Join Rob Twells chatting with Caroline Smith from Smudged, as they discuss all the fantastic reasons why you should humanise your brand.
Discover why embracing the human touch in your brand is a game-changer when it comes to digital marketing, including examples from B2B companies that have mastered the art, as well as those who may be falling short. As ever, there’ll be as tons of advice, insights on where to start, tips for content marketing, social media etc, and how to secure long-lasting buy-in from your team, stakeholders, and most importantly, your cherished customers.
This unmissable episode will hopefully leave you equipped with the knowledge and tools to humanise your brand strategy. Tune in now!
Listen on your chosen podcast player
Subscribe to our Youtube Channel
0:00:07 – Rob Twells
Right, we are back, Room 301. Today we’re going to be talking all about humanizing your brand. I’ve got a very special guest, Caroline Smith from we are Smudged. Good afternoon, Caroline. How are you?
0:00:51 – Caroline Smith
Good afternoon. I’m good, thank you. And thank you for inviting me.
0:00:54 – Rob Twells
No problem at all. So tell us more. Tell us about yourself.
0:01:00 – Caroline Smith
About myself… So a little bit on Smudged. So Smudged is on a mission to humanize brands. How that came about? I spent 18 years or so as an in-house professional working across predominantly B2B. And one of the things I picked up in my time doing that is the element of the people part of it. Business 2 Business seems to have, not all of them, but a lot of them seems to forget that there’s still a person in the transaction and people buy for emotional reasons. So I kind of thought I wanted to help them do it and help them understand how to do it and help them understand how to make that a thing.
0:01:40 – Rob Twells
Sounds good. I love the fact that you’ve got a very specific mission. I know we spoke about two weeks ago, didn’t we? I said the same thing then. You were very clear in what you were intending to do at Smudged, which I think is great. And surprisingly, I don’t think a lot of businesses can say that. So, no, really good. So “marketing from the inside out”. It’s a bit of a slogan of yours, isn’t it?
0:02:01 – Caroline Smith
Yes, it’s what we talk about. So there are many of us around with two of us talking now and do fantastic things. There’s some amazing campaigns. I mean, we could have a podcast just talking about all the amazing campaigns throughout there. Now, I’m a big fan of the Barbie campaign, but when you look at those campaigns, what is it is their culture, their ethos, everything about the that what they stand for and that’s where the inside out comes from. That if you get your insides correct, your outsides become easy. It’s knowing your why, your purpose, your passion, why you do what you do, and then connecting the two together to the challenges that your audience is having and join the two together.
0:02:43 – Rob Twells
Fab. No, I completely agree. And having ran a business dealing in B2 B myself for the last ten plus years. At this point, it’s so important that at the end of the day, a lot of the differentiation you have as a business is the people you employ yourself. A lot of different services are very similar these days. So it’s the people you put in front of your customers that can make all the difference. So how can a company use its internal team and culture to sort of humanize its brand, shall we say ?
0:03:15 – Caroline Smith
Simple as: use your people. So many brands have become very faceless, very about the product, the service, about the brand, and forgetting that behind all of that is a team of experts who make that hamster wheel keep turning, so to speak, and it’s allowing them to tell those stories, allowing them to let the people tell. We all know ourselves the three degrees of separation. If you pass something down the line, it kind of loses its authenticity. So let the people tell their story and you know, make it engaging, make it including. And then just involve in them show the case studies of the people, of why they do what they do and what’s integral to the business and it will look after itself, I suppose is the best way to put it.
0:04:06 – Rob Twells
And how does that work in sort of practical terms? So think from a marketing point of view, which is obviously what we do day in, day out. How does that work from point of view? How would a “humanized” paid social campaign, for example, look?
0:04:22 – Caroline Smith
Good question. Content. So thought leadership but a lot of businesses go for this faceless “from the point of view of” for me, as an example from Smudged. Well someone in there is the expert that wrote that. Put the name to the article, put the name to the campaign. If you’re doing video, put real people on. Don’t use actors, use people. Show your culture, show their expertise, show the people doing what they do day in, day out. Simple as, really. Just don’t hide behind your logo, basically.
