Humanist approach for brands

If you search Google for "Digital Transformation", it returns 598 million results. Nearly triple what you get when you type "pancakes recipe". This number speaks to the massive interest in completing the long-awaited transformation that followed the internet explosion for organizations. There was a time when it seemed like it would be fairly straightforward: create a digital version of everything we did offline.

More than two decades later, we've learned that wasn't all there was to it. Transformation involved many things, including a multiplication of opportunities to start businesses, generating a dense landscape of new and improved products and services. But it's actually gone much deeper—also into how we relate to each other as people and, therefore, how we work and especially how we connect with brands.

Until then, what dominated was a Taylorist management approach, an idea from 1911 that centered proper functioning on a process dividing identical tasks, as if people operated like machines. However, for a corporation to transform and even improve its functioning, the first step is to see people as complex wholes that develop across different spheres with their natural fluctuations.

Humanism in organizations

Approaching this perspective is what the humanist approach applied in organizations seeks—being able to listen to and understand individuals so we can unlock the unique potential of each one. This theory starts with a principle that may seem basic, but shouldn't be overlooked: organizations must guarantee people's dignity and strengthen their capabilities as responsible adults in service of the shared purpose they have as a collective, in this case business.

At Soluble, we integrate this humanist approach into our own development, but especially to accompany companies as they develop their brands, particularly in the digital space. So when we talk about brand and say it's everything that lets us shape an image, what happens inside is crucial: organizational culture and not just understanding what a company does, but also why and what for it does it.

Brand through people

A brand carries so much of the people who make it up and how they relate to each other. In their unique and inimitable realities we find strengths to surface and build the perception we need to endure as businesses: our brand image.

This is crucial for brands with high digital presence, because while Taylor's theory generated processes that required considerable effort and time to implement change, the humanist approach—by respecting human nature—gives organizations positive and agile adaptation, based on autonomy and trust in the judgment of our people.

Feedback between culture and strategy

For these changes to be not only agile and aligned with common sense, but also to resonate congruently with the brand we are and want to continue being, it is once again fundamental to have laid the groundwork internally, to recognize that strategy that unites us and springs from our own culture. This strategy puts into words the concepts that give us meaning, but it is also a practical tool that will help professionals be more aware of their role and contribution, and will enable more aligned, congruent, and conscious decision-making across the entire corporation.

Addressing organizational transformation from a humanist approach therefore requires approaching brand management and activation from a similar perspective. This way, we will also multiply the benefits known to come from applying this kind of culture (replacing hierarchies with autonomy, error with learning that leads us to innovation, replacing discourse with conversation, fostering commitment and preventing talent retention, etc.)

Moreover, the humanist perspective applied to brands allows us to address something we consider critical: mental health. This is not to be confused with permanent happiness, which would only generate frustration and be of little use to the organization, but rather as that capacity we have as individuals and as a collective to face the challenges that arise, deal with difficulties, and know how to confront what this brings with it in spaces that are also healthy for our psychology.

Today for organizations and brands, transformation is no longer an objective, but a constant state that requires an increasingly human approach and one truly centered on people. That is our path: returning to the essence of what we are so we know how to build agilely and digitally today what will allow us to endure.