Let me introduce you to Emily. Modern and stylish, she might have a family or she might be single. She might be working as a senior manager, or might be a negotiator. She might like to read books in her spare time or might take part in triathlons. But one thing is certain: you will dislike her intensely.

You see, Emily has been created by Bushells, a London estate agency, to make it appear more personable, and most of the preceding description is taken from a glossy brochure pushed through my letterbox. Next to a picture of a bland-looking woman, the blurb continues: “Emily has been introduced because she describes the personality of our company . . . She is friendly, warm, welcoming, helpful, honest, reliable and trustworthy.”

This, of course, is not the first time that an estate agent has tried to get chummy. Foxtons has been attempting mateyness for years, putting its spikey-haired, pinstriped agents in a fleet of cute, branded Minis. And walk down most streets in Britain today and you’ll see “for sale” boards emblazoned with pictures of everything from young children to attractive couples feeding one another pasta.

In itself, this attempted affability is a symptom of a wider trend. Companies everywhere have realised that the brands that do best are those that connect emotionally with customers and, suddenly, it’s like Freshers week: they all want to be our pal. Glance at a carton of Innocent Smoothies and you’ll spot an invitation to call the company on its “banana phone” or to pop into its headquarters at “Fruit Towers” for a chat. Pick up a Pret A Manger sandwich and you’ll read pleas on the packaging to get in touch with management. Even the cold-hearted suits at Barclays are at it, putting up signs asking “Can I help?” over customer service desks and beckoning customers into branches with this notice: “Through this door walk the nicest people in the world.”

However, a backlash seems to be brewing, with Charlie Brooker, of The Guardian, recently launching a tirade against Barclays’ £7 million rebranding, saying that he wanted to “vomit himself inside out” when he saw businesses trying “to cute themselves up” with “lower-case brand names and twee little jokes”. He has run a competition to name and shame the worst examples of corporate nausea, with people pointing the finger at everything from bottles of Worcester sauce with “splish me, splash me, glug me” inscribed on to them, to notices saying “hi” in Tescos and of course, those omnipresent and universally loathed Foxtons Minis.

He has a point - but it goes only so far. Attempted corporate affability is often grating, but there are companies – such as Innocent and Pret A Manger – that pull it off. As with all marketing, there is an art to it and those seeking to practise corporate chumminess need to obey a few basic rules, which can be demonstrated by looking at why the Barclays, Foxtons and Bushells campaigns fail.

The main lesson of Barclays’ botched rebranding is that, just as with animals, the bigger you are in business, the harder it is to appear cute. The reason why Innocent and Pret get away with cosying up to us is that they are small enough to allow friendliness to infiltrate their culture. If you call the banana phone or visit Fruit Towers – and I have done both – you will find that Innocent staff are as approachable as promised. If you spend some time in a Pret kitchen – and I have done – you will find that the staff genuinely care about food and customer satisfaction, because they have been well-trained and are being paid well.

In contrast, you need only to walk into a branch of Barclays as a customer to realise immediately that the new cuteness is only skin deep. Yes, they have signs suggesting that they are fun and relaxed, but right next to them you have posters displaying acres of small print outlining in detail how they will repossess your house and your children if you cross them in any way. And the cashiers sitting in suits behind glass screens don’t exactly scream approachability.

Meanwhile, the lesson provided by Foxtons’ failure is that, just as with making new friends in the human world, it is possible to try too hard with corporate chumminess. Like jokes, cuteness becomes less effective with repetition and the Foxtons Mini campaign annoys because it has been going on too long and there are too many of the things clogging up roads. Foxtons’ campaign was, initially, affecting, but estate agents have shown that when it comes to marketing, whether it is flyboarding, or invasive direct mail campaigns, they are incapable of doing anything with any subtlety.

Which brings me to Emily, whose failure illustrates the point that corporate friendliness never works if it is self-conscious. Chummy marketing is an illusion – companies don’t really want to be our mates, they just want to flog us things – and the moment you draw attention to the artificiality, you destroy it. Irritatingly, Bushells takes self-consciousness to unprecedented levels. “We call her ‘Emily’ but that isn’t her real name,” the introductory blurb expounds, laboriously and patronisingly. “Emily is not meant to represent the type of person you are, she is meant to represent the type of people we are.” I was going to say that the overall effect is as awkward as being chatted up by social misfit who has just been on a neuro-linguistic programming course and is trying to use every tip they have learnt in one go. But it’s worse than that. It’s the corporate equivalent of being chatted up by a barely functioning robot, which has been programmed, incompetently, to communicate with humans.

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