The first step in creating something valuable for your audience is to think and feel what your audience is feeling. Tom Asacker in A Little Less Conversation, p. 61
Empathy: getting really close to folks so you can almost see it from their eyes and feel it as they do
There’s never been a better time for small businesses and independents to leverage technology and excel! Asacker says you’ll need to “go deep” in your relationship with your marketplace. Deep enough, in fact, to
be close enough to them during those precise times when they’re exposed to your types of products and services, evaluating options, receptive to messages, and making decisions, so that you can make informed predictions about how to stimulate their desire, have them care about and relate to you and your offering and, subsequently, make them happy (p. 61).
Whoa. At first blush, that sounds like a challenging prescription. While it’s a prescription I labeled “full immersion” in the last book on Asacker’s book, it’s not quite as overwhelming as it seems. Tom’s calling for a change in worldview first (from “it’s all about me and it’s all about the money” to “it’s all about you; how can we co-create something valuable in your life?”), and then building a marketing continuum.
What does this mean for marketers? Once you’ve done the soul-searching to buy into the new worldview, just think through how someone goes from being a stranger to a customer to an advocate:
- How do people become aware of you?
- What process do they go through to explore/evaluate/compare you?
- How do they buy?
- What do they need to have a successful experience with your product/service?
- How do they share that experience with their friends?
Mapping the process helps make concrete your pathway for “going deep.” When you do go deep, you’ll be heading down the right path toward creating real value for your customers. [They'll reward you with that elixir you seek: ROI, but you let them worry about that.]
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Great post Trey. While I haven't done any research to back this up (yet), I think empathy is a higher level cognitive function that has to (largely) be learned and practiced. As an interesting aside, in the field of acting, the world's greatest film & stage actors are almost universally “method” actors. This means they are not “pretending” to be their character, they BECOME their character by living, breathing, eating, sleeping, etc exactly as the character they become would. One of my faves, Daniel Day-Lewis, does not come out of character until well after the entire film has wrapped (note: this doesn't always work well if you're playing a drug addict or killer). It would be nice to see more “method marketers” out there: Patagonia, Whole Foods, etc- companies whose founders, execs, and employees all live and breath the stuff they sell & market. They're not pretending. They're not peddling. It's authentic. It's real. It's true. And what they do and how they do it actually helps people and the global ecosystem they are a part of.