OK, Who Let Companies Use Emojis In Marketing Emails?? 🤔

Have you ever received an email from a company that looks something like this?

• [Mint Mobile] Brent, your plan renews in 2 days! 😨

• [The SoFi Daily] 👨‍🦳 OK, boomer, what happens when you retire?

• [HelloFresh] NEW! Fresh Fruit Sampler 🍊🍎🍐

• [True Classic] These office looks are 🔥🔥🔥

These are all real email headlines that have arrived in my inbox in the last 14 days.

Aside from giving your a glimpse into just how badly I need to do an unsubscribe inbox purge, what this trend reveals is another component of our society’s relentless crusade for “relatability” and “authenticity.”

Every corporate online interaction is carefully curated by a social media team to project an image of approachability:

• Interns post behind-the-scenes iPhone videos on social media stories.

• Company Twitter accounts get into meme wars and respond to customer feedback with GIFs.

• Everyone is using trending audios on short form videos trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Now, maybe you’re the type of person who loves the fact that our commercial institutions are now speaking on the syntactic level of a middle schooler who just got their first smartphone, but to most people I know, this sort of juvenile pandering rings quite hollow.

But why is this the case?

The gradual casualization of corporate communications is not a new phenomenon. Successful advertisements have relied upon understanding societal values and exploiting cultural trends for as long as marketing itself has been a bonafide industry.

The new distinction, I believe, is the emphasis on “personification” of brands, or the desperate attempt by corporations to establish themselves not just as a company that is “with the times,” but as a company that is “no different from you and me.”

And in the same way that we get a gut feeling that another person isn’t telling us the truth, companies pretending to be normal human beings when they quite obviously aren’t strikes us as extremely disingenuous even if we can’t put our uneasiness into words.

Like I mentioned, this is happening because of a cultural demand for “authentic and relatable content.” In short, I suspect that this movement has its roots in a broader societal distrust for established institutions. There’s obviously a lot we could go into there, but establishing this premise goes a long way towards prescribing a solution to the identity crisis at hand in corporate marketing departments across the globe.

So how do we fix this? It seems to me that this whole “think of me as another one of your friends” approach isn’t going to get most companies anywhere.

Of course, brands can still be fun, have personality, and not take themselves too seriously!

But, at the end of the day I think that companies who do right by their customers and go the extra mile to provide excellent customer service and build institutional trust in a flighty and distrustful era are going be much more successful than companies who are merely chasing trends.

Memes, GIFs, and marketing gimmicks fade, but a good reputation never goes out of style.

Takeaway: The casualization of corporate communications is often an attempt by brands to “prove” their trustworthiness through relatability instead of proving it through an established track record of quality products and high caliber customer service.

My name is Brent and I like to talk about ideas and the way that we share them. Thank you so much for reading!

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