Seah Eu Jeen, Founder Of Kiniterang Consulting, On Speaking Human

Image: Seah Eu Jeen, Kiniterang

A few years ago, I built a strategy team inside one of the largest professional services firms in the world.

It started small with a 3-man team (myself, a graphic designer, and an account executive) and grew into something substantial. The team became 15 people. We made millions in annual revenue from the get-go. We worked on serious projects with serious companies, and by most conventional measures, things were going well.

I was proud of what we built. I still am. But the longer I stayed in that world, the more I started noticing something that bothered me. Companies were becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they managed themselves, but not necessarily better at sounding human. Everything was polished. Everything was approved. Everything went through layers of review. Somewhere in that process, I felt the life of the brand (or perhaps my own life) got squeezed out of it.

The language became safer, but also flatter. Companies started sounding like other companies. Leaders started sounding like press releases. Employees were encouraged to be visible, but only within fairly narrow boundaries. Everyone wanted authenticity, provided it had been cleared by legal, communications, HR, brand and probably three other people you never knew existed.

Image: Seah Eu Jeen

I was part of that system too. I understood why it happened. Large organisations are built to manage risk. Consistency, reputation, and governance matter. Before long, decisions started to be made only from a risk mitigation perspective. But the machinery designed to protect the organisation could sometimes distance it from the very people it wanted to reach.

When I eventually left Deloitte and started Kiniterang, I became much more conscious of this. I no longer wanted to help businesses merely communicate better. I became more interested in helping them sound more like themselves. 

That eventually became what I now call Speak Human.

The idea is fairly simple. People trust people more easily than institutions. They respond to voices, opinions, imperfections, conviction and personality. Yet businesses often spend enormous amounts of time removing exactly those things from their communication.

The biggest companies in the world spend enormous effort trying to appear human. Most humans spend enormous effort trying to appear corporate. Somewhere between the two, there is probably a better way to build a brand.

Seah Eu Jeen, Johor Bahru

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