Corporations are faced with two choices: get a new likeable personality or try to borrow somebody else's

INNOVATION THIS!:Governing bodies such as Fifa have become bloated marketing companies, pompously claiming to 'deliver an audience' to sponsors, writes RICHARD GILLIS

THE word "corporate" has evolved into a term of insult, capturing much of what we feel has gone wrong. It translates to meaning something cold, amoral, detached, unfathomable, remote; images come to mind of glass-towered offices, a Mercedes E-Class and websites with no phone number.

This is true not just at a macro level, but relates to individuals too. Something you notice when you spend your time interviewing people about their work is that they often speak in two voices. When discussing their professional lives many, subconsciously perhaps, use a formal jargon-filled "corporate voice". Then, when the tape is turned off they revert to their natural tone and vocabulary, and begin to sound more like they would with their friends, their partner and their kids. This distance between the real person and the version of themselves they present to the world is a matter for them and their psychiatrist.

But big companies - which are a collection of individual voices - are now, because of the social media phenomena, trying to speak like human beings, with "engagement" - the current Holy Grail.

Many are finding this impossible and a new report in AdAgein the US, suggests the implications of this "brand autism" could be profound. It claims 77 per cent of American consumers trust businesses less than they did a year ago, with research, (which it should be noted was carried out by a digital agency and so has a vested interest), suggested that we prefer the recommendations of peers via sites like Twitter or Facebook.

So what to do? In lieu of a likeable personality of their own, corporations are faced with two choices: get a new one or try to borrow somebody else's.

The former strategy was on show at the 140 Conference, an event in London devoted to the business implications of Twitter. Here some big, faceless giants such as BT and Kodak were coming over all touchy feely. Desperate to be part of the "conversation" Kodak have set up a team of people who spend their days Twittering and who report to a hilariously Orwellian figure: The Chief Listener. But, said the company's chief marketing officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, if "bad people are behaving badly" the company will "go after them", a statement that sounded vaguely menacing, highlighting how far they have yet to travel: the need to control the message is hard wired into marketing lore.

Alternatively, corporations can hope an association with more human activities such as sport, music, art, culture or film will rub off on them. "In a time when people love to be pragmatic and hard-headed," says the philosopher Alain de Botton, articulating the mutual benefits of sponsorship, "let's remember that sponsorship fills vital gaps in our society, between what we really love and what can generate money. Of course sponsors want glory, and want to maximise their brand exposure, but let them: it is their wisdom to seek glamour in the most noble of places. The world will be a sadder planet when the wealthy and large corporations stop wanting to associate themselves with the many important things which don't make any money."

But what are the implications of this on those areas of life to which corporations want to associate? For an answer, it's logical to look at the market where the relationship between business and human endeavour is most advanced - sport - and the results are not promising. Rather than business becoming more human, sport has become more corporate.

Governing bodies such as Fifa, Uefa and the IOC have become bloated marketing companies, pompously claiming to "deliver an audience" to sponsors, as though discussing train loads of computer chips to be taken away and processed.

This dilemma was summed up recently by Nick Hornby, some 20 years after the publication of Fever Pitch, still the definitive book on sporting obsession. "Fever Pitch is an attempt to gain some kind of an angle on my obsession," he wrote back then. "Why has the relationship that began as a schoolboy crush endured for nearly a quarter of a century, longer than any other relationship I have made of my own free will?"

But recently, Hornby said something that was quite sad, but also telling. "Going to the Emirates Stadium," he told fellow celebrity gooner Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show, "was closer to a visit to the cinema than a football match".

The club and the players were now very distant, he said, the whole thing was "too corporate". Put another way, the club's most famous fan has been on a journey that is the very opposite of that anticipated by its marketing department. Over the course of 20 years, the club has moved from being an integral part of his life to occupy a place on its margins: as Arsenal became a brand, its most obsessive fan became disengaged.