Brands and corporations around the world have embraced social media as a tool to communicate directly with their current and potential customers, but the public hasn’t always embraced them back. There are lots of reasons why a brand’s social media communications might fail, but when they do, accounts like Brands Owned on Twitter are always there to take pictures and appreciate the damage.

Some of these burns might be cheap shots or just innocent witty banter, but in some cases, internet commentators take the opportunity to highlight very real issues with these brands’ and corporations’ operations.

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Twitter accounts like Brands Owned are about more than just celebrating witty and snarky clapbacks. They tend to represent a cluster of different political value systems that can unite over a shared distrust of corporations. On a more basic level, they also give voice to some social media users’ discomfort over the idea of brand and corporations trying to pretend that they’re people.

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This approach to corporate/brand social media communication is a relatively recent phenomenon with a few different names, including brand humanization, personification, and anthropomorphism. In a practical sense, each of these practices seek a similar goal: making a brand, product or corporation seem like it has an individual character/personality.

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Image credits: BrandsOwned

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Social media isn’t the first or even the most culturally prevalent way in which companies have tried to achieve this. In the past (and to this day, some companies relied on charismatic or influential leaders to give them a human face. Consider Steve Jobs at Apple or Elon Musk at Tesla. Other companies have opted for mascots, like Mr. Clean, most child-oriented breakfast cereals, or the M&Ms mascots.

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What’s different about the social media trend is that it’s happening in a space where the public is being engaged. Brands are inviting people to respond to their questions, but some of them aren’t getting the responses they were hoping for! The creation of a brand identity that people can engage with and talk to opens a whole new can of worms in terms of brand communication.

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These entities, at their core, are powerful profit-oriented enterprises. Naturally, this means they can make ethical missteps that the public will disapprove of, and when they try to later represent themselves as affable individuals, the public can still remember and address their past injustices.

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Despite these risks, there is research out there indicating that this strategy can provide positive results. According to a study republished on Science Direct, “The results indicate that brand anthropomorphism is a valid predictor of outcomes such as brand trust and brand commitment. Finally, in support of incremental validity, it is identified that the [brand anthropomorphism scale] explains variance in brand trust and brand commitment above and beyond the measure of brand anthropomorphism commonly employed in the literature.”

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What all of this means is that IF a brand manages to successfully create a friendly or otherwise memorable and pleasant public-facing personality, they can count on that impression to influence consumers’ decisions when they decide how to spend their money. This is a goal that many brands hope for but, as we can see in this list, few actually achieve!

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Whether or not we like it, this is a trend that is growing in many different industries. If you have a smartphone, it is likely that you can also use a digital assistant on it that has a human voice and can speak to you in full sentences. Websites are experimenting with using ChatGPT so they can provide every single visitor the impression of communicating with a human representative – without actually having to provide the customer service reps to do so.