0:04:57 – Rob Twells
Is there anything from your experience, obviously you’ve worked in house before, haven’t you, Caroline? I imagine there’s some reluctance sometimes to be the face of campaigns and be too involved. But is there anything in your experience that you’ve leveraged to get individual stories and expertise from team members to bring them to the forefront, make them feel they want to be a part of it?
0:05:16 – Caroline Smith
They want to they, just want to do, you know, when you include them in the story. So a prime example is, I worked for a software company, and we were all included. Nobody’s role was someone’s role, if that makes sense. We all knew which everybody was an expert in what they did, but everybody knew how they did what they did. And when we did stuff, if we did conferences, we didn’t just have someone from sales or quite often someone from marketing. We had the expert stand up there and have that conversation. They don’t want to hear from me doing secondhand. Someone else has given me that information. When we did partnership articles in trade journals, it wasn’t written by me. It was written by the person. Yes. Sometimes I’d had to redraft it to make it a little bit more “media friendly”. But the one thing I say to a lot of people, they don’t see that they’re good at what they do. So many people I know that I’ve worked with and copywriters, but they believe that because they’re a numbers person or they’re an R & D person, they’re an engineer. “Oh, I can’t copyright”. And they wrote some of the most natural, beautiful copy I’ve ever seen. It’s things like technical brochures. I wouldn’t write them. I would get them to write them, then I would humanize them. Our job as marketeers is not to do it all, it’s to help understand how to connect it. And it’s just people want to get involved, they’re excited about it. If you’ve got the right people in the right place for the right company, they’ll want to do it.
0:06:50 – Rob Twells
I think I’ve seen a very similar thing. I think buy in from the then or team is so important and culture plays a massive, massive role in that. And I think I imagine a poor company culture can work heavily against a marketer, but a great company culture can make a marketer’s life far, far easier. What role does culture play in your mind, in humanizing a brand?
0:07:14 – Caroline Smith
It’s so important. People buy what you do and why you do it. And you just have to look at in this digital age, people talk. There is well documented toxic cultures being talked about, and it does affect the shareholder value and it does affect the profitability, because you don’t want to do business with someone who doesn’t treat their employees well. And sometimes I feel that gets forgotten because when people think of return on investment or profitability, they think about new leads, new customers making more money, when actually you go back to the fact of looking at the cost of recruiting, the cost of HR issues, well, actually all leads to that bottom line and that profitability and then brand value. If your PR team and your media team are constantly having to do crisis management, the cost of that, when actually what they want to be doing is sharing beautiful stories about how amazing your company is. And instead you’re firefighting all the time.
0:08:20 – Rob Twells
I dread to think the cost of BrewDog’s crisis PR bill, at the moment…
0:08:25 – Caroline Smith
Well, you’ve dropped the name in, I was a bit kind of, “Do I drop the name in?” But that is exactly what came to mind when I thought of that, of the whole situation of as a marketing team, we can sit here and go I’m sure many of us have had conversations about how would you manage it, what would you be thinking? And as marketeers, we don’t want to be firefighting all the time. That’s not why we came into what we did. Whether it is because you’re comms or whatever. We don’t do our best work when we feel like we’re going into what fire are we going to have to tackle tomorrow? We do our best work when we enjoy who we work for. Whether that’s because we are internally or externally, if we enjoy who we work for because you’re a great place to work, because you care about the people who work for you, the people you do business with, you get better marketing. Because we become so passionate about what you do and doing our job becomes easy.
0:09:23 – Rob Twells
I couldn’t agree with that more. And I think all too often business leaders almost create a separation between what happens inside the walls and how that impacts what happens outside the walls. But they’re so intrinsically linked, aren’t they? And I think that’s often forgotten, poor company culture, lack of buy in can have a massive, massive impact on the bottom line, for sure. And we’ve seen that with the company we’ve just mentioned and plenty of others. Plenty of others. And I know, I’ll be honest, it has affected my buying decisions as well. Definitely. I’ve looked at a shelf of craft beer. I’m a craft beer fan. I’ve thought twice about buying certain brands because of the stories that you hear.
