What's the easiest way to increase your likes and followers? What engages our brains the most? Infographics, text or maybe... faces? Or maybe they are one and the same?
From the article below you will learn:
🔹 Why do faces have powerful advertising potential?
🔹 Is a face more powerful than a logo?
🔹 How to translate this knowledge into professional success?
🔹 For those curious: how to present data with Chernoff faces.
🔹 Why do faces have powerful advertising potential?
It seems that with the current development of civilization, nothing is permanent. Old professions are disappearing, new ones appear, and anyone who stops being interested in technology immediately stops being up to date. However, there is something that has not changed since prehistoric times. Our brains. Evolution has long stopped keeping up with us and despite the use of smartphones, we still have the same mechanisms in our headswhat our ancestors did with a spear.
We are cavemen with access to the Internet. Many of our reactions and decisions are based on behaviors that were necessary for survival a few thousand years ago. At that time, man lived in a very dangerous environment and anyone who thought, instead of acting immediately, could stay, for example eaten by a bird. Despite the fact that instinctive actions in the 21st century are rather reduce the chances of survival, they continue to lead the majority of people. Which means that We will be interested in the same things that would interest primitive man.
What was ancient Facebook? One of the main carriers of information for our ancestors were faces. Their expressions informed about the condition of their loved ones long before the first words were used. Each element of facial expression carries with it lots of informationthat automatically engage our brain. Emotions, views, health status and even sexual orientation can be read from the face. Michał Kosiński at Stanford University he created an algorithm based on photographs indicated sexual orientation better than humans (the algorithm was 81% accurate and the study group was 61%).
This leads to the face simply clicking well and being memorable. Georgia Technical Institute, together with Yahoo Labs, analyzed over 1,100,000 photos on Instagram in terms of engagement. It turns out that posts containing a human face had 38% more likes and 32% more comments, regardless of the context. This means that removing the human element from your brand promotion immediately cuts out a lot of your audience.
🔹 Is a face more powerful than a logo?
Each face is unique, just like fingerprints. This means that each of us is born with a unique identification that we develop in others throughout our lives. This is our absolutely unique, engaging "logo". Additionally, it is easy to remember because each of us remembers about 5,000 faces without any effort. The graphic on the left shows the average number of faces that each of us associates. People known from the media are marked in blue, and personally known people in yellow. Now imagine that you have a set of information assigned to each of these people in your head. Amazing, right?
Are you having trouble connecting the following people with the brand they represent? I don't think so. You can even say that sometimes it is easier to remember the CEO's face than the company's logo.
🔹 How to translate this knowledge into marketing success?
▪️Try to focus on people in all advertising activities, and add a logo at the same time. Look how wisely Coca-Cola has been doing it for years
▪️If you are building a personal brand, practice facial expressions. This may give you more credibility than hard knowledge! Acting techniques are great for this, or simply recording yourself and analyzing good and bad moments. As Czechów said, "everything in a person should be beautiful: his face, his clothes, his soul, and his thoughts."
▪️Get familiar with video and public speaking. It's hard to build a brand without it, and not only a personal one.
🔹 Prediction for the future
Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the face in marketing will increase. Why do I write "unfortunately"? Because the basics of this phenomenon are quite unpleasant.
Man is a social animal and our brain is designed to live in a herd. Our close cousins, chimpanzees, spend as much as... 20-40% of your day on social interactions. This time includes mutual care, play, foraging together, building alliances and resolving conflicts. They would probably spend even more time like this if they could, but they have to devote the rest of the day to their physiological needs: resting, searching for food and sleeping.
However, due to the development of technology and social media, our brains are deprived of this, resulting in an epidemic of loneliness:
In 2023, the Electronics Hub report indicated that the global average screen time is 6 hours and 37 minutes a day.
Generation Z spends an average of 109 days a year looking at a screen.
We spend eighty percent of our day consuming information, an increase of 40% compared to 1980.
We see 208 ads per hour - 10 times more than our parents saw at our age.
12% of Americans say they have no close friends, and half say they struggle with loneliness. Additionally, those who have friends spend 70% less time with them than a decade ago.
Our brains are hungrier than ever for relationships with real people and are looking for an outlet for social needs. And I find them on the Internet. On YouTube, videos with thumbnails showing a giant human face have the greatest reach.
The most popular people on the Internet are those who provide us with quasi-relationships and position themselves as quasi-friends. This phenomenon is getting worse and that is why faces are becoming a new brand.
I know it sounds a bit callous and scary. But marketing must keep up with changes in society if it is to be effective.
I would like to add that I encourage as many real relationships with real people as possible. Who knows, maybe this will be a new trend in a few years?
🔹 For those curious: how to present data with Chernoff faces
There is a phenomenon of pareidolia, i.e. seeing in random objects. This is where the famous Martian Face comes from, as well as the clock settings in photographs and in stores. They are usually set to 10:10, which is intended to create the illusion of a smiling face and evoke good emotions in customers.
In 1971 Herman Chernoff created the concept Chernoff's face, i.e. the presentation of data in the form of... faces. In the generated faces, the shapes and sizes of the eyes, ears, and eyebrows are responsible for various data. Chernoff stated that our brains are so accustomed to analyzing faces that this form of data presentation is better digestible than charts. The video below shows crime data in the US from 1960 to 2009 using Chernoff's face:
-The size of the face is the amount of violent crime. -The shape of the face is the amount of robbery.
-The size of the mouth is the number of murders.
-The frown curve is a worsening number of attacks.
-Eye size is the rate of rape. -Hair size is the amount of property crime.
-Hairstyle is the amount of motor vehicle theft.
-The size of the nose is the speed of theft.
-The size of the ear is the amount of intrusion.
