Your brand is your business’s bedside manner
Your brand is your business’s bedside manner
Doctors are highly trained medical professionals, obvs. But to be a good doctor requires more than technical training in diagnosis and treatment. Doctors must develop a bedside manner. Their bedside manner is how they interact with patients on a human level.
You could label engaging and empathising with individuals when diagnosing and treating their sickness and ill-health as a soft skill. However, this shouldn’t detract from its central importance in delivering care effectively.
Bedside manner influences care outcomes. Patients are more likely to view their treatment as being effective if they perceive that their doctor has a good bedside manner. From the start, a doctor’s ability to alleviate patient anxiety and make them feel more comfortable in a medical setting contributes to their ability to absorb information and how well they accept treatment.
So, what’s all this got to do with your brand?
You might have years of experience doing what you do and be an expert or specialist in your field, drawing on a vast bank of knowledge and insight. You might be able to diagnose your customers' problems incisively and act decisively to solve them.
But are you delivering a satisfactory customer experience? What shapes your customer’s perception of your business? Is it all down to outcomes, or shouldn't you also focus on all the touchpoints throughout the customer's journey?
Bridging the social synapse
Bridging the social synapse
The American psychologist, Lou Cozolino, specialises in interpersonal neurobiology — the area where body, brain, mind and social relationships all meet. He has compared social interactions with the brain’s biological synapses, its nerve-cell junctions. The social synapse is the space between individuals, where interpersonal communication occurs.
This communication is verbal and non-verbal. It involves the exchange of information and influencing how people think and feel. A doctor’s bedside manner allows patients to bridge the social synapse, helping them manage information and their feelings about their diagnosis and treatment.
Similarly, successful brands make their customers feel something. They tap into emotions to drive purchasing decisions. These emotions can be varied and complex. It’s not always a simple case of persuading someone to buy a product or service by appealing to their sense of anticipation or even their fear. It’s about building trust.
Brands build trust by bridging the social synapse. This goes beyond having an eye-catching brand design and a memorable strapline. Your brand is your business’s personality. It ensures your consistency in how you communicate and interact with prospects and customers at every touchpoint.
Your brand isn’t a substitute for relationship-building but a vehicle for it. Therefore, it must have substance behind it. It should encapsulate who you are, what you believe in and, most crucially, what you will do for your customers.
Your guiding personality
A doctor is the archetypal caregiver. Typically, their bedside manner will incorporate compassion and a willingness to provide help while setting the patient at ease. Some doctors will naturally be more at ease with patients, depending on their personalities and how they apply them professionally.
This doesn't mean a less socially adept doctor can't develop a good bedside manner. It depends more on an understanding that patients will probably see things differently from them. Establishing an effective bedside manner requires empathy.
The patient's expectations are that the doctor will be a caregiver and display these traits. For brands, however, meeting customer expectations is more complex. Ensuring your brand has an effective bedside manner depends on you adopting the guiding personality that most closely aligns with your customer’s expectations of you and your position in the market.
You can see this most explicitly in consumer brands. They must appeal to their audience and stand out from the competition. Therefore, they adopt a guiding personality or archetype to make their messages resonate more powerfully and maintain their consistency.
Here’s an example: Who Gives A Crap toilet paper. Head on, it tackles the taboo of shit while expressing its purpose-led values in a playful, down-to-earth manner (50% of its profits go to help people without access to clean water or toilets and its products are environmentally friendly).
The brand understands its audience and has developed a specific personality and tone of voice to engage them. It is an archetypal jester brand, using its playfulness and directness to build a loyal customer base and transmit compelling brand messages that could otherwise sound overly earnest or preachy. The Who Gives A Crap brand is completely consistent and uniquely identifiable.
But what about businesses that don't wish to sound edgy or humorous? Or, what about those enterprises with the main purpose of making money rather than more elevated, socially conscious goals?
Whatever your type of business, the bedside manner principle should still apply. People will do business with you if they feel they can trust you. It boils down to building relationships and connecting with your target market. Being businesslike shouldn’t prevent you from sounding human, and the best channel for achieving this is your brand.
Be more human to be on-brand
You can’t have a good bedside manner without human traits. However, you can’t pop up in person everywhere at once, attracting, connecting and engaging with prospects to convert them into customers.
Realistically, you need your brand to do the vast proportion of this on your behalf, which is why relatable brands display human traits. They have personalities to grow engagement and persuade each customer to start and complete their journey.
Displaying relatable, human characteristics via a consistent brand personality requires careful planning to develop a clear brand strategy. This strategy should also reflect your business objectives — your brand and business goals must harmonise to ensure clarity and maintain a clear sense of direction.
Again, like the doctor's bedside manner, your brand strategy has an end goal in sight, which should deliver intended outcomes.
Patn is a branding agency for placemakers. We provide brand strategies, devise and design brand identities, run brand workshops and offer branding support via brand-led marketing.
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