I started this post a good while back, but recently read a fascinating post called “Wires Should Not Behave Like Humans” over at i [love] marketing and got inspired again.

First, let’s take the title of the post I read — what does it mean for a wire or a computer or a website to behave like a human? Start with a guy named Alan Turing, and his eponymous test. From Wikipedia:

It was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which Turing considers the question “can machines think?” Since “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chose to “replace the question by another which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.”

[This picture is the] “standard interpretation” of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is tasked with trying to determine which player — A or B — is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions in order to make the determination.

Okay, so what does this have to do with marketing?

So much of what we in the marketing world do is about anthropomorphizing brands. (How ’bout that recent Honda “let it shine” video, for one example?) We write strategies and briefs describing a brand’s personality, which manifests in content, or the choice of producer, the style of art direction, or tone of voice.  Or at Naked, as Michelle described, a brand personality will likely manifest as a whole behavior system, guiding all aspects of the business.

The assumption is that the more human-like a brand is, the better we as consumers will be able to relate to it and, presumably, the more readily we will buy the product or service in question.

Assume for a minute that we are getting better at making brands feel more human.  (There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but let’s suspend disbelief for just a minute, okay?)

If all things converge at infinity, and especially as channels and opportunities for interaction continue to increase, then we then have to assume that the line between human and brand will continue to blur — marketing communications will eventually be subject to a test like Turing’s.

There are signs that this is necessary already:

• Facebook’s redesign made brand pages look and function more like people pages
• So many brands tweet as if they’re people
• Time Magazine recently tried to poll its readers, only to find it couldn’t tell which votes came from real people and which came from spam bots, despite using reCAPTCHA.
• The granddaddy of them all is Subservient Chicken.

But in the blog post that I mentioned at the top of this post, Ana argues that we actually need the opposite of a Turing test for our websites. She believes there should actually be a bright line: “The less ‘is it a human, or is it a machine?’ confusion, the better.”

I’m with Ana on this one. And the same is true for brands in general — the less confusion, the better.

After all, as we continue to be inundated with choice, our attention spans will continue to shorten. (Did you know, for example, that the average length of time consumers spend on a given website is now only 56 seconds??) A brand has fewer opportunities and less time to make an impact on a consumer.

So the Turing test is out. For marketing communications, a test for efficacy needs to mark a different line.  Rather than testing for how human a brand is — because do we really want to be friends with a laundry detergent? — we test for the ability to create a consumer relationship in a compacted amount of time.

So it’s about clarity of intentions and the value brought. In short, it’s about honesty.

As with Turing’s test, the honesty test is simple and binary — it either is or isn’t. And it is a personal and subjective test — a brand might pass my honesty test, but fail yours.

If the desires of the brand are transparent, and if the brand brings you some kind of value — say, function or interestingness — then it passes the test. You are eager/able to forget or ignore that the brand ultimately wants you to help pad its bottom line.

If brand in question brings nothing relevant to you, if it is only trying to sell you something and you end  up resent, or if it is just bloviating (again), then it does not.