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Tag: Empathy and Brands

Transforming Business: An Empathetic Approach

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

There are many factors that add meaning and purpose to a brand, and they all stem from a single source: empathy.

Empathy is the ability to walk in another person’s shoes. That is, to see and experience the world from a perspective different from your own.

Here we explore how empathy plays a vital role in shifting brands from a bland and vulnerable position, to one that is robust in meaning and purpose.

Empathy as a driver of brand strategy

When you’re close-in to a business’s daily operations it’s hard to see how your brand is perceived by the people you serve, both as customers and employees. To create a meaningful and purposeful dimension for your brand requires you to step out of your own perceptions of what’s good and valuable about your brand. It forces you to look at your brand – and everything it represents – through the lens of human needs, values, and aspirations. Through an empathetic approach, it’s easier to see the meaningful outcomes people experience based on their interactions with your brand. As such, empathy leads you to the deep-rooted, emotional connections that can be forged to create strong and enduring bonds. You won’t reach this point without allowing yourself to take the necessary steps back to the most common and fundamental needs, values and aspirations of humanity.

Empathy as a cultural ethos

Your business is a set of policies and procedures that have been conceived and designed to produce desired metrics (e.g. productivity, efficiency, profitability). Empathy can be used to elevate how well these functions not only produce the desired metrics, but do so in a way that aligns to the needs, values, and aspirations of the people involved. Empathy helps you create a more human-centric culture, by encouraging you to rethink and reconfigure the nature of your policies and procedures. As such, empathy helps you better engage and motivate employees. This means they’ll be far more likely to listen to, appreciate, and follow your leadership.

Empathy as an engine of innovation

If your business, like many, is struggling with hyper-competition and increasing product commoditization, innovation will be a primary focus. Nothing inspires innovation better than empathy. By encouraging your development people to “walk in your customer’s shoes”, either literally or through sensed experience, you bring them closer to what’s really important and valuable to the market. An empathetic attitude sheds new light on what’s needed now and how to best address that need or opportunity.

Empathy as a leadership practice

We’re all born empathetic. As babies we all had the capacity to perceive how others were feeling and what they were experiencing. Sadly, over time, we lose this skill. However, it is remarkably easy to revive and put to good use. Mindful leadership is the goal. All it requires is that you adapt your leadership presentation and style based on an understanding of your follower’s needs, values, and aspirations. You don’t necessarily change your management objectives, you simply radically improve your leadership performance by forging more meaningful connections with your followers.

If you are looking into the future, and have questions about your brand’s ability to navigate the rough seas ahead, you’ll want to carefully consider your own, and your organization’s, capacity for empathy. The strongest businesses going forward will be known for how their meaning and purpose-led behavior enhances both individual and collective well-being. They only reach this strong position by embracing empathy every step of the way.

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Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Meaningful Brands Are Led by Meaningful Leaders

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

The key to meaning is empathy: the ability to step outside one’s own life and see the world from another’s perspective. In both branding and leadership, the value of this ability cannot be underestimated. Both areas depend upon engaged followers. Engagement only comes when followers see leaders connect the dots between their personal needs and desires, the goals of the business, and the greater good.

Brands and leaders that are inward-focused and self-absorbed fail to connect with people who are increasingly attuned to the needs of humanity and the planet. This puts them in a precarious position. That’s because these people are increasingly applying these altruistic criteria to the products they buy, the brands they support, and the companies for which they choose to work.

The result for brands? More meaningful competitors steal your customers and profits. Your brand’s real and perceived value drop. Your brand’s ability to attract top talent diminishes.

The result for leaders? Those you hope to have as followers drift away. Your reputation for generating results suffers. You experience defections and cannot hire the people you need.

When people see that what’s lying behind your brand or leadership is an honest effort to use business in a positive way that will pay them emotional dividends and address their altruistic concerns, brands and leaders thrive. Of course, meaning is easier said than done, and must flow from a sincere and authentic base. It must be routed in the truth as nothing more readily violates the social contract than lies and deception.

You are born with empathy.

It’s there within you, waiting to be rediscovered.

Pull it to the surface, apply it to your business, brand and your leadership thinking, and discover the power of truthful and meaningful connections that positively change the way people think, feel and act.

Additional reading: Transforming business: the four faces of empathy 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco Branding Agency.

Branding in a World Full of Screens

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

A world full of screens

Joel paints a picture of a world that’s filled with screens – far more than the four business currently focuses upon:

“The basic dilemma for marketers is this: there are now too many screens to count. Set aside PCs, tablets, smartphones, and TVs (connected or otherwise), for a moment. Your car, your thermostat, your washer and dryer, your refrigerator are all on their way to being “smart” as well – connected to the internet and to each other, featuring screens that offer up all sorts of information, from usage data to content, like a fridge that suggests recipes based on the food stored inside”.

