Can businesses which increasingly rely on automation hope to make meaningful connections with their human customers? Strategic communications advisor Gavin Haycock explores.
Firms positioning for 2025 and beyond to hold and win new business are already asking how they become and be more relevant.
It’s a matter of focus, time, money and … control.
Daily life is ever more digital for the many and the few be they country, corporate or citizen: ‘Automatic for the People’ to replay an album title from a US band’s breakout moment more than 30 years ago.
In a pre-digital time learning to drive, I loved the casual confidence automatic conveyed. That said, with manual each moment behind the wheel was felt and managed. Gearshift grind and grandeur in one ride. Visceral on big open highways, narrow lanes, the go-betweens.
Not losing control mattered.
We see reflections of this today with the hope and hypertension around how AI can extract and inject cost and value. In one sense it is a reworking of an analytics-instinct and automatic-manual division of joy, insight and enlightenment.
Story, identity and purpose easily blur.
Our world by many measures is in flux.
Taking a firm to another level has always been unpredictable and transactional.
Today, from politics to product, profit, purpose and beyond, more so.
Firms hustle with their own groove armadas to sail their route while shooting for a winning shot: The rollout of new product, landing influencer engagement moments or tapping a one-to-many vein rush with a “We’ve got scale” storyline.
Sometimes telling it as it is becomes framing it as it was.
Sometimes a break from the past is a new dawn.
Consider the skid marks, schadenfreude and ‘yes’, figurative settling of dust in the wake of the Jaguar rebrand, Standard Life Aberdeen’s shift to Abrdn, Twitter to X, Facebook to Meta, Coca Cola to New Coke, Yahoo to Oath, or Microsoft this month relaunching its free Copilot for business as … Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
Rebranding rebrands. What’s in and beneath a name?
One challenge among many businesses positioning to be seen as leaders is that too often too few within their broader “team” lean in asking what actually makes their business better tomorrow than it was yesterday and what role does any one person or part of the business play in that?
Why does growth occur, how is it nurtured, what accelerates and holds it back
Too many rely on status quo.
There is so much power in brand equity when automatic and manual, analytic and instinctive alignment work WITH rather than against each other.
When it’s offkey, brand equity erodes. Rust never sleeps.
Ironically, while successful brands and campaigns excel at addressing ambition, curiosity, hope, and so often making you think and smile, these exact same dynamics matter more within the fleeting, beating heart of a business.
When you get it right, what you do with your clients, partners, suppliers, investors or any others who touch you brand flows in-step behind.
The ultimate price and prize of being Automatic for the People is closer than we think.
What was the line in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner? “More human than human.”
If your business needs to determine or define how it can shape a new future, get in touch. We’d love to chat and help your brand connect where it matters.