Humanizing Your Brand: Introducing Mr. Pump Head To The Water And Wastewater Industry

By Bill King

The more human you can make your brand, the more likely it will resonate with your customer. After all, they are human. Right? Still? We might be entering a new era of machined intelligence but for now, you still face the centuries old challenge of marketing and selling your products to human customers.

When I think about the products and services used in the water and wastewater industry, it’s hard to find examples of them being made more human. JWCE’s Muffin Monster would be an exception. BioMicrobics has also invested in some fascinating marketing campaigns and techniques over time including Aerobe and Robust, BioMicrobics Onsite Treatment Specialists (B.O.T.S). 

But generally, the pumps, valves, analyzers and pipe fittings of our industry are about as inhuman a group of products as you can find. Humans are emotional, temperamental, passionate, unpredictable and humorous (at least my coworkers are). The engineered products of the water and wastewater world are reliable, mundane, repetitive, staid and well, designed to be boring. You may know one or two humans who fit this description too but how do you get buyers excited to interact with your brands when they embody these characteristics?

The answer is enlisting the humans that interact with your products into your campaigns and content. The chances are the next time you pick up one of the trade pubs of our industry, there’ll be an operator or an engineer on the front cover. That’s because it connects the reader with the magazine because they see someone who looks like them doing the types of things they do staring back at them.

The humans that make up your organization and the humans who are your customers bring transparency and authenticity to your products. We’ve been having a lot of fun this year interacting with many of you on creating human-based content. The level of knowledge, skill and passion that our writers have uncovered within our customer’s rank-and-file has been thrilling. And your customers tell a great story about your products too!

When you launch your next product and are creating the prerequisite specification sheet or application video, take a moment to think about how your customers will deploy it. Use that pilot study participant to tell their story. Find the humor. Humanize it. Connect your brand. 

Image credit: "DSCN0740," Cynthia Donovan © 2008, used under an Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/