Editor’s note: Nate Cusick is a business and marketing development representative at market research tech company Discuss.io, Seattle. This is an edited version of a post published under the title, “Empathy and the evolution of market research.”
There are a growing number of articles being published shedding light on a new trend in the consumer insights and market research realm – consumer empathy.
I had the opportunity to chat with Kathleen Boyse, VP of strategy and insights at Jump Associates, to uncover what consumer empathy really is, and why your team should be focusing on it. She wanted businesses to invest more on the front end and study real people and human behavior, not just market reports, in order to uncover and design products and services that address prevalent human needs. Boyse gets involved much earlier in the process, as her strategy and research approach focus on helping create new products and services as well as reinvent existing ones.
Nate Cusick: What is consumer empathy and why should we care about it?
Kathleen Boyse: Empathy is created when you place yourself in someone else’s shoes – walk a day in their life and feel what it’s like to be them. It’s not a new concept but it does seem to be getting a lot of press these days. For an organization to be successful, they need to spread empathy widely and create a cultural intuition within the company about what matters most. Empathy needs to be activated, embraced and embedded.
Haven't most brands always been empathetic to what their consumer wants?
Well, yes and no. In the past, some companies were customer-oriented but honestly, many were far more product, sales or marketing-focused and they didn’t necessarily generate widespread empathy and learning throughout the organization. One key difference is focusing on what the customer needs vs. what the customer wants. When you focus on customer wants you deliver incremental value with customer interactions that are focused on selling more stuff. When you focus on what the customer needs, you start to understand the value of the customer relationship beyond sales or a measure of revenue. It’s this perspective on customer empathy that can really make the difference.
What trends are you seeing in the market research and insights space?
The role of the market research professional has grown tremendously over the last several years both in importance as well as in increased responsibility. Folks are being asked to do more with greater speed and impact. The best teams have a seat at the strategy table and the insights they gather help drive the business forward. They keep their teams focused on the right initiatives and they challenge their partners and push them to prioritize.
The research mandate used to be to identify insights that would help improve the success rate of the company’s products and marketing, but now the accountabilities range from tactical insights about marketing effectiveness to strategic insights about people’s needs and market dynamics. The research function at leading companies is accountable now, more and more, for providing insights, ideas and advice to business leaders well beyond marketing.
How is technology affecting the market research industry?
Technology is having an overwhelming impact. Companies and brands now have the ability to frequently measure the pulse of consumers and they can have a much more informed, open and iterative discussion with more customers or a wider target audience. There are so many different types of tools that are now available to the market research industry – from DIY tools that provide the ability to create surveys to support decision-making for concepts and package design, to digital tracking that has the ability to give you real-time insight into online and mobile consumer behavior.
One of the biggest trends I’ve noticed is a push toward establishing a digital community of enthusiasts to get customer feedback real-time and gauge sentiment at a moment’s notice. These branded communities are paying off big time for many folks and actually taking some of the pressure off the market researcher. Bizarrely enough, although the impact of technology seems overwhelming, it is only beginning as we start to see new AI as well as VR, AR and blockchain products on the horizon.
How can insights teams showcase consumer empathy?
Nowadays, insights teams and leaders can’t just be great at doing the insights work or uncovering and creating empathy; they need to be both a detective and a diplomat. Many decision makers don’t want to simply hear the story around the work, they want to experience it for themselves. We often help our clients craft two hour or even two-day sessions where business leaders watch uncut videos or talk to customers first hand. We like to call these experiences immersions. Rather than act as a master storyteller, we help our partners and insights leaders act as guides, helping decision makers come to conclusions on their own. Most of the time, these insights teams are leading their stakeholders down a path to conclusions that they’ve already made in advance, but the experience of getting there can help decision makers feel included in the process. We have found that if you allow folks to see it and feel it themselves, it becomes much more real and the collective empathy that is achieved ends up being much more natural, and as a result, much more impactful.
What can brands do to become more agile in market research?
That’s an interesting question. While it’s important to be agile, learn quickly and, if required, pivot into new unchartered territories, it might be just as important (if not more important) for market researchers to take a moment to reflect, lean back and learn to make strategic choices around the initiatives they choose to prioritize. In my experience, the best market researchers are those who ask why. They challenge their partners and work together to achieve a deeper, more impactful, actionable reframe of the business. They focus on asking the right questions and are relied upon as a strategic and valued partner.
What are three of the biggest obstacles legacy brands face when transitioning to a more empathetic organization and what are some solutions you would recommend?
First, keeping the empathy in a research or insights silo and not spreading it throughout the organization.
Legacy brands typically have the added challenge of size – it’s exceptionally hard to get a large organization all on the same page. At Jump, we have found it helps if you can create an immersive experience that can be shared throughout the organization from the top up and the bottom down. At a minimum, you can create a war room for employees to walk through and see for themselves what their customers are thinking and feeling, or go out and talk to your customers and see the competition in action. Better yet, develop an immersive session that includes hands-on learning and brings the insights to life.
Second, getting too focused on quick results and sacrificing the quality of the work – not spending the time it takes to develop a deeper understanding of one’s customer.
We have seen this happen over and over – folks are running too fast and they have more to accomplish with fewer resources so they end up “checking the box” on empathy or customer insights instead of challenging the work or taking the time to go deeper. There are lots of great quantitative tools out there for that allow for quick turnarounds, but if you don’t end up with actionable insights that can help drive the business, you will be forced to keep digging and might even have to start over. Our most focused strategic insights projects may take six weeks but we guarantee the quality of our work and we will keep digging until our clients have something that really pushes the needle on the business. We take the time to do things right so our clients don’t have to re-do the exact same project six months later.
Third, making assumptions about their customers or not taking into consideration all the changes that have occurred in the last few years.
The enemy of intuition isn’t a lack of information. It’s an over-reliance on data. In order to create widespread empathy, you need to do three key things: Get outside into the real world. Talk to people about their lives, not just your products. And finally, bring the outside back in so you don’t forget. This is not a one and done effort. Things change. People change. Don’t assume that you have everything that is needed to obtain or infuse deep customer empathy throughout your organization because you did a big project three years ago.
It’s an exciting time to be in research and insights. A new generation of leaders has now emerged with the desire and focus to create and drive a culture of widespread empathy and organizational learning. I’m really excited about the future and can’t wait to see what’s next!