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Lol on scrabble tiles
If you say LOL out loud your language is already an expression of a human-machine hybrid world. Photograph: Nick Sinclair/Alamy
If you say LOL out loud your language is already an expression of a human-machine hybrid world. Photograph: Nick Sinclair/Alamy

The future of brands in a post-human world

This article is more than 8 years old

In the past, brands offered certainty. Now, only those that tap into our desire to explore what’s changing will survive

Years ago the purpose of a brand was clear and simple. It provided a mark of trust and quality. In a market with counterfeits and snake-oil salesmen, the brand was a mark of reputation and guaranteed a certain level of performance.

During post-war Britain when products were still scarce due to rationing, no one could afford to waste money on a disreputable product. A host of household names asked consumers to put their trust in them, making them a regular item on their shopping list. Certainty and stability was what we were looking for and brands became part of that reassurance.

As peace continued to hold, the west in particular rebuilt its shattered cities and businesses started to focus on growth. A positive GDP was a sign of a positive economy and progress in the increasingly global marketplaces. Over time, growth became the measure of all success until it was almost the only measure anyone was willing to contemplate. Consequently, corporations talked about innovation, and how that would fuel growth, how sub-brands would help them enter new markets and adjacent categories, and how takeovers, mergers and acquisitions of new companies with new competencies could also help convince consumers, or clients, to buy more of what they had to offer. The word brand became a shorthand for expansion and indicated an overarching portfolio of service offerings or product lines.

An era of exploration

The world that is emerging today is different once again. Forget the idea of reassurance, or the idea of expansion (see the recent financial crisis in China), we are entering an era of exploration. Thanks to exponential change in technology and the all-pervasive computing power in our lives, we are seeking out new experiences, new possibilities, new skills and even new worlds. That is not so much expansion, which promises just more of the same, but a desire to learn and discover something new.

Part of what’s emerging is a philosophy and belief in the potential of man and machine working in harmony; of the augmented human who is truly “super” thanks to advances in technology. There is evidence today that man and machines are becoming closer and perhaps, as some transhumanists suggest, they will indeed end up being one and the same thing.

The old eras of the mid-late 20th century were times in which it was clear what it meant to be human. Even around the millennium and after the internet became mainstream, we still spoke of brands in an anthropomorphic way. And despite, or perhaps because of, the rise of social media, we continue to refer to brands as having very human qualities. They are “warm”, or “friendly”, or “restless”, “confident” or “carefree”. We have always anthropomorphised brands because we use them to make a connection to other human beings. If we want a relationship to exist between a brand and a human being, the best way to establish that is to ape the human. Until now.

The rise of social media has changed how brands communicate. Photograph: Anatolii Babii/Alamy

Post-human brands

Much of our communication is now computerised. So many of our services that we enjoy for free and with spontaneity are served to us via an algorithm. By 2020, it’s predicted that the internet of things will be present in about 30bn devices and there will be more machine-to-machine communication taking place than human-to-machine communication. More of our communication will be artificial and less of it will be human.

If you don’t believe this, have a think about your own communications and how your language has changed even in the last couple of years. Today, verbal and textual language almost constantly interpollinate each other. If you say LOL out loud, or start tweets or emails with ‘Um’, or sign off with IMO, then your language is already an expression of a human-machine hybrid world. As Greg Rowland of the Semiotic Alliance put it to me: “This demonstrates a viral evolution of linguistic tics that are derived from clickbait more than actually ‘lived’ language.”

Our communication is changing, as are our behaviours. In fact one might argue that our behaviours are changing faster than the systems around us. Much of that is an evident source of tension in the world: the clash of the old and the new; the traditional and the modern; the digital and the analogue. We’re in transition.

We are in fact mutating. We are on the cusp of a mutation of humanity as we transition from being biologically natural to become a multi-species, multi-gender, multi-skilled, multi-purpose hybrid of organism and computerisation. This doesn’t happen overnight of course, but as Peter Schwarz said at the World Future Society conference recently: “The biggest change to come is that humans will take control of their own evolution. The next century will see significant differentiation between and inter species that produces a great variety of forms.”

People such as Rosi Braidotti the philosopher, suggest we are still taking our prejudices, cultural biases and assumptions over into the post-human world. What does that mean for brands? Must they reflect those prejudices or can they adjust and address inequalities and unfairness, promising a more holistic and empathetic world, actually compensating for the lack of human nature in a digitally intelligent and disembodied world?

It is now common to say that the world is uncertain and therefore can’t be planned for. One thing is certain though. We are entering a world that is post-human. The question is, given that brands have always communicated using extremely human values, emotions and language, what does the future hold for the post-human brand?

Part of the answer is to embrace the emergence of exploration – exploration of the information systems of biology. Millions of dollars are pouring into the life sciences, synthetic foods, genetic engineering and pathogens research. In the last few years, it has become fashionable for lifestyle brands to describe themselves as technology brands. They are wrong though: technology is just the process, a means to an end.

We are embarking on a new level of understanding of life, death, disease, emotions, behaviours and communications within our own species and beyond. All brands will in one way or another become what I call ‘bio-brands’: tracking, hacking, monitoring, predicting, augmenting, creating, and recording us and our surrounding environment. Bio-brands that improve, augment or enhance our health and wellbeing will be what every post-human brand will, in the end, become.

The Future of Brands: Post-Human Brands report will be available to download from anydaynow.co later in September

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