0:10:05 – Caroline Smith
It’s the way it’s going. I think people want to buy from people who do good things. Gone are the days where market or businesses are reliant on what we put out there. We are in a digital age that you are one click away from the truth and people buy from emotional decisions. The new buying age, whether you are B2B or B2C, is, by the time they physically speak to you, they know you. You know everything about your company, they know they want to do business with you. And it’s our job as business owners to ensure that we are not faking it till you make it. People see behind these false personas now, these fake ideas and this perfect lifestyle, perfect culture. We’ve got to live it. We’ve got to move forward with integrity and authenticity and not just see them as brand washing words that are thrown around. They’re being thrown around for a reason. And we need to be listening.
0:11:03 – Rob Twells
100%. So. Putting ourselves in the shoes of your average marketing director or a marketing manager who’s who’s got a team and responsible to the stakeholders for marketing results and they know the importance of a great culture and a great internal team and that collaboration. How would you if you’re in those shoes, and I think you have been at one point in life, how would you foster that collaboration? Any practical tips on that?
0:11:29 – Caroline Smith
I think the first thing is top down, you’ve got to have two hats on. You’ve got to know that you’ve got this leadership role, but you’ve also got remember what your role is there to do. So almost remember that you become the key point between the two sides of the business. So it’s lead by example, if anything, marketing, whatever it is, whoever is the most your position in that, you have to be the beat that drum. You have to embed it. And as an in-house person, I’m sure a lot of us can experience the fact that some days it feels like it’s a hard drum you have to beat, but you’ve got to keep beating it because then everybody else buys into it. You have to be everywhere. You have to be the eyes, the ears. You have to be the voice of the pros and the cons. You have to have those difficult conversations. You have to be in both directions. And that, I think, for me, is the biggest thing. It’s behind the scenes and just kind of be the face, be the voice internally to create it
0:12:40 – Rob Twells
Makes sense that in turn, you would hope would breed advocates of the brand.
0:12:47 – Caroline Smith
Absolutely. I think the biggest thing is make it real as well, because you sometimes get those M&S cultures unintentionally so it can’t be forced. And I think that’s where the eyes and ears, if you’re seen to be listening to this is quite the famous NASA case study, isn’t it? The janitor who put I put men on the moon, if you think like that, but also listen to them and understand what every role does, every customer. When I was in house, I went to sales meetings. I regularly spoke to clients. I wanted to hear what’s going on. I used to sit in the canteen, and I wanted to hear the conversations that were going on from our manufacturing team. I wanted to hear the truth. I would ask those difficult questions of I wanted to understand what they knew, what they didn’t know, what they were frustrated about. And from our clients, I wanted them to feel that they could tell us everything. Because then you become the ability to have that intel, to drive that change.
0:13:57 – Rob Twells
Makes sense. Makes sense and really ringing true to me. I think the more buy in you get internally, definitely how it impacts externally. You mentioned brand washing a few moments ago. What are some sort of telltale signs that this is being done with a lack of authenticity, shall we say?
0:14:18 – Caroline Smith
I’m going to give a case study because I’ve talked about it in my marketing. Oh, Dashwater was a prime example. So they’re a B Corp company? Yes, they do ethical manufacturing, ethical sourcing. But then they didn’t live and breathe it. It’s a campaign they’ve used. They went and used quite a pivotal PR thing with Prince William to use it for their advantage. And in there was the whole they just lost the whole ethos of they were trying to say that if you don’t want the limelight, we do. And I was like, the whole ethical side of the fact of the whole mental health behind it, the whole using the media that this guy’s taken to court in the first place, ethical is live it, breathe it, everything you do. It’s not saying you have to be perfect, because no one is. But if you make a mistake, own it, apologize for it and learn from it, and people see through that. It is the whole B Corp is in the news a lot at the moment because they’re having to change the way they vet their, because of the fact that people are using it as a look at us, we’re a good company. You have to live it and breathe it. You have to be perfect. You have to everything about it, the values of B Corp have to live it and breathe it. There are some fantastic companies using it and doing it very well, but brand washing is jumping anybody jumping on the back of anything like that, whether it is a I mean a high profile thing. Another good example was Shell So becoming the sponsor of the cycling, yet they’re one of the biggest contributors to the oil problem. And everybody said, what does this mean for the fact of renewable energies and what you’re doing to drive this? It’s covering up what you’re doing to try and use something else to your advantage. And it’s like, no, fix that first and then use that rather than use that while you’re fixing it.
