The Humanisation Play: How Schneider Electric Stopped Selling Products and Started Celebrating People
Schneider Electric was a component supplier nobody talked about. With 'Life Is On', they replaced product claims with named, real customer stories, making the people who chose Schneider the heroes of the brand. The mechanism: when your product is invisible, make the buyer's ambition visible instead. This is one of the patterns inside jugnu's Kosh.
The tension it resolves
Schneider Electric's scale and sustainability story were buried inside product documentation, leaving the brand invisible to decision-makers who only ever saw a component supplier.
The challenge it solved for Schneider Electric: How do we shift a large industrial brand from being seen as a product catalogue to being seen as a relevant, human brand that sustainability and efficiency decision-makers want to align with?
The mechanism
Named, real customer stories replace product claims as the primary content unit, so the brand's proof travels through the identity and achievements of the people it works with rather than through its own voice.
Schneider Electric launched 'Life Is On' as one of its largest-ever North American marketing investments, using viral video, print, online advertising, email, and event marketing to reframe the brand around customer outcomes rather than products. A 2017 global follow-on campaign added content partnerships with the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and CNBC, and featured 30-second TV commercials built around named customer stories such as Nemours Children's Hospital.
Where this applies in India
This principle is ready to use in Indian industrial automation, where mid-size manufacturers buy from brands they have never heard a human story about. It fits B2B solar and energy management companies selling to procurement heads who need their choice to look smart inside their organisation, not just on a price sheet. It also applies to Indian logistics technology platforms, where the real story is the supply-chain manager who built reliability into a chaotic network, not the software that ran underneath it.
FAQ
What is the Life Is On: The Industrial Brand Humanisation Play pattern?
Named, real customer stories replace product claims as the primary content unit, so the brand's proof travels through the identity and achievements of the people it works with rather than through its own voice.
Which brand proved it works?
Schneider Electric, in industrial / energy / b2b technology (North America campaign launch (October 2015); Global multi-platform campaign (November 2017)). jugnu's Kosh tracks 304 such patterns across Indian and global brands.
How do I apply this to my brand?
Run your brand challenge through jugnu. It diagnoses the tension underneath your problem, checks whether this pattern fits it, and builds ideas on the patterns that do.
This is the story. Every Kosh card also carries a transfer layer: the consumer insight underneath, the principle that moves across categories, and the boundary conditions where it breaks. jugnu applies that layer to your brand when it builds ideas.
Wondering if this pattern fits your challenge? Run it through jugnu and find out.
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