We also helped our client examine its internal processes. We brought in partners from places such as the MIT Media Lab and mobility start-ups to share various styles of working and prototyping. During those conversations, it was surprising to learn that car companies still create clay models of new vehicles before moving them into production. While the craftsmanship to create those models is truly astonishing, we encouraged our client to consider new forms of rapid prototyping such as 3-D printing to help move through design charettes faster.
We also helped the client understand that innovation often requires operational change, but those changes rarely translate into profitability within a quarter or two. It takes time—sometimes years—before innovation yields results. Teams that are evaluated on a quarterly profit-and-loss basis will be reluctant to take bold risks and challenge convention. To change a culture, it can sometimes be necessary to support innovation on a financial and personal performance basis. Our client needed to establish new policies that would give its teams permission to take calculated risks and, at times, accept a loss before obtaining long-term growth.
It’s also important to look at a company’s products and/or services because they ultimately sustain its culture and behavior. They represent the output of the people, processes, and principles that must meet up with the opportunity. They are the physical manifestation of elements playing well together.
Our auto client’s team changed the way they thought about product and, instead of thinking simply about making cars, shifted their focus toward creating mobility solutions. They began to think differently about how people use vehicles in cities versus suburbs and rural areas. And we saw them begin to explore a new set of services, either through new venture creation or investment in existing ventures, which let them play a role in the sharing economy and collaborative consumption business models via car-share programs and other disruptive mobility innovations.
Everything was coming together for that organization, and its people were seeing the benefit of working from an empathic place to act upon their initial instinct to shift into a more innovative culture. With that internal alignment in place, we could begin the work that the client had first come to us to carry out: to tell the world it was an innovator. That company took a big step in the right direction, but empathy and innovation are not magic wands. They take time, dedication, and continuing recommitment to make them a core part of a company’s DNA.
EMPATHIC OPPORTUNITY: EXTERNAL
Once we’ve identified an empathic opportunity and have aligned the company’s internal aspects around it, it’s time to take the work out into the world. To do this, we bring together a mix of marketing, communications, public relations, sales, customer experience, and media people. But we don’t use the traditional “us-versus-them” approach so common in our trade. Instead, we look at the problem through the lens of “we” and use words all of us understand:
• Conversations
• Behaviors
• Relationships
• Memories
This is how Applied Empathy comes to life in the world.
Conversations
The first step any company should take before externally acting on an Empathic Opportunity is to decide clearly and articulately what it wants to communicate. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often marketers and creative types dive straight into a campaign for a product or service before the company has figured out exactly what it wants to say. The only way to do that empathically is to engage in internal conversations. This goes to the core of the work we do. Building a campaign with empathy begins with asking ourselves:
• What conversation(s) are we trying to have?
• With whom?
• In what channels?
• And most important: Why are we having this conversation?
Asking these questions helps establish the baseline for the company’s marketing and communications. We want to understand who we’re talking to, how they consume content (e.g., via social media, through advertising), and what we want to say to them once we have their attention.
We worked with a fashion brand that couldn’t figure out why its social media following had plateaued. We looked at the content from the past few months and immediately saw that it was overly populated with product-focused content. More than 80 percent of the posts were focused on the latest cuts, styles, colors, and sales related to the product. I asked their communications team, “Imagine if every time we hung out together, all I talked about was my clothes. How often would we hang out?”
They realized in an instant that their communication strategy was too myopic. In their defense, they had been responding to pressure from the company’s sales and leadership teams to drive more sales through social media. But together we looked at their audience more empathically and created a plan that could show the leadership that sales wouldn’t come from talking about sales.
We looked for other topics for which the brand shared a passion with its consumers, and we landed on music, design, and food. As a test, the media people swapped their sales promotion content for conversations with their followers about their favorite new bands, artists, and restaurants. We helped them think empathically about the consumers they wanted to attract and provide content they knew would interest those consumers.
Within weeks, the company regained its lost audience and began adding new followers to its social media outlets; most important, it established an authentic connection that carried over to its product. Its consumers came to believe that the brand understood them. And guess what? Sales started to rise.
Our work with that client was focused on the conversations the company needed to have because that’s where empathy starts. When people connect authentically, bringing about a shared understanding of each other, the greater the likelihood is that everyone will get what they are looking for.
