Susan Fiske, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, studies the psychology of branding, consumers, and the motivation to buy from one company over another. She’s worked out how we pick friends, and companies – both the ones we decide to like and the ones we decide to hate.

Her book, The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies, written with marketing expert Chris Malone, is a blueprint for anyone interested in the human motivation behind consumer choice.

Her insights also apply to the branding that any successful speaker must engage in. Here’s what she’s found: we relate to brands the same way we relate to people, to friends. We are drawn to people who exhibit warmth and competence. If we find either one lacking we respond with suspicion, pity, or disgust.

Brands elicit similar feelings – we want warmth, and competence. If you’re low on warmth, you get suspicion. If you’re low on competence, you get pity. Low on both, you get contempt.

Now, credibility (competence) and trust (warmth) are also prime success factors for speakers. Study after study has found that audiences want credibility and trust from their speakers.

The biggest surprise from her research comes in the area of making mistakes. The best time to relate to your customers, she finds, is when you’ve made a mistake, counter-intuitive as this might seem. Provided you respond with authentic contrition, owning up to the mistake, you develop a stronger bond. You’re human; we forgive.

It’s all good.

Speakers often live in mortal fear of making mistakes; this research suggests that they should instead see the moment the mistake is realized as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship with their audiences – both the people right in front of you, if you’ve made the mistake live, and the audience for your brand.

Fiske and Malone’s work suggest a quick template for thinking about your speaking business in 2015.

First of all, how are you connecting with your audiences and potential audiences? Where’s the warmth?

Second, how are you projecting competence? Do you have a blog, an e-book, a published book, a TV or radio show, a platform of some kind? You need some way to show the world that you are competent.

Third, what are you doing to show authenticity? You don’t set out to make mistakes, of course, but you will, so how do you use those mistakes to get closer to your audience?

Fiske’s findings show that our criteria for evaluating new entities – whether people, companies, brands, or speakers – are pretty simple. We respond emotionally and intuitively to organizations and their work – so put a human face on them.

Think about your speaking the same way. Sure, you want to come across as the expert, but you also want to show warmth too. Especially when you screw up.

The human psyche is simple, when it comes down to our daily heuristics for determining friendship, brand loyalty, organizational affiliation, and whether we like a speaker or not. Ignore human nature at your peril, in any of those areas.