Empathy: Trying to feel the way others feel. Abandoning your comfortable, familiar worldview to imagine how it's like to be in someone else's shoes.
It will do you no benefit acting as if everyone cares about your own beliefs, wants what you want, or knows what you know. However, when you work to understand your audience, you'll learn how to talk to them human to human rather than market at them, and you'll be much closer to earning their attention and trust.
The art of being a marketer is to be able to imagine how your customers see the world.
In my first few months in marketing, we worked on one of the pharma corporates’ annual meetings. One of the deliverables was the opening movie which should have set the tone for the 3-day gathering. We finished the first draft and shared it with the client, I assumed it would have been approved immediately, and it was.
Only one “little” amendment they requested: to add faces of everyone in the company into the movie as if each was a star in the sky. I pushed against the idea since it would look so awkward, add unnecessary time to the movie, and require a ton of work to execute. I assumed that it was a silly idea from a client who didn’t have a clue how movies are produced and couldn’t imagine how this kiddish idea would look at the end.
The client insisted, and I hated him for being so stiff. I didn’t want to fight over it, took it to my team to get it over with. Editing was done. I wouldn’t say I liked it. It was 3 whole minutes longer to show 300 faces of people who already knew each other. I found it boring but delivered it anyway.
At the opening ceremony, I stood in a far corner in the back of the ballroom while the movie started to play, ready to watch the bored audience reaching out to their phones or chatting with each other, but it was the exact opposite. Eyes fixed on the screen watching faces, people clapping, whistling, cheering, … The room was so full of enthusiasm and joy… And I got it. I saw what that client saw. I understood what he needed.
I was so focused on how the movie would look and how long it would be, how did it fit the solid metrics that I learned. He was focused on how his people would perceive it. Even if the movie wasn’t a masterpiece, they liked it. They enjoyed seeing themselves being the movie heroes, being appreciated for last year’s success.
I learned my lesson there. My job is not to show clients that we have a talented team and just ship work that I like. My job is to listen to them, understand where they come from, see through their eyes, and then interpret their messages into something that resonates with their audience.
Since that moment, I stopped seeing things from one angle (mine/the agency’s). I learned to make sure, each time I had a meeting with a client, that I have the maximum possible understanding of their environment, stakeholders, markets, their relationship with their boss, colleagues, and teams, what they expect to achieve…
Now, I can anticipate the success level of any project I work on, even before it started, based on how successful my communication is with the client to get to know all the relevant details.
