Harnessing the Power of Empathy in Marketing
This exercise is the marketer's opportunity to draw a journey that teaches your company a lesson about behavioral economics.
Two Types of Empathy -- And How to Employ Them in Your Marketing
Affective empathy is a shared emotional response. Cognitive empathy is understanding the other’s worldview; the experiences that shape how they look at the world and themselves.
The most effective marketers -- and leaders -- tap equally into both cognitive and affective empathy to create brand stories that resonate with what their audiences believe in.
Introspection is out, and outrospection is in. Philosopher and author Roman Krznaric explains how we can help drive social change by stepping outside ourselves. Discover more RSA animations: http://bit.ly/1FKMHGv.
Creating a New Perspective
You have personal and professional biases about the thing you're marketing -- the perspective of a person who spends most of their time thinking about this thing. Your audience is, I'm sorry to say, likely not quite so dedicated to said thing. So how do you create and sit inside your audience's perspective? What would they know or care about before making the decision you're seeking to influence?
Generally, people say ‘yes’ to what matches what they believe in. The specifics of the thing are actually less important than the beliefs the thing represents. Decide what your persona believes, what different sets of information your personas would have access to, and whether they'd likely interpret the information differently than you would based on their beliefs and knowledge.
Don't just intellectualize the reasons why someone may use your competitors. Feel what they may feel. Focusing only on the cognitive, you can’t help but develop some affective empathy, but not the sort that would develop if your primary focus were on the affective from the start.
Here are some questions you might ask yourself:
What features, ingredients, safety reassurances, accreditations, etc., would they look for? Do they even know to look for any or all of these?
What would they notice about your business - where it's based, how large it is, who runs it, what it's origin story is, its employer brand, etc.?
How much would their direct experience of your business weigh against the personality of the marketing, the physicality and branding of the thing or location, as compared with opinions within their tribe?
What disagreements or cognitive dissonance might your personas experience on their way to the decision you're seeking to influence? If so, how might they work through these, and how might your marketing help them to do so?
You might not be able to cover every detail about your persona's journey to a decision, and that's ok. You might decide to ignore aspects of the decision-making journey, or focus on one persona only, in the interest of creating something usable in a timely manner. For instance, you might decide to .
Creating Better Marketing By Changing Your Thinking About Who Says Yes or No
This exercise can change how you, the marketer, thinks about the moment when someone says 'yes' or 'no' to what you're pedaling. By integrating your personas' narratives, stories, world views, emotions, and priorities, you're no longer able to simply write off their 'no' decision as the wrong one -- that they just don't get it. You'll find yourself able to accept and understand what led to that 'no.' And that can only help improve your marketing and expand your mission's reach.
With our newfound empathy, we now can ask ourselves how our successful marketing practices aligned with what the responding personas believe in. And, conversely, we can ask ourselves how marketing that fell flat didn't align with personas who responded 'no' -- what they believe, if there's common ground with what we believe. If there isn't common ground, do we need to change something...or does what we believe in simply resonate with one persona but not the other? Maybe the business is totally viable without the 'no' personas -- after all, all things are not for all people. But, if we need to bring that 'no' around to a 'yes,' we now can employe cognitive and affective empathy to look to tactics, wording, styling, etc, to speak to the beliefs of the ones who have said 'no'.