0:16:27 – Rob Twells
100% I think there’s so many you mentioned there about B Corp. There’s so many accreditations that you can slap on your business now. B Corp, you got a fair living wage, you’ve got all these different…
0:16:38 – Caroline Smith
Good places to work. People are losing their integrity and their value because people are using them.
0:16:49 – Rob Twells
100% and a lot of the brands you see in the news nowadays, like the Brew Dogs, like whoever else, where they’ve had staff who have come forward and spoken about the challenges of working there, using these sort of marketing tactics because they are marketing tactics, aren’t they? B Corp badge, salary, living wage, all that kind of stuff, like you say, losing credibility. And I think we’ll start to see, as we clearly have with B Corp is those guidelines and what you need to do to achieve those statuses to get stricter. I think it should be something you have to apply for or prove every single month…
0:17:25 – Caroline Smith
I think it should be I do. I think it should be I think you should have to do it every single year. As marketeers, if we go for chartered status, we have to prove we’re continuing to make sure we’re good at what we do every single year to keep that accreditation. There is a commitment to our ongoing learning and development to keep our chartered accreditation. So if you want to keep that accreditation, you have to keep annually proving why you are committed to it.
0:17:51 – Rob Twells
Absolutely. So, on the contrary, what are some brands that are doing this well?
0:17:57 – Caroline Smith
Oh, who are doing it well? Hmm… Do you know what the one that sprung to mind for me? I was looking into this, and a few because there’s not many in the B2 B that really stand out either or they’re just living it. There’s a really good one with Adobe at the moment, and I really love this as an example, they’ve created, like, an environment to because they’re a creative company, so they’ve created an Intranet where people can share their skills, share their articles, their own little ones. So it’s a little bit like the slack culture. And then they use that to generate content and they just get people to kind of share their design, share their skills, because people are proud to work for Adobe. And I quite like that, that it’s just literally a creative platform for a creative company to allow their team to be creative. For me, that kind of resonated. I know it’s not kind of what you’d normally think of that, but for me, that was like, how amazing is that? As an example?
0:18:57 – Rob Twells
Got free marketing effectively, haven’t it?
0:18:59 – Caroline Smith
Yeah. I’m sure there’s rules and regulations behind it, but it is the kind of I think, for me, that’s what I love about it is. Everybody gets an opportunity. When I worked in a manufacturing company, what I loved about that was everybody had a voice. If we could see an area to improve the business, it didn’t matter if it was your department or not, your voice was welcomed. Your voice was encouraged, how we can improve things in the business. And that’s what people want. They want to be able to feel that they’re not just number that turns up every day. You just have to hear that; the quiet quitting. It’s people who are feeling like, just turn up and do your job. I think there’s a lot going on transitioning at the moment that people are beginning to realize that that the modern employee wants to feel like they add value. I’m not saying all of them, but there are people the way people work has changed, the way people buy has changed. But the whole environment is we want to do things that are more aligned to us now and what matters to us. We want to work with businesses who are aligned to us. And that’s where I think for me, there are some smaller companies coming up who are starting to do it. There are some. But I think it’s still slow burn. Some of the bigger companies, it’s harder because they’re so huge and you’re going to hear good, bad stories. You just have to go on Glass Door and see the big companies with the 3.5 because you’ve either got the people absolutely love it or the people who go. So it’s a difficult to say who’s getting it right? It’s a perception, isn’t it? I think who’s getting it right? Are they growing? Are they retaining staff? But Adobe was the one that I think and I’ve heard a few people who say it’s a great place to work.
0:20:58 – Rob Twells
I’m going to find that. I presume there’s an article out there somewhere…?
0:21:03 – Caroline Smith
I think it was called something like Adobe Life. Let me have a quick look. I did write some notes in it, but basically it’s just like an intranet that encourages them to share and support any articles they’ve seen. Anything that’s relevant. I loved it. I thought, what an amazing idea…
0:21:23 – Rob Twells
It is very feel good. Okay. Back in Mr. Marketing Director or Mrs marketing Director’s shoes, we’ve managed to convince the board to get some more participation from the team. We’ve managed to convince the team to buy in and then they are bought in. How do we measure that? How do we go back to the board in six month’s time and say, this worked a treat?
