Empathy leaves its marks on life and on business

Picture the scene: you have to buy a gift for a secret santa and you have no idea who the person is. You do not know what they like, need or truly value. Hard, right? Now think about this: if buying a gift for a stranger is already complicated, imagine creating a product or a brand without understanding the people who will buy it.

Creating with empathy is not self help fluff. It is a strategy that costs little and is worth a lot. You know that meal you had at a restaurant and wanted to go back to the following week? That car you test drove and kept thinking about for days? That service that makes you always look for the same company or the same person? That is empathy.

It is not advertising. It is not luck. It is a real experience connecting people through something true. And whoever creates those experiences does not have to be the cheapest in the window to stand out. Whoever delivers an honest feeling stays out of the price war. They create desire. They create loyalty. They create a living brand.

What if brands could see the world through people's eyes? That is the power of empathy.

In everyday use, empathy is understood as respecting other people's feelings, or putting yourself in someone else's shoes. In the dictionary it can also mean the ability to grasp the meaning of an object, usually a work of art such as a painting or a sculpture.

In psychology it is a tool for interpreting human behavior and emotion. In sociology it is how a person understands the social self through three lenses:

• Seeing yourself through someone else's opinion: what do they think of me?
• Seeing others through someone else's opinion: what do they think of that person?
• Seeing others through their own opinion: what do they think of themselves?

The word itself comes from the Greek empatheia, carrying the sense of passion. That word could be the key to everything here, since winning people who feel passion should be the biggest goal any organization has.

What holds many companies back is exactly this: managers focused too hard on the numbers end up ignoring the effect empathy has on the business.

In the book Empathy (2017), published by Harvard Business School, Daniel Goleman presents the concept of the empathic triad, split into three dimensions:

• Emotional: the capacity to feel what the other person feels. It builds deep and honest connections.
• Cognitive: the ability to rationally understand what the other person thinks, feels and values. It makes communication clear and precise.
• Compassionate: it goes past understanding or feeling. It is the capacity to act on what the other person actually needs.

Those three forms, emotional, cognitive and compassionate, work as invisible tools that let people listen with more than their ears, see with more than their eyes and connect for real. If people can develop those skills, brands can too.

The empathic triad of brands

Brands can also apply the empathic triad to see themselves, their competitors and their customers with more depth.

First, seeing yourself through what people think:

• What does the customer think of the brand?
• What do they value in it?
• What would they like to be better?

Second, seeing the competitors through what people think:

• What does the customer think of the competitors?
• What do they value in them?
• What would make them switch brands?

Third, seeing people through their own eyes:

• What are their beliefs and their view of the world?
• How do those beliefs shape their choices?
• What do they value and what do they reject?
• What is their culture, their way of living and the group they belong to?
• Where do their needs come from and how do those needs show up?

Brands with an empathic posture harvest results beyond the financial ones. They are loved, they are valued and they win both the mind and the heart. Empathy is not only what the market is looking for. It is what makes brands more human, and that may be what the world actually needs.