The Business Value of Empathy

Consumer-centric decisions are better decisions and will result in better products and marketing by making the consumers’ experiences more relatable and more urgent.

And building empathy for consumers allows you to build a more consumer-centric organization. In order to be successful, however, every employee, including the C-Suite, needs to understand consumers.

A common challenge within organizations is that the people who design products and marketing campaigns are often not the same as those who buy them. While a young marketing manager in New York City might have some creative ideas, those ideas may not always resonate with their target market. It’s important to recognize that the daily life of a young New Yorker is different than that of a soccer mom in suburban Indiana. So assumptions or gut instincts that are not accurate often lead to bad decisions. By building empathy through conversations with consumers, marketers are able to see beyond stereotypes, shatter preconceptions, and relate to the consumer on a human-level.

Empathy is best built through conversation. It can’t be outsourced – meaning that it’s up to each individual to make a connection with consumers. However, in most large organizations, this isn’t an option. Resources and time are often limiting factors. Maybe they’ll have the opportunity to read a report, but rarely will most people get any face time with a consumer. And with good reason: empathy has traditionally been hard to scale.

At Discuss.io, we make it easy to have conversations with consumers around the world, at scale. Our video platform and network of global research experts make it easy and cost-effective to find the right target consumers and have meaningful conversations. Our technology enables those conversations to be recorded and transcribed so that teams can easily search across conversations and projects and share auto-generated video clips of key moments.  

So where does empathy fit into your team’s workflow?

We recommend using consumer conversations as a constant pulse-check for general category understanding. Regularly checking in ensures that consumer empathy is continually developed and strengthened. It will help brand managers to spot emerging trends and to stay on top of existing ones. By exposing unmet needs, organizations are able to build consumer-centric products that address real client pains.

Enterprise-wide empathy drives more strategic and consumer-centric decisions. To learn more about the benefits of launching an empathy program, download our ebook.