0:21:46 – Caroline Smith
There’s many things, I think employee satisfaction, you know, so many businesses forget to actually ask them how they feel, ask them what they’re enjoying. You’ve then got retention, you know, sickness, all the kind of things that you wouldn’t relate to brand and brand experience is: what are your sickness rates? What are your retention rates right the way through to… are they becoming brand ambassadors? Are they proud to mention they work for them? We all know on social media you can choose to tag your business. Are they saying “I work here”? Are they proud to admit it? You’ve then got on to the fact of leading right down the customer journey. How is that to the conversion rate? How is it for the customer experience? Are they naming people because they will in those testimonials? Are you sharing those testimonials where someone has been named? In the end, the biggest thing is it might not be instant, but you’ll see it in your profits.
0:22:55 – Rob Twells
Is that really the bottom line? The bottom line is the metrics which we typically measure internally and externally. So anything from sales to marketing campaigns, metrics to staff turnover and all that kind of stuff all are the same. But we measure with and without.
0:23:03 – Caroline Smith
It’s got to be we always marketeers like to measure on success of our campaigns, of sometimes on vanity metrics because we want to rub our ego. But the truth is, if it is not leading to a… They’re not always a financial goal, but the end of it. If your goal is recruit more people, enter a new market. The end goal is because you want to make more money. You need staff to be able to serve it better, because you want to make more money. You want to make more money because you want to invest it back in the business. But in the end, unfortunately, even if you want to be a purposeful business, you still need you still need money to continue that. It is down to the bottom line.
0:23:50 – Rob Twells
It’s interesting what you just said there about recruit more people as a marketing goal. You’ll notice that the way people market for recruitment is probably the way they ought to market to customers as well. So there’s a lot of faces, a lot of happy people. There’s a lot of what it’s like to work here what we do differently. We do this for charity. We do that for charity. All the stuff you’d want to promote as an employer, maybe ten years ago, an average buyer would not care about that kind of stuff. But they do now. So maybe there’s something in recruitment campaign.
0:24:11 – Caroline Smith
There are businesses doing it now. They are doing it. You look at Admiral and the insurance, a lot of their videos is real people. Or you see businesses having real clients show showing the difference… *sirens* …Um sorry with the noise. And that’s the whole the bit, you know, we, we hearts and minds, we love that kind of it’s the people who show they understand their their audience, you know, you you’ve and that that’s the that’s the whole gist of it really. It’s it’s the you are spot on with it. But I think your recruitment marketing actually plays a part into your sales based marketing anyway.
0:25:11 – Rob Twells
100%. And is there any risks of doing this job?
0:25:14 – Caroline Smith
Of course there is. There’s risks in everything you do! I think it is the control in it. You are asking people internally to be a voice. There is a risk of you just have to look at Glassdoors. There are a risk of you empower people to use their voice and they will. But that’s where you go back to lead from example, where good guidelines, where if everybody understands the mission, the vision, the value, the story, and are all recruited because they have bought into the bigger picture, you’re mitigating the risk. And it does go back to, again, what we said about recruitment and marketing and seeing it as all as a value based exercise about culture and recruit for fit, train for skill. Because if you’ve got those right people in post, you won’t be worrying about what they’re saying because they are absolutely they’re ambassadors of what you do.
0:26:06 – Rob Twells
Yeah, values align, behaviors align, absolutely everything falls into place. So what are your best practices? What are your tips to communicate? All this to B2B customers, a humanized brand.
0:26:23 – Caroline Smith
Start with your foundations. So know your why, know why you do this. You know, what is the purpose of it?
0:26:29 – Rob Twells
Surprised how many businesses don’t know that.
0:26:34 – Caroline Smith
Yeah, the problem is, in B2B, I was having this conversation with someone this morning, they’ve lost sight. So when they’ve grown, sometimes, if you haven’t stuck with that founder led environment, sometimes the core mission can get lost. So I say to people, go back and have a look at it. Remember, above and beyond, whatever the product or the service is, it does. Why was it created in the first place? What is it there to do? Move away from features and benefits and think of impact and value. And because people buy, because they want something that solves their challenges or makes them feel better. So go back and have a look at that. Look at why you exist, your values. And I don’t mean that the stereotypical ones of integrity, transparency, honesty. Because I say to a lot of people, if you have to put them on their website, it does make people question. If you have to physically say, these are my values, I question businesses personally. If you have to put that as your values, I question why? Because, you know, most people I would hope maybe that’s my yeah, maybe I need to see the good in people that I presume you are leading with: authenticity, integrity, honesty. But know what that is. Embed it into the culture. Share that wide. Have really good internal communication. And I don’t mean just when something’s changed. I mean the success stories, what you’ve been up to. People want to know why they do what they do. If you’ve run a really big project and what it’s doing, don’t just talk about we’ve just won this. Talk about who the client is and the difference it’s making. Because someone will feel more passionate about doing it if they know they’re making a difference to someone else’s life. Yeah, that’s the biggest one. It’s just really know your why and sharing.
