You Think You Know Me? Advertising Without Empathy is Just Noise.

Sometimes, “the struggle is real.” Your friends are being flakes, your family puts unnecessary pressure on you, the presentation you’ve been working on for months is now on the 102nd round of revisions, and where the hell is the Blue Apron you ordered last week!?

Sometimes during these moments of stress, and possibly several glasses of wine, unexpected and powerful realizations can pop into your head. I had such a nugget recently and it changed my outlook on life and improved my career. When asking someone very near and dear for advice on how to get out of my funk, his response was basically “be positive and be empathetic.” The first part I understood, but the second piece took a while to sink in.

In life and work we are encouraged to be all kinds of “good” — collaborative, hard working, respectful, creative, the list goes on. But being empathetic is nowhere to be found as this is usually reserved for those in less fortunate or painful situations. Yet, as advertisers, empathy is actually a critical part of our jobs.

The idea of being empathetic, as it applied to advertising, didn’t crystalize for me until I bumped into an old deck titled, “No One Gives A Shit About Your Brand.” The premise: we are so in the weeds of our work and coming up with ideas that are on trend, that we forget the people on the other end. We forget to stop and ask ourselves, why? Why should other people give a shit? We all have lives, responsibilities, passions, and struggles, including our consumers. Why do the campaigns we create deserve their attention in a world where they have better things to do than spend 5 to 30 seconds on what we have to say?

This “WHY” is seldom answered through traditional market research alone. It is often answered by developing a deeper understanding of who our consumers are and really getting to know them. This means stepping away from demographics and psychographics and instead relating to their day-to-day and feeling their realities. In a proverbial sense, it’s about walking a mile in their shoes. It involves developing a sense of empathy for them as human individuals, not as the “targets” of our brand’s message.

Nailing empathy is critical because it allows us to easily play in an emotional space in addition to a rational space. This isn’t just smart, it’s also good for business. Brands that connect at a deeper level earn a competitive advantage and stand out in the “sea of sameness” where landscapes are cluttered and almost all products and services do a lot of the same. By playing above the fray of practicality and functionality brands can jiu-jitsu around these competitive variables.

This isn’t just my opinion. There’s hard evidence this works.

The report “Marketing in the Era of Accountability”, an analysis of IPA case studies, points out: emotive communications outsell informational ones by 19%. Another analysis sited in the book Building Strong Brands examined profitability among 1,400 campaigns and found that emotional campaigns worked TWICE as well as those that were just informative. If they cry, they buy. Simple as that. What is at play in these instances of successful emotive advertising? It’s their ability to pull us in, relate through feelings, and experience all of the emotions the characters are having. They emotionally put the audience in their shoes and help them experience empathy. This can’t be achieved without advertisers practicing empathy in the first place.

Try to watch these spots without tearing up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6bLugtJkQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SwFso7NeuA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk

Now, do you remember the name of the brands? Chances are you do, even though the videos told you almost nothing about the brand. This is the greatest advertising magic trick of all time.

Opening up this can of empathy-whoop-ass is easier said than done, but a good place to start is by listening and opening up. Making an effort to understand other people’s belief systems, thought processes, and motivations. Challenge yourself to avoid defaulting to easy and cheap assumptions and stereotypes. And most importantly, constantly reminding yourself that you are NOT the target audience, and that the key to truly impactful communication will not be found by sitting behind a desk looking at data and PowerPoint presentations. We have to talk and listen to people to understand people.

Empathy can be actively applied to our jobs in a multitude of ways. To me, the easiest and most effective way is to get up and go talk to someone. For a recent strategy assignment about tequila I printed a few questions I had, headed to the nearest tequila bar and sparked up conversations with men who were my target. Two tequilas later they were opening up about the rabbit-hole of trouble tequila was for them, but yet how relieving it was to say “fuck it!” to adulthood and get their party on regardless off the repercussions they knew were sure to follow. For them, Tequila was an awesome terrible decision. Talking, listening, understanding their pain points, and granted, some tequila, lead to this finding. Not reading or analyzing data charts.

Empathy might add 10% or 20% more time to your job. But it is a short-term investment that will help you and your clients move away from simply throwing marketing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Taking the time to understand and respect your targets moves away from the all-to-common objective of “reaching” the right customers and instead moves towards actually impacting them.

Sources:

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683304/empathy-sells

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_habits_of_highly_empathic_people1

Building Strong Brands, by David A. Aaker 1995

Marketing in the Era of Accountability, An important new analysis of IPA case studies, by Les Binet and Peter Field, 2007