Humanization of Halo Top and What the French

Vaishakh Gopalakrishnan
Nov 29, 2021
2 min read

Updated: Dec 6, 2021

Brand humanization is a concept that is on the rise especially when people’s perception towards brands are changing. People connect with brands on a much more emotional level now and even simple things like having an avatar or how people perceive your logo can have an impact on how relatable you can be as a brand.

Trying to be more relatable or more intimate with your customers can increase your customer loyalty by huge margins and your overall performance as well. Even though both the brands that I have covered in the series of articles posted here are pretty transparent about their staff (What The French and Halo Top); which is one very important way to humanize your brand and make it more relatable to the general public, I wanted to know how the brands are perceived and try to make a humanized version or avatar for the brand.

So, I started an experiment with 40 of my classmates here in the SKEMA Lille campus on how they see these two brands and to use words to describe their first thoughts on seeing their brand’s logo. I did get some interesting answers and my job here is to try and humanize the brand depending on the perception of my classmates. But first, here is a word cloud to just show you the interesting answers!

This is what people think of What the French.

Most people think of What The French as a cool, young and attractive brand. They feel that it is a bit aggressive but annoying and sweet at the same time. People also think the brand only caters to Gen Z and Gen Y(Millennials) as more than 80% of the people I surveyed think so, which is true as the brand itself says that they cater to the millennials. So, now for an avatar!

I think this avatar shows a cool, young, attractive as well as an annoying person. Perfect for What the French ice creams!

Now let's move on to Halo Top. Halo Top had even more interesting answers which are shown in the following word cloud.

So, here even though many found the brand to be young, cool, or premium, there were answers suggesting that they found the brand to be creepy. Almost everyone who answered this quiz thought that this brand caters to Gen Y and Gen X which is pretty much in line with Halo Top. There was also on answer that said their logo looked like a bald man with a tattoo on the back of his head. Looking at their logo now, I can’t unsee it.