0:28:30 – Rob Twells
Go back to basics. If you know your why, every part of marketing becomes much easier.
0:28:37 – Caroline Smith
Yeah, understand something and we talk about your social purpose. Absolutely. But make sure you truly believe it. If it is sustainability, make sure you’re squeaky clean and you have a very sustainable ethical business. If it is inclusion and diversity, make sure you have an inclusive and diverse workforce because otherwise it goes back to the brand washing again. So it’s know what your “why” is, know what your purpose is and live it, breathe it, embed it.
0:29:10 – Rob Twells
I’m sold. I’m totally sold. And I’m sure everyone listening is sold too. So, looking ahead, in the realm of humanizing B2 B brands, what do you see, what do you predict for the future and how can we adapt our strategies?
0:29:24 – Caroline Smith
I think it’s going to come more and more important, I think, because we have a world of sameness and people are looking for a reason to buy, and so the Human nice brands will be the ones, and we’re already seeing it, are the ones that people are buying from. When you look at the conversations of there are businesses flying at the moment, despite the economic turndown, there are businesses thriving and growing. They are the businesses that are adapting and changing. I’m going to say the dreaded word AI: it’s here to stay. And actually in this world of AI actually is a very good tool for that mass customization because it can help you understand those relationships, how to embed it further. I don’t mean ChatGPT as all of marketeers talking about. I’m talking about those chat bots that can help you enhance those experiences. I’m talking about those automations that can enhance those relationships and those experiences. The gamification. How can you get people’s buy into the brand internally? Don’t kill your employees with death by PowerPoint. Have interactive ways that they can share and contribute and get involved. So yeah, it’s your whole tech for good. That’s the biggest thing is we need to stop seeing AI as it’s going to take our jobs and see it as AI is going to make what we do, and those brand experiences and those relationships we want to build, better.
0:30:55 – Rob Twells
And that is quite possibly one of the best descriptions of AI I have had. And there are a lot of, you know, people are fearful of their jobs, but if you look on the side of optimism, there’s lots of opportunity as well. And I think what you’ve just said…
0:31:09 – Caroline Smith
AI has been around for years. AI has been around for years. It’s just because it’s more in our faces.
0:31:18 – Rob Twells
I agree. I agree. Well, look, I really appreciate your time. Any parting words?
0:31:26 – Caroline Smith
Just remember, we’re all people and we all want, and as species, we want connections. So let’s find a way to build those connections on a human level.
0:31:37 – Rob Twells
I agree. Put myself in my own shoes. B2B. When someone buys from me or from you, they’re not buying the brand. They’re buying the people that work within the brand. They’re buying the years of experience and the craftsmanship and absolutely the people they’re going to work with day to day and who they’re going to interface with on a daily basis. So, yeah, the more we can bring the people to the forefront, the better. And that’s something that I’ve certainly learned in my time. Anything from the marketing to even when we’re pitching, when we’re pitching now, we focus on the process, who you’re working with, what expertise they have, what experience they have, and so on and so forth, and really bringing the people to the forefront to add weight to our own brand. And hopefully it works both ways. So, no, I really enjoyed this chat, Caroline. I think there’s lots of takeaways. Thank you again.
0:32:30 – Caroline Smith
No, and thank you. It’s great to kind of have an opportunity to put this out there.
0:32:36 – Rob Twells
Thank you all for listening. We will see you again soon.
Rob Twells
Co-Founder & Managing Director
Rob is the Founder of an award winning digital agency (since forming a digital agency group The Digital Maze with Boom Online) specialising in SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and web design. With over 10+ years in the marketing space, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
Feeling
inspired?
Sign up to The Digital Maze Newsletter