Considering a reboot this year? What you need to power up your leadership and take your decision-making to the next level.
How’s your intuition holding up these days? Were you able to predict the changes in consumer behavior over the past 16 months? What’s your gut telling you is to come? How will your brand respond to changing consumer values and resulting behaviors?
A strong intuition is essential to any business leader’s success. Call it what you like, a gut feeling, killer instincts, a sixth sense or intuition, this deeper sensibility has a seat at your mental table for your best decision making, collaborating with colleagues, and creating marketing programs for your consumers. You need your intuition to be strong and precise.
What nourishes a healthy intuition? Empathy. The ability to see the perspective of other people. This leads me to my next question. How strong is your empathy with your consumer?
With all the changes that have happened since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen a remarkable shift in consumer behaviors and values. With 72% of US adults indicating they want to make changes in their life post-pandemic rather than return to the old ‘normal’, chances are good your brand is susceptible to new values, needs, and wants. Additionally, marketers are beginning to appreciate the diversity of their consumers and are looking to understand those audiences.
Building a strong foundation of cognitive empathy – seeing the point of view of others --- will infuse your intuition with the right perspective to keep the consumer front and center. At Ignite 360, we help our clients keep their intuition sharp with empathy programs custom-designed to build empathy skills while also answering business objectives at the same time.
5 Steps to Empathy
Seeing the current empathy crisis and the paradox of leaders calling on people to be more empathetic but no one showing how to actually have empathy, I developed The 5 Steps to Empathy. “Simple but not easy” is how one leadership expert described them. In The 5 Steps to Empathy, I break down how to get to cognitive empathy with exercises and mindfulness to remove the barriers that typically occur.
We’ve since bundled training of The 5 Steps to Empathy into a program we call Empathy Camp™ where we take teams through The 5 Steps and give them the chance to experience empathy building on their own.
Additionally, we always review The 5 Steps to Empathy before any qualitative fieldwork. It paid off the first time we did it. A client turned to me after the in-home and said that he was really having difficulty connecting with what the respondent was telling us about eating an entire pizza on the way home from picking up a pizza at the store. Then, he realized he was being judgmental, which let him dismantle his judgment (step 1) so that he could actively listen (step 3) and gain valuable insight into the job to be done that the respondent was telling us about.
Empathy Camp
More recently we’ve taken insights, marketing, and sales and category management teams through Empathy Camp™ for several of our corporate clients. Each time they’ve gotten over their discomfort with “the E word” and gained newfound appreciation for their consumers as well as how they work together.
Kelli Davis, former head of insights for Juice+ at Pepsico, spoke with me at a conference on the success of the empathy program we put together for her business unit. She said they had increased their ability to make decisions quickly and were also successfully relying on their intuition instead of commissioning more and more research to answer questions. As an added benefit, the entire team going through the program together becomes a bonding exercise.
We take a similar approach to projects where the audience might be different from the client team in terms of age, ethnicity or race, accessibility, education, income, geography and more. The further apart the client team is from the consumer in these criteria, the wider the gap is to be bridged by empathy.
Empathy Immersion
To start building that bridge, we create immersion exercises for our client teams. Recently, for a client looking to understand how people with different levels of vision impairment engage with online shopping portals, we conducted an empathy immersion where each of the team members was sent a pair of simulator goggles. As a group, we took them through exercises visiting different websites that were optimized for vision impairment and those that weren’t. Then, they were able to discuss what they experienced.
Similarly, taking time to experience the life of your consumer, to learn about the culture and value systems helps pave the way for achieving empathy when you get into the field and meet the consumer face-to-face. The added exposure and contextual understanding makes any multi-cultural work more meaningful.
We’re entering a new world as we return to having the freedom of movement and gathering that was denied us for so long. Your consumers have evolved over the past year and a half. Is your intuition ready to keep up with them or do you need to build empathy to meet them where they are today?
Ready to ignite your empathy engine? We are launching an exciting NEW level of training. Subscribe now to get the very latest productivity and training info sent to you.
For further reading on how you can better connect with your consumer:
OUR #1 SYSTEM FOR CREATING SUCCESSFUL STORIES
DESIGN FORUMS: THE KEY TO POST-PANDEMIC SUCCESS
AVOID THOSE HALF-BAKED IDEAS WITH THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE FRAMEWORK FOR INNOVATION
