Designing with Empathy

Creating truly valuable content can be hard. To be successful in your content strategy you need to be able to create a connection between your brand and audience. You can't throw just anything at your audience, they have to connect to it or they won't remember it.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability that we have to see the world through another person's eyes. This means we can see what they see, feel what they're feeling, and experience the things that they do. Of course you can't literally get in someone's shoes, but we can get as close as possible. Instead of trying to understand someone from our own preconcieved notions, we put them aside and try to understand their thoughts, ideas and needs instead. Empathy is an innate quality that we all have. It helps gives us a better understanding of one another and it can be a great marketing technique.

Marketing with Empathy

Since we have so many similar goods to buy in today's market, it's hard to differntiate between them. This means brands need to become better at marketing and selling their products to us. They do this through empathy marketing. Empathetic research is different than typical marketing research in that it isn't concerned with facts, rather with their motivations and thoughts. It's more subjective and qualitative than traditional marketing research and it requires interpretation as you need to determine what people mean, rather than what they say. The objective of empathetic research is to uncover those untangible needs and feelings that show what changes should be made in a product, system, or environment.

Takeaways

Empathy is important in the world of marketing because it allows us to fully understand and uncover the feelings of the people we're trying to market to. Empathetic research involves collecting subjective information, but then objectively analyzing it. On an objective level you're learning what people need to be able to do what they want to do. On a subjective level you understand what their goal is and what they're feeling when trying to accomplish it. We all share empathy-you just need to figure out how to unlock it.