How to avoid ‘fake empathy’ by using creativity to solve your customer’s problems
How do you achieve true empathy without rubbing customers the wrong way? Here, Coles CMO Lisa Ronson, Wellcom Worldwide’s Bud Peart, and Adobe’s Michael Stoddart explain what empathetic marketing means, how to achieve it, and how to avoid the dreaded curse of ‘fake empathy’.
Last year, McKinsey discovered that 57% of consumers have tried a new shopping behaviour since COVID-19 started, and of that number, 83% intended to continue with that new behaviour. The researchers found that 26% had tried a new retailer or a store or website, of which 90% intended to continue.
“Marketers have embraced this uncertainty,” said Michael Stoddart, director, strategic business development at Adobe, during last week’s webinar, How creativity can unlock empathetic marketing and help brands stand out. “They leveraged the chaos factor of last year into their processes to pivot their direction as circumstances changed. Despite the uncertainty of last year, creatives told us they’re looking to turn 2021 into an opportunity to thrive.”
Coles CMO Lisa Ronson, who was also on the panel, explained how she responded to the challenges of 2020 with a mixture of creativity, innovation, and empathy. “For me, creativity and innovation are intrinsically linked; they feed each other,” she said. “When we’re talking about empathy, it was really about understanding on a day by day, or even sometimes hourly by hourly basis, how our customers were feeling.
“When people were buying more of certain items than they would normally buy, we had to adapt very quickly across every single facet of our business. On a certain number of days and weeks in March last year, we were doing the equivalent volume of Christmas every single day. So that puts massive complexity in the supply chain and the teams had to figure that out really quickly.”
One of Coles’ creative solutions was its What’s For Dinner broadcast campaign, which “was based on the simple insight that we discovered about a year and a half ago around the amount of anxiety that Australians go through between 3 pm and 5.30 pm about ‘what am I going to put on the table?”
During the pandemic, people had fully stocked pantries of pasta, rice, and flour, but many had never cooked much rom scratch before. In response, Coles worked with Seven to bring What’s For Dinner Live to TV screens, whereby Coles’ chefs and partners created authentic content sharing some of their favourite recipes. In many cases, the videos were filmed on the talent’s iPhones.
“We did that every single day for a number of months and it just rated its absolute socks off because people were cooking more, they were spending more time with the family and cooking as entertainment,” said Ronson. “So we solved the problem, and everybody really loved it.”
Stoddart applauded the strategy behind What’s For Dinner, adding: “Up to this point, we’ve mashed technology with a glossy sheen that it has to be perfect, and we have been faking empathy through this glossy technological screen. Part of empathetic marketing is the exposure of similarity. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be real.
“YouTube content creators don’t even think about technological perfection, they just think about speed to market, they just want to get it out, and get it out fast. In the process, they’ve actually set what’s technologically acceptable.”
Pure Public Relations founder Phoebe Netto, who moderated the panel, added: “If brands have their values defined from the inside out, not the outside in, they’re going to avoid that inauthenticity that we see so often with empathy.”
So how can marketers achieve empathy, instead of simply appearing to be empathic? Bud Peart, head of content creation at Wellcom Worldwide, explained that this is a problem faced by many organisations: “We all do it in a way, it’s unavoidable in a big organization to some extent. You shouldn’t be lying to yourself about it, and sometimes it’s just about acknowledging that it isn’t something you can fix in a second.
“You might be getting social media flack about it, but mostly even just an acknowledgement that you understand the problem exists and that you’re willing to address it goes a long way. People don’t expect perfection from an organisation, but they do expect transparency.”
In order to link their marketing with what their customers are actually trying to do, they must ensure that their messaging makes sense for the brand, rather than simply saying what they think customers want to hear.
As Lisa explained: “It has to come from the right place. I remember during the pandemic, everyone started coming out and saying, ’we’re all in this together’, even though the brand didn’t really have a role to be saying that to the Australian community.
“I was driving down the freeway and it was a paint brand, saying ‘we’re all in this together.’ I thought, well that’s stupid, because you’re a paint brand. It would be so much better and so much more Australian to say ‘we know you’ve got a heap of time on your hands, paint your house.’
“It’s about knowing your place, and not overstating your place, and your brand’s role in the lives of consumers. Pandemic or no pandemic, when you overstep that mark it’s just a waste of time and money.”
To watch the full panel discussion, please click here.