These spontaneous perceptions drive most of our emotions and behavior toward other people. Read more of this post
