Originally published in Business Insider
This Diwali, brands that didn’t need festive-offer advertising to light up their sales figures used a sound strategy instead – empathy. From Facebook’s Pooja Didi to India’s first-ever hyper-personalised ad (this claim is disputed) by Cadbury, brands used the travails of a Covid-hit society to maximum effect. Health workers, local businesses, parents, domestic help, dabbawalas – everyone was at the receiving end of a psychological hug. However, it’s hard to distinguish between moment marketing and actual empathy these days. A mini primer on empathy helps elaborate my concern.
The TL;DR version
- Cognitive empathy is “understanding what others feel”. It makes us better communicators because we are able to convey information effectively.
- Emotional empathy is “feeling what others feel”. It helps us build better relationships with others.
- Compassionate empathy is “caring about how others feel”. It moves us to take action.
Where do you think advertising is playing? The question therefore is whether empathy can play a larger role in a brand’s life.
The elevator pitch
When distribution, product, pricing, celebrity endorsers are all on par in a category, who steps up to the plate as a key competitive differentiator and a TOMA hawk? Influencers! Ok, not really, but it does contain a grain of truth. Influencers not only create recall, but also help build trust and credibility for the brand. They are thus a means to the sustainable answer – brand affinity. Strong brand affinity creates advocates and accelerates word of mouth.
Empathy, I would argue, plays a strong role in building brand affinity. It has an impact on two important aspects of how customers judge a brand – competence (across all the competitive factors in the previous section) and values. Without really understanding customers, a brand cannot retain its competitive edge. And articulating what it stands for is becoming increasingly important, especially in a polarised world. That explains why “cause marketing” is becoming popular – the entire premise is based on empathy for something – a set of people, or the environment at large.
Empathy in communication
Empathy is actually at the heart of brand management. If you have done market research to understand customers, created personas, and used customer insights to deliver powerful brand campaigns, well, it wouldn’t have been possible without empathy. A brand’s communication signals its worldview, and makes it relatable to its customers. Forming a worldview that resonates requires empathy! And yes, that includes the channels you advertise on!
Empathy everywhere
Communication operates at a cognitive level, generally speaking. But to go deeper – both in terms of empathy as well as organisational support – the brand needs a vision that its entire ecosystem can rally behind.
For instance, thinking of the product as a “job to be done” in the consumer’s life requires both cognitive and emotional empathy. When customer service is less empathetic in trying to solve the customer’s problem and rigidly follows a rulebook, you get United Airlines, which dragged a paying customer out. Alternatively, it could be like Ryan Air with its critical and commercial hit “Always Getting Better”.
Does the organisation treat the ecosystem like Berger and Asian Paints, who provided cash support to their dealers, anticipating muted demand? Or eBay’s “Up & Running” for small businesses? Or does it leave them to their own devices?
Brands like Allbirds even help customers contribute shoes to health workers with “We’re better together”. And if you’re Burger King, you can be empathetic even to your competitors!
Empathy vs
In The Lessons of History, Will Durant writes, “Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.” Most businesses also optimise for efficiency, and I wonder if efficiency and empathy are like freedom and equality.
Most businesses also aim for scale. But even as martech increases its capability to create a segment of one, and chatbots abound, empathy at scale remains a challenge in execution beyond mass advertising. Maybe, in the future, with facial recognition that can detect emotions, AI that can provide even more context and information, and recognise tone and modulation, my bot can speak to your marketing bot on my behalf. But for now, we have to consider calls for personal loans as empathetic gestures!
With scale also comes the problem of “partial empathy”. A brand might be doing great work on sustainability but will get called out if it’s not paying fair wages. Even the actions of their partners or endorsers have an effect.
One of the lessons the pandemic has taught us is the power and value of true empathy. As inequities and activism rises, and AI continues to reduce a consumer to a numerical probability, empathy has the potential to provide the counterbalance, and be a source of competitive advantage. To quote Maya Angelou, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”