The Importance of the Human Experience in Branding
The Human Experience is Holistic
The human experience is the sum of the interactions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors a person accumulates throughout life. It is holistic and multidimensional, comprising emotional, psychological, physical, social, and spiritual components that are cumulative and collectively shape a person’s experiences.
These connections are essential to life and, therefore, are critical to all B2B and B2C brands. Some more insightful and progressive brands are increasingly putting the human experience at the center of their strategies. These brands prioritize understanding and addressing customers’ real needs, emotions, and values. This strategy goes beyond promoting products or services. It’s about humanizing the brand and creating genuine connections that resonate personally.
Understanding People’s Emotional Needs
The first step in developing a human-first brand is to deeply understand your audience, including their motivations, desires, and pain points. One approach is to draw from time-tested psychological and sociological frameworks that have shaped our understanding of human behavior today—for example, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which has been influential in psychology, education, sales, and business as a tool to understand motivations and behaviors. As a brand and marketing framework, it can provide an effective foundation for strategy by helping brands align their offerings and messaging with their customers’ deep-rooted psychological and emotional motivations.
An example of this is Dove. The beauty brand puts women at the center of its marketing strategy, which is evident by its messages of body positivity and authentic beauty. The brand smartly includes real women, not models, in its campaigns to reinforce its values of inclusivity and self-expression.
Get Inside Their Heads
Another framework is Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, which describes individuals’ psychological and emotional growth across their lifespan. Brands can align campaigns, messaging, and experiences with consumers’ life stages to create deeper, more meaningful connections. For example, consumers in “young adulthood” might resonate with messages about connection, relationships, and shared experiences, while those in “middle adulthood” might resonate with messages about legacy or impact.
Genuine Feelings Before Prompts
While the simplicity of psychological frameworks may pale in comparison to the flash and excitement of AI and other innovative technologies, the former are rooted in real human experiences. They were developed by experts using decades of research and firsthand observation of people, and they themselves were shaped by the emotions, relationships, and complexities of life.
Perhaps our excitement over the benefits of AI has blinded us to its current limitations. Recently, abundant content has been percolating about AI’s capability to develop your brand. While this sounds like an enticing proposition, it misses some fundamental truths. AI can access content and ideas that presently exist and manipulate them, imitate them at breakneck speeds, and build off of existing material in ways that appear creative. However, it is heavily dependent upon the prompter to achieve its aspirations. Most importantly, it lacks consciousness, so AI cannot emotionally understand or connect with people and therefore lacks any inherent creativity or ability to ideate.
Esteemed writer and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck wrote, “You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.” The human experience is about understanding oneself and one’s place in the world, making connections, and striving for a higher level of fulfillment. AI can predict and pretend, but it cannot participate in the human experience.
To create deeper relationships and greater loyalty between your brand and your customers, you must always view them first and foremost as individuals. A power that only we, as people, can bring to the table.
Written By: David Kessler
Starfish is a branding and creative communications agency that ignites powerful customer connections through the discipline of brand experience.
David Kessler
Starfish CEO | Global Marketing Executive | Brand Strategist
