Why and When to Use Personification in Advertising

Brands are constantly searching for ways to stand out, connect, and persuade. One creative device that consistently proves effective, when used strategically, is personification. Giving human traits to a product, object, or idea might sound like a literary trick best left in the pages of children’s books, but in advertising, it can unlock surprisingly powerful results.

Why Use Personification?

1. It Builds Trust Through Relatability

At its core, personification makes things feel familiar. When we see a juice bottle that “asks” us to give it a shake before opening, it suddenly becomes more than packaging, it becomes a partner in our morning routine. A bag that “invites” you to unzip its front pocket feels less like a product and more like a helpful guide. This kind of interaction can increase the perceived trustworthiness of the brand. By humanizing the product or the message, advertisers can lower the barrier to belief. It's no longer a cold, corporate claim; it's something (or someone) you can relate to.

2. It Grabs Attention Through Direct Appeal

A key challenge in advertising is simply being noticed. Personification is an attention magnet because it disrupts expectations. When a product “speaks” or behaves like a person, it activates the part of our brain that’s wired to engage with social cues. Whether it’s a sponge that’s “tired” after cleaning or a car that “wants” to go off-road, the ad shifts from being a statement to an interaction. This moment of surprise or amusement is often enough to make someone stop scrolling, watch a little longer, or lean in.

3. It Drives Action With Playful Prompting

Good advertising doesn’t just inform, it nudges. Personification can create a more natural and memorable way to suggest a behavior. “Shake me before you open!” is more engaging than “Shake well.” “Unzip me to explore inside” feels more inviting than “See internal compartments.” By turning instructions into playful prompts, personification helps move people from passive viewing to active engagement.

When to Use It

Personification isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it works best in specific contexts:

• For everyday products that benefit from charm. Household items, personal care products, or packaged foods can easily feel boring or overly functional. Personification adds warmth and voice to the otherwise mundane.
  
  
• When you want to teach or instruct. Complex or multi-step products often come with instructions that consumers skim over. By turning those instructions into dialogue or personality, you make the message more digestible and memorable.
  
  
• In campaigns that rely on emotional storytelling. Brands looking to build loyalty or shift perceptions can use personification to forge an emotional bond. Think of the M&M’s characters or the talking insurance gecko... they become more than mascots; they’re brand personalities.

Final Thoughts

In a world of data-driven targeting and algorithmic precision, it might feel odd to talk about something as whimsical as personification. But it’s precisely that human touch, that spark of creativity and emotion, that often turns a good ad into a great one.

Used wisely, personification helps your product speak not just to the consumer, but with them.

The Automated Lie: AI and Your Devices Don't Love You

Your Apple Watch just told you to "you're making tremendous progress this week." 

ChatGPT started it's response to your query by complimenting you on your  insightful question. 

LinkedIn just offered you congratulations on your work anniversary. 

And somewhere in your kitchen drawer, yesterday's fortune cookie slip still promises that "good things are coming your way."

All lies. Beautiful, well-intentioned, algorithmically-optimized lies.

Here's the uncomfortable truth we've all agreed to ignore: kindness doesn't scale. You can't compress genuine human care into a push notification. You can't reduce authentic encouragement to a randomized string of motivational text. Yet somehow, we've built an entire digital ecosystem designed to simulate the very thing it fundamentally cannot produce: sincerity.

Think about the last time someone genuinely surprised you with kindness. Not the predictable "Happy Birthday" post that Facebook reminded them to write, but real, spontaneous human warmth. Maybe it was a coworker who noticed you seemed stressed, or a stranger who helped carry your groceries, or your kid who drew you a picture just because. That moment had weight because it was unscheduled, unscripted, and irreplaceable.

Now compare that to your fitness tracker congratulating you for standing up. The emptiness is almost insulting.

We've become so starved for positive reinforcement that we'll accept it from anything ... even machines that wouldn't know genuine encouragement if it were written directly into their source code. We've trained ourselves to feel a tiny dopamine hit when our phones tell us we're doing great, as if a device that can't distinguish between a sunrise and a screensaver somehow has insight into our worth.

The cruelest part isn't that these automated affirmations are fake. It's that they're training us to accept fake as sufficient. Every time we smile at a generic "You've got this!" notification, we're lowering the bar for what counts as human connection. We're teaching ourselves that engagement algorithms understand us better than the people in our lives.

Real kindness is inconvenient. It shows up at the wrong time. It costs something. It can't be A/B tested or optimized for engagement. It doesn't come with analytics showing how it performed across different user segments. It just is ... messy, imperfect, and irreplaceably human.

So the next time your smartwatch tries to coach you through a breathing exercise, or your video call platform tells you you're "amazing," remember what you're really being offered: the digital equivalent of a participation trophy. A hollow simulation of care from something that has never cared about anything.

Save your appreciation for the humans who show up without being programmed to do so. They're rarer than you think, and infinitely more valuable than anything your devices will ever tell you about yourself.

The machines can keep their compliments. I'll take the real thing, thank you very much.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Feet

 

Oofos positions their product as "recovery footwear."

Look closely at the video's script. It hammers home their positioning while focusing on benefits and outcomes:

We don’t make footwear.

We make shock absorbers.

Fatigue fighters.

Mobility maximizers.

This is the science of active recovery.

Revolutionary Oofos technology absorbs impact and reduces pressure.

It’s the foundation of every pair of Oofos and the key to recovering faster.

This is not a shoe. This is Oofos active recovery.

Activate your recovery with Oofos.

Combined with eye catching graphics, this script shows that Oofos understands what their customer wants/needs ... and then delivers that in the form of shoes.

Pickle Fork

I inherited a pickle fork.

As pickle forks go, it was a nice one … but … having no use for a pickle fork, I put up for sale on the internet.

It got an immediate response from someone who appreciates a good pickle fork more than I do. A response that made me smile at the writer’s move to establish a relationship and suggest offering them a discount.

I hope you're as amused and charmed by the response as I was.

“Good evening. Hope you and all yours are doing well. I am interested in this little fork to serve sweet gherkins at table.

“I have, well HAD, a very similar one, albeit sterling, but some poorly raised malcontent swiped it at my last open house. I’m pretty sure he outed himself for using the incorrect spoon for his soup course. As my dearly departed Grandma would say, ‘Those with evil in their heart will show their real selves sooner or later.’

“I like the looks of this potential replacement, but may I ask for a close-up photo of the face and wings that grace the caryatid/harpy. Give me a quick image and I’m 90% sure already I’ll take this petite pickle poker, but I want to look into its eyes first.

“Look forward to hearing from you. And any discounts for clever repartee, being amusing, or pleading undying love and devotion … to my miniature dachshund at least ... will be greatly appreciated.

“Thank you, my dear one, and I look forward to your response.”

Not your typical response, but in these days of boring, often AI-generated, content, something out of the ordinary and a little offbeat can be a welcome breath of fresh air. Even if it's just response to an online ad. For a pickle fork.