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Empathy Based Marketing (EBM) Value

While this may sound a bit like the superpowers of a new Avengers character we haven’t met yet – those who have this skill in real life, may know that it comes naturally to some people and is entirely alien to others, though it can be years until you realise this is not something that everyone can do to the same degree, or even at all. 

What does this have to do with Marketing? Well, everything actually, regardless of who you are targeting. The depth with which you know and understand your audience will determine the value you add, and therefore eventually, the success you can report back to the business.

B2B marketing used to extol the virtue of the product – an innovation, a USP, a new bell or whistle. Bigger, faster, more integrated. As standardisation overtook proprietary IP, waves of consolidation happened as vendors sought to mimic the capabilities of their rivals. And our value became tied to our solutions. “We understand your problems…” we said, “and here is a carefully curated solution that will make them go away”.

So why isn’t this what’s moving markets? Why doesn’t it stick? Why aren’t audiences listening anymore? It varies by type of audience, so here’s the tunnel before we show you the light at the end of it:

Customers and prospects: Buyer uncertainty leads to a 30% decline in customers’ ability to reach a purchase decision at all .^[1]

The number of vendors, competition and marketing noise is deafening. For example, over three million blog posts are published every day,^[2] a volume that serves largely to drown out individual business voices. One solution starts to look much like another. And buyers, bombarded with the same or similar information and style of communications from different vendors and businesses, just end up confused and completely turned off, defensive even. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you. Generic, uninspiring waffle is everywhere and set to increase (thanks generative AI!). Everyone is talking, but only a few are saying anything worth hearing. No wonder then that buyers are confused and rejecting the information overload.

We need to follow Gartner’s advice about moving our mindset from making things easy to sell to making them easy to buy. We need to say something more relevant.

Employees: 85% of employees are either unengaged or actively disengaged.^[3]

The actively disengaged (those visibly unhappy people that are disrupting the lives of their colleagues) are only a small part of this group. The majority are the so-called ‘quiet quitters’ – the ones whose heart simply isn’t in their work. More importantly, they will not be delivering the kind of experiences to your customers that you need them to. And that apathy shows up in your bottom line: companies with the highest rates of employee engagement are 21% more profitable than their competitors.

Employees need to be and feel understood and empowered to do their best work. According to Gallup research, workers who aren’t allowed to use their strengths very often seek jobs where they can; workers who do get to use their strengths seek out jobs where they get to use them even more.^[4]

We need to better enable and inspire employees to help them and the business enjoy the success that comes with it. A great deal of this comes down to how the business communicates with employees. 

Partners: Almost two thirds (60-65%) of strategic partnerships fail^[5]

Three quarters of CEOs will swear blind that strategic alliances are critical to the success of their organisation and 94% of tech industry executives consider innovation partnerships a necessary strategy^[6]. I’m sure you would say the same for your company. Every year, over 2000 of these relationships are formed, yet most of them are destined to fail. Even among those that survive, Pareto’s Principle (aka the 80:20 rule) is likely to be in play: 80% or your partner revenues will be driven by 20% of those that have signed with you. 

We need to understand partners better in order to join industry leaders like Microsoft, Zoom and SugarCRM^[7] in generating huge revenues from a partner ecosystem.

If you are responsible for engaging any of these audiences (or for managing teams that are) then this is quite the predicament and we know these are tough hills to climb.

Key ingredients for cutting through and inspiring action:

Humans are emotional. Business decisions are emotionally driven

The first step is recognising and getting comfy with the fact that emotion plays an enormous role in business decision-making, often more than reason.  

As Amy Marino, Global Head of Brand Marketing for HubSpot observed, “B2B purchasing decisions [are] massively emotional. The stakes are high and so are the investments; the buyer’s reputation, trustworthiness and potentially future success are all on the line.”

Research from LinkedIn carried out in 2022 underscores the importance of emotion. It found that brands which built emotional connection through their ads acquired almost 200X more followers and had a 44% higher average CTR than other advertisers. A different study from the Harvard Business Review found that fully connected customers were 52% more valuable… 52%.

Same can be said for employees. As humans, they can feel the entire spectrum of emotions – and that applies just as much (if not more) in the workplace where they spend up to 1/3 of their life. Their perspectives, quality of output and ability to work at all, can all be influenced by their emotions, let alone a desire to be advocates and go above and beyond. 

Empathy-Based Marketing (EBM) 

Our EBM approach applies both to value proposition development and to creative execution. With a richer understanding of the audience, we are much better placed to add value for them. Our methodology ensures we’re considering the emotions already in play, and the ones we want to evoke. This then informs our strategic briefs, which provides our creative and studio teams with the emotional territory that will allow them to craft engaging and effective – stand-out campaigns – campaigns that cut through the noise, with messages that directly address the audience needs at a deeper level. 

Feeling Machines that Think 

In a time where you can’t hide from the narratives about AI, this is when we need to lean into our human nature, and what inspires us. Empathy-Based Marketing applies António R. Damásio’s insight that humans are, “Not thinking machines that feel, [but] feeling machines that think:” It acknowledges that B2B expectations have risen to set the same bar that consumer services already deliver; and that we must move beyond the dry recitation of benefits that continues to dominate. It proceeds on the basis that an emotionally-led approach can build new levels of trust with your audience, add value for them and deepen their understanding of you, to generate richer experiences – and More Rewarding Connections™ – for both sides. 

^[1] Gartner, future of sales ^[2] Worldometers, blogs ^[3] Gallup 2023 ^[4] Gallup 2022 ^[5] Partner hacker, 2021 ^[6] Harvard business review, 2022 ^[7] Crossbeam, 2022