4 ms·
>"Brand relationships are like human relationships." No. Brands, corporations, and other legal fictions are not human. They're tools explicitly designed to gen
by aspensmonster 13y ago
>"Brand relationships are like human relationships."
No. Brands, corporations, and other legal fictions are not human. They're tools explicitly designed to generate profit. This is their fundamental purpose, and as such, they can never bear any significant resemblance to human relationships.
Aside from that, it's certainly an excellent write up. And I like the term too: Dark Patterns.
- grey-area 13y agoI found this statement confusing at first too, but perhaps the way to look at it is that most customers do treat their relationship with brands by analogy to human relationships, whether they should or not. We get mad at brands, vow we'll never use them again, break up with them, come back to them, expect them to behave coherently, criticise the behaviour of one representative as if it were the firm as a whole, demonstrate our loyalty to them in the hope of reward, and generally treat them as human counterparties in a relationship. Of course none of this is realistic or justified, but if you're running a company it's not something you can ignore. If you're a user/consumer/customer of course, it makes sense to step back and realise that your loyalty means nothing to a corporation, they are not a person but composed of people, that they have their own internal goals, and they are rewarded by shareholders for some behaviour we'd call sociopathic in a person.