Why Empathy Is an Important Part of Every Marketer’s Toolkit

Understanding customers will always be greater than your brand

Nitish Menon
Better Marketing
Published in
5 min readMay 24, 2021

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A number of promise locks.
Photo by Morgan Petroski on Unsplash

The digital world we live in has people constantly battling between information overload, noise, and extensive marketing, making it nearly impossible to get your message across, or even be remembered.

Unless you can make people feel good about themselves. I mean who doesn’t like being coddled? And the quicker brands can understand this, the better they can get with their marketing efforts.

“Don’t push people to where you want to be; meet them where they are.” — Meghan Anderson, VP Marketing at Hubspot

As a brand, you may think this is an easy task considering the technology we’re presented with today. However, with even more layers added to human connection gaining empathy with your customers can be extremely difficult.

What’s Empathy-Based Marketing?

Back in 2011, award-winning author Adam Grant defined it as “perspective-taking”, but contemporary marketers simply refer to it as empathy.

The literal definition of the word according to Google is the ability to share the emotions of others. To understand what people feel, why they feel that way, and what they care about. It’s always about them and not about you.

Empathy-based marketing is all about taking a step back and taking a hard look at your brand from the eyes of the customer. As marketers, we must have a clear understanding of who our customers are, the various challenges they face, and what motivates them to make a purchase.

By gaining a better understanding of their motivations, you can focus on solving a problem they face or help them with the tools they need to be successful. An effective way to do this by creating educational content and resources that directly speak to their situation.

Eyes on the Prize (Aka Your Customers)

Empathy-based marketing is built on the foundation of trust. The funny thing about trust is that it’s one of the easiest things for your brand to lose and one of…

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Marketer writing about business, marketing, strategy, and other experiences from life.