The instruction to "make our marketing more human" has become one of the most frequently issued and least clearly defined mandates in the discipline. In practice, it often produces marketing that swaps corporate jargon for casual informality — replacing "leverage synergies" with "hey friends" — without addressing the deeper reasons that corporate marketing fails to feel human. The result is marketing that feels performatively relaxed rather than genuinely authentic: language that tries to signal approachability through informality rather than earning trust through honesty, specificity, and genuine usefulness.
Real humanity in marketing is not about the register of the language or the presence of emoji and exclamation marks. It is about the quality of the attention the marketing pays to its audience — whether it demonstrates a genuine understanding of how the audience thinks and what they care about, whether it is honest about trade-offs and limitations, and whether it treats the audience as intelligent people capable of evaluating information rather than as prospects to be moved toward a conversion action.
What genuine humanity in marketing actually looks like
Genuinely human marketing demonstrates that the people behind the brand understand the customer's situation — not in the abstract sense of having read a persona document, but in the specific sense of knowing what it feels like to have the problem the brand solves. The marketing that feels most human is the marketing produced by people who are close enough to the customer's experience to write about it with the kind of specificity that creates a moment of recognition: the feeling that someone gets it, that this brand has been paying close enough attention to understand what the actual experience is like rather than what the demographic data says it should be like.
Honesty as a component of humanity
One of the most reliably effective and most underused techniques for humanising marketing is honesty about limitations. A brand that acknowledges what it is not suited to, what its product requires from the customer, and where competitive alternatives might be a better fit is a brand that is treated as trustworthy by the sophisticated buyer — because that buyer knows that no product is perfect for everyone, and a brand that pretends otherwise is signalling its own insecurity. The courage to be honest about limitation is, counterintuitively, one of the most confidence-inspiring things a brand can do. It suggests that the brand has thought seriously about who it is for and is secure enough in that definition to be direct about who it is not for.
The most human thing a brand can do is demonstrate that it has genuinely paid attention to the customer's experience. Not in the abstract sense, but in the specific, embarrassingly-close-to-accurate sense that makes the audience feel seen.
The authority question
The concern that humanising marketing will undermine authority is understandable but mostly unfounded in practice. The authority that matters commercially — the authority that makes a prospective buyer trust that this brand knows what it is talking about and can solve the specific problem they have — is not produced by formal language or impressive credentials. It is produced by the quality of the thinking demonstrated in the marketing, the specificity of the understanding of the customer's situation, and the track record of delivering what the marketing promises.
A brand can be warm, specific, honest, and approachable while simultaneously demonstrating deep expertise and consistently strong results. These are not in tension. The tension is between performative informality — casual language that masks shallow thinking — and genuine authority. Genuine humanity — the honest, specific attention to the customer's experience — is compatible with, and in fact supports, genuine authority. It is the manufactured version of both that creates the conflict.
The practical techniques that work
There are several practical techniques for making marketing more genuinely human without retreating into manufactured informality. The first is to use specific rather than generic examples — the details that demonstrate close observation. The second is to acknowledge what the audience already knows before adding to it — treating them as informed rather than as blank slates to be educated. The third is to include the kind of qualifying honesty that positions the brand as genuinely helpful rather than promotional: "this approach works well for teams with X; if you are in Y situation, you might find Z works better." The fourth is to let individual voices through — the marketing leader, the founder, the practitioner — rather than always speaking in the undifferentiated corporate voice that makes no reference to the specific people behind the brand.
The test of genuine humanity
The test of whether marketing is genuinely human or performatively human is straightforward: read it to someone who knows the audience well — a customer, a customer success team member, a salesperson who talks to prospects daily — and ask whether it sounds like someone who actually understands their situation or someone trying to sound like someone who understands their situation. The gap between those two things is large and immediately obvious to an audience member. It is often much less obvious to the marketing team that produced the content, which is precisely why the external test is so valuable.
Market to people as if they are intelligent, busy, and capable of making good decisions when given honest, specific information. That is a more accurate description of most target audiences than the implicit model of prospects as passive recipients of polished messaging — and marketing built around this more accurate model consistently produces better results than marketing built around the polished messaging model.