Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers. I understand the politics and the culture challenge that marketers face today, and now I’m dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can, to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers. What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives – I have a good story I think we could maybe get to it a little bit later on – but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey. This digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers – we think we get it. There’s a group of individuals generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article. I think that Wells Fargo has such an incredible corporate history and culture, and I believe that there were just a few of the wrong people in leadership positions who were forcing a value in pushing the business over the needs of the customer. Brian: When we focus on the wrong thing, we can almost become sociopathic trying to get our needs met at the expense of others. People talk that we need to change the culture. Their CEO is a guy named Bill McDermott, who was instrumental in my career and mostly he mentored me and created an opportunity for me to do what I was able to do at SAP. I think the best way to do this is you need to be empathetic by putting that recognition on others inside your organization who push these ideas.
Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy in 2017?
If not, you should. Let me explain.
I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael) the CEO of MarketingInsiderGroup.com. Michael has received recognition across the Internet for his knowledge and role in shaping content marketing as we know it today. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of The Content Formula. I’m excited to bring his thoughts on empathy to you.
Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Michael: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and looking forward to talking about empathy, which I think is so important in today’s landscape. As we get older, I’ve needed to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to. But a 20 plus year career in sales and marketing, and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small. Most recently, about ten years ago, was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing. I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing, and mainly helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking. Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to discuss.
There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand. They want to do it I think but struggle with how to get it done and how to change the culture inside their organizations. That’s where I’m focused now. I built Marketing Insider Group, primarily, as kind of a one-man agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments. I understand the politics and the culture challenge that marketers face today, and now I’m dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can, to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.
Brian: That’s fantastic. I came across your article on LinkedIn, and several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian you should check this out for your book.”
What inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?
What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives – I have a good story I think we could maybe get to it a little bit later on – but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey. This digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers – we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”
Often, I find someone in a position of power (with their arms folded) asking challenging questions like, “Well, how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?” I co-authored a book called The Content Formula, to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was, how do you show ROI from this approach? In the book, I talk about how you can show a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people want.
Even after all those sorts of financial objections are removed, I still found that there was resistance inside a lot of companies. I think we can talk about this in a little bit more depth as well, but there’s a natural instinct inside a business to want to promote itself. That’s counter-intuitive. That’s why I came to this kind of realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time, is empathy. It’s missing inside corporate cultures and structures.
Empathy is the most counter-intuitive secret to success. Why is that?
For instance, the posts that I put up on Facebook. I don’t do a lot of business content on there. It’s mostly pictures of my kids and the trips we take, and it’s essentially me putting my best face forward to the world. That’s what I think we all tend to do in the social world; that we express to the connections we have. It’s our natural instinct.
I think there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to see that you’re happy and you’re healthy, and you’re doing fun things. That’s the natural instinct we carry with us when we walk into the company, with the companies that we work. The natural instinct of the business person is to want to promote itself and put its best face forward. It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell. That’s why I think empathy is so counter-intuitive.
The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.
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Brian: I know it’s something that I struggle with, and I think everyone does when we’re focusing on getting our needs met, whether that’s hitting a number, as you talked about achieving ROI. It’s a challenge, and I think you spoke of this collective amnesia we have. It seems that we change how we think about our customers as we walk into the building and put on our marketing and sales hat.
How can we overcome our collective amnesia and relate to customers?
I love the term coined by Noah Fenn, who is head of video sales and strategy at AOL. He talked about how this instinct to self-promote: it’s like a collective amnesia.
And what he means by that is kind of like I said: that although we’re real people when we walk into our places of work and then forget that we are real people. We forget how to market to people just like us. That’s essentially the collective amnesia. We walk in; we want to present and promote the companies and the products that we sell. That’s precisely the kind of thing that we as consumers don’t want, right?
Someone heading marketing, who makes an ad buy, is doing that with the knowledge that he might, or she might, hate ads. That’s the collective amnesia, right?
When you’re watching a TV show, you don’t need to see an ad for Chevy 15 times over the course of the 45-minute show, right? But the ad buyer for Chevy is making that decision. There’s a group of individuals generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article. We make judgments in the business, as people, that often forget that we’re marketing to real people just like us.
Brian: It’s funny, and I think it’s interesting. As I talk to marketers, we realize just how cynical we can be too. And I believe that it’s just getting out of our heads. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and remember we are ones (customers) too.
What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more?
I think the counter-intuitive nature of it is that when you help your customers, and I use this line in the article “when you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.” I think we often defend our self-promotional actions by saying, “Well that’s the game we’re playing.”
Like you said, we’re skeptical, and we live in a noisy world. The loudest shouter gets the most attention. That’s precisely the thing that I think the data that we now have in the digital…
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