From Image to Impact: How Brands are Countering Apathy and Adapting Empathy
There are 7 P’s in the marketing mix, and one of them is ‘people’. Although it was initially excluded from the marketing mix, it is now of the highest relevance. People in the business are accountable for turning a brand profitable by ticking all the requirements necessary for customer satisfaction. Now, this could be both direct as well as indirect and in B2C as well as B2B contexts.
Apathy among customers and clients can jeopardize the brand. Apathy could arise for various reasons like targeting the wrong customers or reality diverging from dazzling marketing, but it ultimately destroys businesses, snuffs out ideas, and halts advancement.
Customer and client satisfaction is directly proportional to the profit of a brand. Therefore, measures like pre-sale, post-sale, and support services must be undertaken to win their loyalty. The need to satisfy them highlights the importance of associating with them and their point of view, which basically implies empathizing. Today, effective marketing must go well beyond simple image promotion. Brands need to abandon traditional practices and bring humanized communication, client satisfaction, and emotional connection in place.
Every brand’s marketing team should work to include emotional intelligence in their strategy by comprehending the logical and emotional triggers of the people, pledging to support them, empathizing digitally, especially post-covid, and innovating by recognizing their preferred modes of engagement.
How brands use empathy to counter apathy
Sincerity
Brands must be sincere and drive their business on credibility, trust, and familiarity. This is possible by paying attention to what matters which product, service, or customer. Any time you want to build sales, it makes sense to start by closely identifying the target audience. People spread the word about authentic companies by sharing, liking, and recommending them to others.
Communication
Engage the audience in discussions. Brands must conduct thorough audience research before deciding which emotion to evoke and communicate. Brands can narrate an account of the struggles overcome, current challenges and their inspiration to connect emotionally.
Innovate
Make sales messages unique. Make customers familiar with what makes you outstanding, why it is better than other alternatives, and whether they actually require it. Case studies, testimonials, and brand success stories can support the demonstration of the benefits derived by existing clients.
Promote
Utilize personal values as a sales tool to allure numbers.
Change with trends
Recent trends require brands to maximize their digital presence. The social selling skills will successfully establish the brand as an indispensable resource to prospects, persuading them to make a purchase.
Empathy in Metaverse
By merging close details of the real world into the virtual world, brands can enhance empathy in the metaverse. The avatars in the virtual world can have a significant impact on real-world customers. However, to do this, it is crucial to closely monitor new developments in the realms of empathy, social connection in VR and AR, and human-machine interactions. The potential for empathy to flourish inside virtual spaces will increase as technology and exposure to virtual experiences develop.
How brands benefit by empathizing
- They know what makes their customers loyal. It encourages customers to engage rather than being skeptical and inactive, to support and bring in additional business.
- It helps to transform an unfavorable situation into a positive one. Like, the criticism of HUL’s fair and lovely and fair and handsome for inherent racism in their product made them replace ‘fair’ with ‘glow’.
- Helps in building brand loyalty and consumer referrals.
- Helps in keeping up with trends and changing times e.g. Due to the epidemic, businesses had to change their marketing strategies to appeal to customers. Zomato implemented excellent empathetic policies like contactless delivery and Covid Insurance for delivery partners and food security for daily wagers.
Empathy matters more than facts. It is the countermeasure against extinction. Brands lose their identity when they fail to serve the interests of people or prioritize shareholder value or gauge staff’s value by their output and revenues. However, when a business consistently acts in favor of people, it will benefit both in the long and short term.
About the author:
Shiva Bhavani, CEO & Founder, Wing Communications