MAN AND PERSONALITY : Even the Moron have a Style

An attractive personality;

All human decision-making is emotionally driven. People choose brands in the same way they choose friends: guided by like and dislike, they are attracted or repelled by particular sets of characteristics manifest in their behaviour. Because of this, advertising agencies and marketing departments work to create endearing brand personalities that underpin their communications planning; informing channel, message, art direction and tone-of-voice.

The brand as person metaphor is a useful way of thinking, but it is seldom pushed to its ultimate conclusion. Brand personalities often fail to be as attractive as their originators intended because they're limited in depth, being made apparent only through the brand communicating something about itself. In the same way that we wouldn't want to hang out with someone who continually talked about themselves, such self-obsession also fails to win over consumers.

How to win friends and influence people;

Instead, to cultivate a truly attractive personality, brands need to communicate about things other than themselves.

Alfred Adler, the Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In it he says:

"It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring."

Taking his cue from Adler, in the first modern self-help book, Dale Carnegie outlines the key principle behind winning friends: don’t talk about yourself, talk about the other person’s interests.

That principle is as valid for brands as it is for people.

Carnegie writes:

“Everyone who was ever a guest of Theodore Roosevelt was astonished at the range and diversity of his knowledge. Whether his visitor was a cowboy or a Rough Rider, a New York politician or a diplomat, Roosevelt knew what to say. And how was it done? The answer was simple. Whenever Roosevelt expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested.”

“For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.”

“If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don't wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.”

“Do you know people like that? I do, unfortunately; and the astonishing part of it is that some of them are prominent.”

“Bores, that is all they are - bores intoxicated with their own egos, drunk with a sense of their own importance.”

Following Carnegie’s advice, we made the conscious decision that Lurpak wouldn’t talk just about itself, but would talk about its target audience’s interest in food. The brand would contribute to the discerning and sophisticated discussion around food by sharing a provocative point-of-view on the food Lurpak’s best enjoyed with.

TQ.
MONKEY SEE MONKEY DO.