Marketers are either too stunned to act, or misguided in how they should proceed

This technological transformation has left marketers in a messy situation. Apparently only 45% still don’t have a mobile presence. And among those who do, they all to often ask the question, “How can I advertise on all those screens?”, when they really should be asking, “How can I create useful apps (services/experiences/utilities) that make life easier, more interesting and more gratifying for people whichever screen they choose to focus upon in the moment?”

Set a different course for your organization

When your brand is driven by empathy, purpose and emotion, your marketing organization rethinks what their job really is. They are more likely to think beyond old-school advertising and embrace the new multi-screen world of usefulness.

Here’s why:

  1. By being encouraged to adopt a more empathetic attitude, they will be better able to focus on the higher-order needs, interests, values and aspirations of people.
  2. By having a common, higher-order purpose (one that goes beyond profits and shareholder returns), they will better see the emotionally meaningful role the brand (and they as employees of the brand) can have in people’s lives.
  3. By evoking a set of specific emotions, they will be better able to engage people through feelings that win attention, earn loyalty, influence decisions and generate word-of-mouth endorsements.

Make amazing things happen within, and around, your brand

Once empathy, purpose and emotion are the basis for brand behavior, amazing things can happen.

Your brand will cut across all the screens, and create emotionally meaningful moments for the one set of eyes that are in constant motion, from screen to screen.

Image Credit.

The One Thing Your Brand Strategy Doesn’t Need

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

The decision to develop a brand strategy or refresh your brand strategy will be typically driven by a specific need. Either you are just starting out and need to establish your brand, or you’ve found that your current brand strategy is holding your business back. Regardless, it’s critical to ensure your new brand strategy takes your business where you need it to be.

Experience shows us that many brand strategies fail because they are inwardly focused. They are myopic in that they lead with product features and benefits and the business’s explicit needs to create growth and increase profitability. And while this approach may have worked in the past, more and more brands are realizing the value in working from outside in.

The key to this successful brand strategy approach is empathy.

Continue reading “The One Thing Your Brand Strategy Doesn’t Need”

What Really Matters to your Brand’s Success? Empathy.

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

If I asked you what really matters to your brand’s success, you would probably only talk about things that can be explained rationally and measured empirically. Nothing wrong with that, after all that’s the way we think and talk as business people.

However, if I asked you what really matters to you as a human being, I bet you would find yourself talking about things that are hard to explain rationally and virtually impossible to measure. You know, messy things like the need for safety, the desire for connectedness, and the joys of love and beauty.

What really matters to your brand’s success?

This contrast actually points out what really, really matters to your brand’s future success. Your prospects, customers and employees, hungry for meaning in their lives in this time of economic and social uncertainty, are reawakening to their core human needs, desires and joys. Successful brands going forward will develop an ability to connect their offerings and ways of being to these “messy” human domains.

Once a brand creates a meaningful dimension for itself, based on empathy, things start to change for the better. That’s because when people care about a brand, they are more likely to do what benefits that brand. Once a strong emotional bond is created around a rational proposition, people positively change the way they think, feel and act on behalf of brands.

Empathy is the path to a more meaningful future state for your brand.

Empathy is the practice of stepping out of the box that your industry and business works to keep you focused on 24/7. When you are empathetic, you start to see your business and brand through the eyes of the people you serve and employ. You suddenly see what really matters about your brand by seeing what your business does, and how it does it, in light of human needs, desires and joys. By then redefining the way your brand reaches out to people, you start to forge more meaningful connection with the people vital to your brand’s success. And when you treat them this way, they gladly pay you back.

Empathy isn’t easy. It forces you to let go of long-held beliefs, familiar language, and well-entrenched ways of behaving. But at the same time, it opens up new paths for brands that face an uncertain future of competition and commoditization. It give brands a new and powerful way to create appeal, differentiate and sell. It builds stronger bonds with customers, giving them more compelling stories to tell others. It helps employees feel they matter and that the work they do matters.

As babies, we were all naturally sensitive and empathetic to others. As our rational minds took over, and our emotional defenses grew – all within a culture that emphasized “me” over “we” – most of us have lost touch with our innate empathetic power.  Outsiders can help inward-focused executives reinvigorate this helpful human trait by promoting the ideas of mindfulness and advocating for the humanity of customers and employees.

Empathy is within you. Let it rise to the surface and help you manage your brand to a brighter future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.