The most powerful advertising tool you always had: Empathy

What makes great advertising strategy and creative so effective?

Depending on your specialized niche, your answer may vary. Today we are awash in a sea of marketing and media technologies that harvest and analyze customer data, automate the sales funnel, and see into the future with predictive analytics.

These are all really important tools if you know how to use them. So are more traditional forms of market research and established industry best practices.

But turning all of this information into campaigns that stand out and get results still requires a very human instinct. It’s one that no off-the-shelf solution has yet mastered, not even the much-buzzed AI. And that instinct is empathy.

Theory of Mind

Whether you want to sell something to someone, teach them something, or simply win an honest argument, it is impossible to escape the fact that you are engaging in a human-to-human transaction. Persuasion and knowledge transfer require an intuitive understanding of the audience’s deepest hopes and fears. But how do we do that?

It’s called Theory of Mind, and it’s something humans have that most other animals don’t.

Psychology Today defines it very simply: “Theory of Mind involves understanding another person's knowledge, beliefs, emotions, and intentions and using that understanding to navigate social situations.”

To put it into even plainer language: It’s how you get inside other people’s heads. It’s empathy.

How we read other people’s minds

Think about recent in-person interactions you’ve had. You have something you want them to know or believe, because you think it’s right or useful. You tell them about it. They react. You immediately start to interpret those reactions, including what they say, their facial expressions, their tone of voice, and their body language. It’s basically mind-reading.

This isn’t necessarily a conscious thing. Your brain just does it. For more than seven million years (since that’s when we had a common ancestor with chimpanzees, who seem to do it too) evolution has been blindly but effectively fine-tuning your brain’s social instincts to understand other people. It knows what other people want from you, whether they like you or not, and even if they’re trying to deceive you. And their brain is running the exact same scan on you.

This is just how humans work. In a time when we lived in small groups in a vast world, empathy held us together. It determined who our leaders were, allowed us to cooperate, and helped us compete against rival bands of people and other species. It has never left us.

It’s not just where and when you reach them, but how

Today, science and technology allow us to share and exploit massive amounts of information about ourselves and each other. Social and other media channels use our desire to be part of a community — and be recognized as special individuals — to profile us to the Nth degree. They know who our friends are, where we work, our politics and other beliefs, and even more intimate details. Their invisible hand uses this intelligence to offer highly-customized ad experiences that promise to fit our needs like a key in a lock. But even then, there are limitations. The machine can tell you who you’re talking to, and what they might want to talk about. But once you reach them, how you do it will make all the difference.

Great advertising campaigns are as much art as science. (Goes the old cliché.) But there’s a reason that creativity is still elemental to real and lasting success. That reason? Empathy.

Trading Places with your audience

There’s a scene in the movie Trading Places that illustrates the value of empathy quite well. Eddie Murphy’s character, Billy Ray Valentine, is an unemployed man who has been put in the place of Dan Aykroyd’s character, a privileged young futures trader. While the latter was a great traditional strategist, Valentine makes a big score based purely on empathy.

“OK, pork belly prices have been dropping all morning. So everybody's waiting for them to hit rock bottom so they can buy cheap. The people with pork belly contracts are thinking, ‘Hey, we're losing all our money and Christmas is coming. I won't be able to buy my son the GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. And my wife won't... make love to me ‘cos I ain't got no money.’ They're panicking, screaming, ‘Sell, sell.’ They don't want to lose all their money. They’re panicking right now. I can feel it. Look at them.”

The underlying message here was that his bosses, the highly-educated professional traders had lost touch with the more personal motivations of their audience. And it rings true, doesn’t it?

It’s fiction, and not even about advertising, but it is poignant. When I work with young creatives, I often tell them that what we do is just like method acting. You need to create a living, thinking, and feeling persona in your imagination. Then let your mind inhabit that being. You're using that evolution-given Theory of Mind, but instead of a face-to-face conversation, you’re interacting with your own understanding of your audience. Great strategists do the same thing when developing insights, which is why you often see the same people excelling at both disciplines.

Unless you are trying to persuade an audience of one, however, you need the right information to build that persona. This is where the market research, online analytics, and algorithms come in. They will feed your imagination to provide the input you need for evidence-based strategy, then put that creative message in the right place.

No matter what marketing specialty you perform, in an agency or on the client side, or even if you just want to be an informed consumer, the basic human connection of empathy will never become obsolete. This is why great campaigns just feel right, and why what makes them great is so highly subjective.

Who “gets” you?

Even if you’re only looking at hard, cold, ROI, an understanding of the psychology at work behind a successful campaign is essential in being able to replicate previous successes. When two campaigns, informed by the same numbers, have very different results you need to ask yourself... why?

As advertising continues to become more commoditized, it will be harder and harder to differentiate the offers. A “secret formula” developed by one party can easily be copied by another. Every brand will be following us around in our digital and even physical lives, trying to out-shout each other to get our attention.

Now imagine being that consumer, trying to filter out the noise, and happening upon something that grabs your attention. Not just because it wore down your defences, but because it disarmed you by surprising you with an original idea. It made you think differently about something that’s important to you. It could be as low-key as a poster on a wall, or as elaborate as an intriguing video that showed up in your social feed at exactly the right time and place. Whether your exposure to that idea was entirely happenstance or meticulously planned, what gets your attention is that it is talking to you. And it’s doing it in a nuanced and understanding way. An empathetic way.

Because nothing knows the infinite complexity of the human mind better than another one. 

So next time you’re looking to hire an agency, or a member of your own team, pay attention to how well they “get” you.

And think about how well they’ll be able to reach your customers and clients.