Behaviors
Once your company knows the message it wants to communicate, it is time to determine what behaviors you want to bring about. Sometimes, as with the fashion brand, it will simply be encouraging followership or building a loyal customer base, but it can be a wide range of things, such as:
• Taking a test drive
• Coming to your store and shopping
• Following you on Instagram
• Buying our product
The role empathy plays here is in recognizing that your consumers are savvy, and they know when companies are marketing to them. So it’s important that you be clear about your intention, whatever it is. You’re not going to pull one over on them. With a clear conversation in hand, you can construct a path toward the desired behavior(s).
Relationships
When your conversations with consumers start eliciting the behaviors you desire, that is the start of a relationship. But, like any relationship, it must be maintained so it continues to grow. How you do that is by applying empathy and anticipating what your consumers want from the relationship. How often do they want to hear from you? Should your communication be personalized at this stage of the relationship? What channels do they want you to use? Will those be uniform, or will they be different depending on customers and their preferences? Successful brands know how important it is to use empathy when considering these questions while creating external campaigns. They know that consumers have only so much time for any one company and realize that they will be drawn to the ones that take their time, interests, and relationships into consideration.
Memories
The final stage—and arguably the holy grail for any brand—is the imprinting of a memory in the minds of consumers. To do this, your company must know ahead of time what memory it wants to create.
Nike wants you to remember that it is there to support you, as an athlete, at any stage of your journey. Tesla wants you to think of it as the most innovative technology company in the mobility space. Amazon wants you to know that it provides you with efficiency, convenience, and choice.
These bra
nds have done a good job establishing these memories because all of the interactions we have with them, from conversations to the eliciting of behaviors to the maintenance of our ongoing relationship, have been aligned and are in the service of creating those memories.
The establishment of a brand memory is the greatest indicator of empathic alignment between a company and consumers with a shared context. It tells us that the company and consumers understand each other, that consumers know what the company stands for, and that the company has figured out how to connect to consumers.
ONE STEP AT A TIME
We practice this three-step process—the Empathy Venn, internal alignment, and external alignment—every day with the leaders of major organizations. Each step is designed to help them understand who they are and their role in the world around them. This empathy can, and should, be applied to all facets and levels of the company as a way of bringing greater clarity, focus, and ultimately alignment to every action it takes.
Any leader who attempts to use the frameworks outlined in this chapter will undoubtedly face difficulties. Few companies are fully aligned to take advantage of the biggest growth opportunities that come their way—even the ones that are needed to make reevaluation and adjustment a part of their daily operation so they can keep up with the world around them.
The great leaders I’ve worked with are as obsessed with these ideas as I am. They understand their business and the ecosystem around them from every angle, putting them into a position to face challenging times and be able to build thoughtful, successful teams that are led by empathy.
CHAPTER SIX EXERCISES
Envisioning Your Future
Think about a media outlet or publication that covers your business. For financial services companies, this could include the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. For technology companies, it might be more relevant to consider Wired or Recode. Now ask what headline you would like to see written about your company a year from now.
Some organizations want to see something about their meteoric growth or profitability. Others imagine an IPO announcement or the release of a new product that is taking the market by storm. Visualize whatever is right for you and your business, and write the headline in your journal.
The Three C’s
Using the Empathy Venn, place your headline at its center and begin to consider the three C’s that intersect with the headline.
Company
Write down in one column the things your company has done and is still doing to bring this vision to life. In the neighboring column, write down a list of things your company is not doing or needs to do to make it come to fruition.
Consider your products and services, your team, your business operations, and any other elements that seem appropriate. No topic is off limits as you do this sort of work, and the more broadly you view your business, the more opportunities you will find.
Consumers
List the various consumers your company serves. Don’t limit them to end consumers, but consider anyone who consumes information, products, or services produced by your business. These might include B2B partners, wholesalers, the media, financial analysts, your internal employees, and others.
Using the Empathic Archetypes, forecast how these different consumers will view your vision of the company. Wholesalers, for example, might have an easier time buying your products (or selling theirs to you). Analysts might be impressed by your company’s earnings and how they will affect your shareholders. Run this exercise for each consumer group, paying attention not only to the positives that emerge but to any potential “watch-outs” or negatives that could occur should your envisioned future state come to life.
