I have often advised clients to include some humanity in their corporate design and marketing. The theory being it positively influences customer behaviour by engaging with them on a more emotional level.
I recently read two articles that back this design hunch;
One, in the New York Times, describes an experiment in which a digital photograph of the patient was attached to the front of a number of the radiologist’s file. The result was these patients received a longer and more meticulous report.
A more obvious was example was one South African company’s attempts to boost their loan business. Using several variations of a mailer sent to 50,000 people they discovered that a photograph of a pretty lady in the design of the offer letter was as effective as a 5% difference in the loan interest rate in getting response from a male target audience – that’s a huge differential in the lending world.