I spent years doing SEO for companies that made things like project management software. Not exactly the stuff of dreams. Nobody wakes up passionate about workflow automation.
But I learned boring brands don’t fail because they’re boring. They fail because they try to pretend they’re not.
Like when a company decides they need to be “relatable” so they start posting memes.
Or when an out of touch marketing director creates a TikTok doing a trending dance in front of a whiteboard with their URL covering 73% of the video.
(17 people liked it… 16 of them were employees)
The brands that actually work don’t try to be something they are not.
I worked with a company that made accounting software. Genuinely the least exciting product on earth. Their competitors were all posting stuff like “We’re not just software we’re changing lives…” with stock photos of people high-fiving in glass offices.
They asked me to help them with their social media.
I told them to stop trying to be interesting. Instead, start talking about the weird tax situations their customers actually dealt with. The freelancer who tried to write off a bouncy castle as “office equipment” because he worked from home and his kids kept interrupting him. That kind of thing. Real stories, anonymised, from their support tickets etc
People loved it. Not because accounting became exciting. It didn’t. But because the humans doing the accounting were interesting. The product was just the thing that connected them.
That’s the bit most brands miss. They think they need to make the product interesting. They don’t. They need to find the interesting people already touching it.
Every boring industry is full of absolute weirdos if you look hard enough. Insurance has fraud investigators who’ve seen things. Logistics has warehouse workers with stories. HR has seen every possible way a human can mess up at work.
The content is already there. It’s in the support tickets, the sales calls, the Slack channels. Someone in your company has dealt with something genuinely funny or strange or human in the last month. Probably in the last week.
But instead of finding that, brands hire agencies to manufacture personality. They spend six months developing a “brand voice” document that says things like “We’re friendly but professional, approachable but authoritative, fun but serious.” Which means nothing and helps no one.
Then they produce content that sounds like it was written by a committee, because it was. Fourteen people approved it. Legal checked it. Someone’s boss’s boss had “a few small tweaks.” By the time it goes live, every sharp edge has been sanded off and you’re left with something that could’ve been written by any company in any industry about any product.
The stuff that actually works is specific. Weird. A bit rough around the edges. It sounds like a person wrote it because a person did write it, and nobody spent three weeks removing their personality from it.
I’m not saying boring brands should try to be funny. Most of them shouldn’t. Comedy is hard and bad comedy is painful. What I’m saying is they should try to be human. Find the one person in the company who’s got stories to tell and let them share.
Mailchimp did this years ago. Their error messages were written by someone who was clearly having a good time. You’d mess something up and the page would say something like “Oops. Something went wrong. We’re not sure what, but we’re looking into it. In the meantime, maybe get a snack?” It wasn’t hilarious. But it was human. It made you feel like there was someone on the other end who understood that software is annoying sometimes.
Most brands are terrified of that. They think professionalism means being forgettable. That sounding like a real person is somehow less trustworthy than sounding like a press release.
It’s the opposite. People trust people. They don’t trust “solutions-oriented platforms leveraging cutting-edge technology to drive meaningful outcomes.” They trust someone who admits the product is a bit boring but here’s something genuinely useful it can do for you.
The secret to making people care about boring brands isn’t making them exciting…
It’s accepting they’re boring and finding funny stories to share.