As with the company circle, put these into two columns, side by side.
Context
Ask yourself what’s happening in the world around you and your business that might be relevant to your vision.
• Will advances in technology make it easier (or harder) to bring about?
• Are there regulatory concerns that may hold it back?
• Is anything happening in the cultural zeitgeist that could make the vision either more or less desirable?
What about your direct and indirect competitors? Remember the Polaroid case, and consider that competition may not come from within your industry but from a rising and disruptive industry that is parallel to your own business. Who are some companies outside of your direct competitive set that might pull the attention away from your business?
Create a list, again in two columns, of the trends that will both support and hinder the realization of your vision.
Empathic Opportunity
The center, where the three circles overlap, is your Empathic Opportunity. This is the place where your perspective and understanding of each of the C’s come together to help you better comprehend the path to bring this vision to reality.
Look at the lists you’ve created. Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Are they almost even? If the negative columns are eclipsing the positives, you don’t necessarily have to give up on your goal, but you can see how you will need to change your business in order to make it come to life.
All of this work provides you with valuable insights that will help you put together a plan that comes in the second part of this exercise.
Internal Alignment
Taking the analysis you’ve already done, move the empathic opportunity into the internal alignment framework.
Here you can consider what you need to keep doing (or change) in order to bring your vision to life.
The left side of the graphic has three key areas of focus: people, processes, and principles, which make up your culture and behaviors.
Your first step is to evaluate your team. Do you have the right people with the right skills to get you to where you want to go? Are you carrying people who are not aligned with this vision? If so, you need to determine if they can be inspired and/or trained to be a part of the new team or if you will need to do some restructuring. It is essential that you have a team that is aligned with your vision.
Next consider the processes within your business and ask if the way they function supports your vision. Scrutinize your business from all sides, and consider where the processes need to be adjusted or reinvented.
Last, do you have the right principles? These aren’t just nice words on an HR document or a website. They are the bedrock of what the company stands for. For example, if you need to behave bravely and tolerate a degree of risk to make your vision a reality, and your company has a climate of risk aversion or timidity, you may need to consider how to change that.
Map out these elements in a way that shows what you need to foster or adjust in your company’s culture to get you where you want to go.
The right-hand side of the framework is for products and services. If the elements on the left have an impact on your culture and behaviors, your products and/or services are infused by your culture and behaviors.
This is when you should determine if your existing product/service portfolio is aligned with the vision you are pursuing. For instance, you may want your company to be seen as a leader in innovation, but if your internal culture is not innovative, you won’t create products that are innovative. Your products and services are artifacts of your culture and behaviors. In a twist on the age-old expression “You are what you eat”: “You make what you are.”
Identify which of your products/services are aligned to your vision and which aren’t. Take a hard look at the ones that don’t align and ask yourself why you are keeping them alive.
External Alignment
When developing external alignment, there are four key aspects to consider in the way your business “shows up” in the world. They include:
• Conversations
• Behaviors
• Relationships
• Memories
First examine these four aspects while keeping specific tactics out of your thinking. Once you establish a macr
o view, you can go deeper into developing specific tactics.
Conversations
These are the foundation of any external relationship your business has with the world around it. We communicate not only through our marketing and communications but also by how our brand or business shows up in our customers’ or clients’ lives—whether in the boardroom, in the retail environment, or perhaps on their doorstep delivered by a distributor. Every interaction is an opportunity for a meaningful conversation with your consumers.
Keeping your empathic opportunity in mind, ask yourself what conversations you need to have with people to make this vision a reality.
• What do they need to hear from you, and what do you need to hear from them?
• What channels should you use to have these conversations?
• How often should you communicate with your consumers, and will you need different messages for different audiences?
Map these out in detail, thinking through what works best for you and the future you want to attain.
Behaviors
All conversations should have the goal of eliciting a specific behavior. People don’t engage with businesses just to pass the time. It is important that you be clear what you are asking the people who interact with your brand to do.
• Why are you talking to them?
• Do you want them to buy something?
Applied Empathy Page 16