This Diwali, brands that didn’t need festive-offer advertising to light up their sales figures used a sound strategy instead – empathy. From Facebook’s Pooja Didi to India’s first-ever hyper-personalised ad (this claim is disputed) by Cadbury, brands used the travails of a Covid-hit society to maximum effect. Health workers, local businesses, parents, domestic help, dabbawalas – everyone was at the receiving end of a psychological hug. However, it’s hard to distinguish between moment marketing and actual empathy these days. A mini primer on empathy helps elaborate my concern. 

The TL;DR version 

• Cognitive empathy is “understanding what others feel”. It makes us better communicators because we are able to convey information effectively.
• Emotional empathy  is “feeling what others feel”. It helps us build better relationships with others.
• Compassionate empathy is “caring about how others feel”. It moves us to take action.  
  

Where do you think advertising is playing? The question therefore is whether empathy can play a larger role in a brand’s life. 

The elevator pitch

When distribution, product, pricing, celebrity endorsers are all on par in a category, who steps up to the plate as a key competitive differentiator and a TOMA hawk? Influencers! Ok, not really, but it does contain a grain of truth. Influencers not only create recall, but also help build trust and credibility for the brand. They are thus a means to the sustainable answer – brand affinity. Strong brand affinity creates advocates and accelerates word of mouth.

Empathy, I would argue, plays a strong role in building brand affinity. It has an impact on two important aspects of how customers judge a brand – competence (across all the competitive factors in the previous section) and values. Without really understanding customers, a brand cannot retain its competitive edge. And articulating what it stands for is becoming increasingly important, especially in a polarised world. That explains why “cause marketing” is becoming popular – the entire premise is based on empathy for something – a set of people, or the environment at large. 

Empathy in communication

Empathy is actually at the heart of brand management. If you have done market research to understand customers, created personas, and used customer insights to deliver powerful brand campaigns, well, it wouldn’t have been possible without empathy. A brand’s communication signals its worldview, and makes it relatable to its customers. Forming a worldview that resonates requires empathy! And yes, that includes the channels you advertise on!

Empathy everywhere

Communication operates at a cognitive level, generally speaking. But to go deeper – both in terms of empathy as well as organisational support – the brand needs a vision that its entire ecosystem can rally behind. 

For instance, thinking of the product as a “job to be done” in the consumer’s life requires both cognitive and emotional empathy. When customer service is less empathetic in trying to solve the customer’s problem and rigidly follows a rulebook, you get United Airlines, which dragged a paying customer out. Alternatively, it could be like Ryan Air with its critical and commercial hit “Always Getting Better”.

Does the organisation treat the ecosystem like Berger and Asian Paints, who provided cash support to their dealers, anticipating muted demand? Or eBay’s “Up & Running” for small businesses? Or does it leave  them to their own devices? 

Brands like Allbirds even help customers contribute shoes to health workers with “We’re better together”. And if you’re Burger King, you can be empathetic even to your competitors! 

Empathy vs

In The Lessons of History, Will Durant writes, “Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.” Most businesses also optimise for efficiency, and I wonder if efficiency and empathy are like freedom and equality. 

Most businesses also aim for scale. But even as martech increases its capability to create a segment of one, and chatbots abound, empathy at scale remains a challenge in execution beyond mass advertising. Maybe, in the future, with facial recognition that can detect emotions, AI that can provide even more context and information, and recognise tone and modulation, my bot can speak to your marketing bot on my behalf. But for now, we have to consider calls for personal loans as empathetic gestures!

With scale also comes the problem of “partial empathy”. A brand might be doing great work on sustainability but will get called out if it’s not paying fair wages. Even the actions of their partners or endorsers have an effect.

One of the lessons the pandemic has taught us is the power and value of true empathy. As inequities and activism rises, and AI continues to reduce a consumer to a numerical probability, empathy has the potential to provide the counterbalance, and be a source of competitive advantage. To quote Maya Angelou, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”

Woke might make you broke!

One year later, a (rightfully) sharp post on Pando alerted me to how the NBA got embroiled in the Hong Kong protests conversation, thanks to Daryl Morey, General Manager for the Houston Rockets tweeting his support. China vs NBA resulted. The NBA apologised. Nike pulled its Houston Rockets merchandise from five stores in Beijing and Shanghai (via). It didn’t stop there. LeBron James, refusing to be left out, waded in by stating that Morey was misinformed. Thanks to Nike’s $1 billion lifetime association with LeBron, that dragged the brand further into it. As per USA Today Nike’s business in China from June 1, 2018 to May 31, 2019 is upwards of $6 billion, and has doubled in the last 5 years, while remaining flat in the US. The stakes are high.

Full contact sport

Nike’s campaign last year was “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”, supporting Colin’s freedom of speech, and protest against injustice. Contrast this with LeBron’s “We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative things that come with that too. I don’t think every issue should be everybody’s problem.” Unfortunately, Nike is a global brand and does not have the luxury of selectively being “woke”. Having taken a stand on an issue in the US, it is forced to create a coherent narrative in another geography.

Cultivated Personality

“Just do it” and the overall philosophy of “if you have a body, you are an athlete” centred on the individual. But in the recent past, Nike’s focus has been shifted to taking a stance on culturally relevant topics, and aligning a community that supports that worldview. It’s interesting to see this from a character (morals, values, beliefs) vs personality (qualities and behaviours) perspective. Nike seems to have internalised what it had been exhorting the individual to do, and in that sense (arguably) has only extended its character, not completely changed it. The individual now acknowledges him/herself as part of a community, and has a point of view on issues. That however, has significantly impacted how it acts in public and is perceived by others i.e. personality. One that is still learning.

A firm stance on hot topics means more skin in the game and a potentially anti-fragile brand in the long term. However, issues such as these will force the brand to think of how it can navigate the short term. A community built on a worldview will not take kindly to missteps. And given that many parts of the world are being politically and culturally polarised, this will not be an isolated case. So Nike needs to take a quote out of its own playbook and in business and communication, “Run more than your mouth.” This is quite the Rubicon for the brand. I, for one, hope that it can fill its own large shoes, because this work on the brand is pioneering, and could prove to be seminal in the years to come.

P.S. Nike is just an example. This is a long list of brands that have had to apologise to China.

A brand manager would ideally like a balance of both though. Meanwhile, somewhere on planet Quora, I voted up our friend Gautam Ghosh’s answer on ‘influence’. Apparently, an old HBR article (2005) had defined influence as a factor of two aspects – visibility and credibility. Considering that a brand is also aiming for influence, I found the connection between visibility/credibility and efficiency/effectiveness very interesting.

I think the ROI debates are also a manifestation of seeking efficiency, though very few distinguish between cost and investment (I). The good news is that once tools are developed to address this, (I hope) brand custodians will focus on effectiveness too. I was very happy to read Jason Falls’ post about tools that are beginning to address scale too. (Expion and other social media tools to manage franchisee operations) While these tools would most likely scale themselves to accommodate new platforms and technologies that arise later, the bad news is that effectiveness is still something that can be judged only by someone who understands the brand as well as the platform in question.

A quick detour. I recently started playing ‘Restaurant City’ just to get a feel of social games, and found Coke doing a pretty decent branding exercise there, that integrated well with the game mechanics and experience. The entire social gaming arena is already exploding. Farmville is passe, and Cityville is king. And that’s just one platform. How does a brand manager keep himself in the loop on all this, and experience enough to have reasonably good perspectives? So the idea of filtering experiences in multiple platforms to get perspectives on effectiveness is something I think only an agency can scale. And the more I think of this, the more I feel that this is the opportunity area for agencies – both communication (PR, Advertising) and media buying. I will state the obvious by saying that this is not likely to happen in their current avatars though. Your thoughts?

until next time, agents of change

Meanwhile, though Twitter lists will add a new dimension to search – people, content etc, like I mentioned in the last post, and create perceptions about people (basis lists they appear in), there are already directions which make me feel ambivalent (country lists, and I agree largely with this take). Even as they try to balance utility with threats like spam, I wonder what features Twitter will add to lists – feeds of lists, search (and advanced) within list tweets or add this option in existing search, one click DM to all members of a list (at least by the creator for starters),  or at least a way to send a tweet to only a list (so that I can be more pertinent to specific kinds of users – eg. there are those who hate my godawful puns, but like the links I share )

(Let me know if these exist in some form – even on apps, and add on the features you can think of)

Another line of thought occurred to me while on Twitter lists – brand communication. It started off by me wondering whether we’d now see brands occupying Twitter backgrounds of relevant lists (considering the web interface is still the most used source of tweeting) say, Star World on a a Heroes/Lost fans list, Kingfisher on a beer fans list. (all of you brands pay Twitter and the list creators, please) Taking that further, would we have brands create lists? Hopefully, not just something as vanilla as their fans, but say, a relevant common interest topic.

This led to a larger picture of how brand communication’s distribution would evolve. This also fit into last week’s post – aggregation of content and serendipity. How would brand communication fit into the varied methods of content consumption, aggregation and discovery?

Even as new distribution and consumption patterns develop rapidly, the identity of the traditional distribution means i.e. mass content creator-aggregators (newspapers, TV. and even web entities) as just a platform for vanilla advertising (and that includes ‘innovations’ like force-fitted editorial) has been changing for a while now. For example, Yahoo, even as it takes steps in creating and curating content, is also making deals “to help marketers creatively incorporate their brands into original online programming. The programs will appear exclusively throughout Yahoo!’s network of leading media properties including News, Sports, Finance and Entertainment.” ESPN Sports Center worked with Toshiba to create advertising that illustrates specifically how ESPN fans could use Toshiba TV sets and laptops. But all that’s still only creating more context. Seemingly seamless content and advertising, tricky territory, that.

To compare it with say, Twitter lists, the latter already have the context and the audience in one place, and these are created by the audience themselves. Isn’t that at least a step ahead. Meanwhile, there’s another way of looking at it – the Google way, using Social Search, and that includes not just Google’s own services like Reader, Profiles (and that means all your other service details you shared there and your respective networks), Mail contacts, but also Twitter. That means, when a person is searching for information, Google can now give him socially layered real time results, quite a good start to a man+spider filtered way of search. I have to wonder (again) how long the SEO way of making sure the brand website appears on top will work.

All of the above – traditional content platforms, social platforms, search are different kinds of people and content aggregators, and options for brands to create/share content (self created or UGC) in. While it might look challenging, it offers enormous possibilities of tailoring content according for the brand’s different audiences and their needs. They have varying sets of positives and negatives, several parameters will decide the medium, but as far as the message goes, interesting content is now, increasingly and thankfully mandatory.

Brands have always been experiences. Brand communication has sought to build/reinforce/manage perceptions. In an unconnected world, the audience had to rely on the communication, and the small set of experiences that they knew of – their own, and those of their circle of friends, relatives etc. In a connected world, the audience will experience in many more ways, and the content they create will be shared and distributed in ways they deem fit, across a much larger audience. Perhaps, now, the experience is the message, and the audience is the medium.

until next time, medium, message and mob mastery