No one seeks to fail, but brands can end up there. At Modern Climate we believe brands can “see” how to succeed with consumers.
So it’s summer. And in our house that means baseball. My 9-year-old son has been patiently waiting all year to hang out with his fellas, work on his skills and maybe dream just a little that he’s a big leaguer.
Over breakfast, I hear today is the first day of practice. He’s pumped, because the first day of practice is uniform day. And for a guy that’s been wearing costumes and playing pretend his entire life, this uniform is key part of his “I’m a legitimate baseball player” persona.
I go to the office that day. Then I see this photo from my wife via text.
Oh sweet joy. I’m thinking this guy looks happy, and more than just his uniform, he received a sweet bag and even a water bottle. High-five! I’m thinking this is gonna be a great summer.
And then my wife hits me with the message I wasn’t expecting, like a caption from Crazytown: Your son says “the sponsor is being selfish.”
Selfish? Selfish. What kind of word is that? What kind of thought like that comes from a 9-year-old baseball player. I head straight for my boy when I get home that evening.
“Hey buddy, looks like you got some great stuff at practice.”
“Um. Uh-huh, I guess.”
“Hmmm. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Dad, they’re just putting their name on everything. I just wanted a baseball shirt with numbers, so you know, so I look like a baseball player. They’re being selfish.”
Acting selfishly is too easy. This applies to people, business and brands. I suppose it’s a part of our natures. Meaning, it’s easy to think about and act on our wants, our needs, our desires. It’s much more difficult to act with the interest of others in mind.
Brands can better use the power of empathy for their own selfish gain. Seriously, another piece on empathy? I know, I know. Empathy is the marketing buzzword right now. But I needed to write this because I feel empathy has more to offer beyond a shallow guiding principle for action (yet please act with empathy and do it more often).
How about we selfishly use empathy to see brand opportunity to make consumer highs higher and prevent consumer lows from ever happening in the first place? In our data-driven, algorithm-proven, I-can-justify-it-with-numbers climate, it’s tempting to form consumer strategy relying solely on our logic and rationale. Tempting, but don’t do it.
Dale Carnegie is still right, “Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.”
To win friends and influence people, empathy can be used as a brand’s strategic tool to help broadly see and understand what the consumer wants as consumers go about achieving their needs. At Modern Climate we do this for our clients with a method called journey mapping.
We use journey mapping as assumptive method to help brands “see.” More than quickly ending up with a complete picture of the consumer experience, valuable in its own right, journey mapping helps us better understand why consumers think and feel the way they do over time.
This understanding has many up-sides, among them: