Closing the Empathy Gap

@johnstauffer
Hello, my name is John Stauffer.

@johnstauffer
I’m the Managing Director of Strategy and Planning at DEG. We’re a full
service digital agency based here in Kansas City.
I manage our channel strategy across paid media, email, web, ecommerce,
social. I could give you a long description of my bio but the most important
thing to know about me, honestly, right now, is that I’m seriously freaking
tired. I’m exhausted because…

@johnstauffer
...of her.
My 10-month old daughter. She hates sleeping apparently. She wakes up
throughout the night. We’ve tried everything. And this is our second kid so
we should know what we’re doing. Here’s a photo from when I took her to the
doctor’s office last week because we were worried something was wrong.
The diagnosis? She is a baby.
Parents of little kids might notice that in this photo I’ve put her clothes on
backwards. You can’t see it but there’s a line of buttons going along her back.
That’s how I tired I am. It’s a miracle I’m properly dressed here today.

@johnstauffer
But this leads me to my point, the whole point of this presentation. Which is
that as marketers we have to be better about understanding the context.
That people are not the personas we’ve created in PowerPoint slides. They’re
not what the web data tells us. They are inhibited in a 1,000 ways from truly
receiving our messages. They’re tired like me or confused or worried or
distracted. Or maybe all of those things at once.
To kick things off, I want to tell a story that takes place at a time and place I
know all too well, at 3am in a baby’s nursery room. I was doing work for a
major baby food brand a while back. Our task was to work with the client to
create a series of videos aimed at educating new parents about infant
nutrition. We created a whole editorial strategy around education and did all
of the research you’d expect to better understand the needs and questions
of first-time parents, new moms and dads.
And, we worked with our clients. Our clients were trained nutritionists.
Scientists. With a specialty in infant nutrition. Which is want you’d want by
the way, if you’re buying baby formula. Expertise. Science. I’ll never forget
what happened next…

@johnstauffer
We produced the first video out of the gate. It was called Hunger Cues and it
was all about ways to tell your infant may be hungry. If you don’t have kids
you don’t know this, but it can be sometimes tricky to figure out what they
want. If it’s hunger or something else. Maybe they’ve been improperly
dressed. Anyway we release the first in a series, the Hunger Cues video. And
do you know what happened?
When people found our video they weren’t thinking like a Nutritionist. They
were tired and probably a little scared because now they were home from the
hospital and they nurses were gone and you’re alone in a dark room at 3am
trying to learn how to be a dad or a mom and the the number one search
term in that situation was not Hunger Cues but “Baby Hand in Mouth”.
Baby Hand in Mouth was what our target audience was thinking and
searching. They saw a behavior that confused them and turned to google for
answers. Yet we were creating a set of videos talking about Hunger Cues.

@johnstauffer
Baby Hand in Mouth on one side. Hunger Cues on the other. Speaking our
own language on one side. Speaking the language of our audience on the
other side.
That’s the gap I want to talk about today. An Empathy Gap.

@johnstauffer
The Gap:
80% of marketers say they have a holistic understanding of their consumers

@johnstauffer
Yet only 35% of people say communications from their favorite brand are
relevant.
That’s a big gap…

@johnstauffer
We all understand what empathy means. And, as digital marketers, we all
strive to understand our customer’s thoughts and feelings. I don’t need to
define empathy. But, the “gap” part of the Empathy Gap is what’s important in
order to better understand and deliver value for customers.
The gap is the difference between assumptions and reality. Between what we
think we know about our users, customers, prospects and what they really
think, feel, and act. Best in class brands work tirelessly empathize with their
customers though the explosion of data, counter-intuitively, has in some
cases widened this gap.
I’m going to talk about three ways to spot some gaps in your organization.
Your own version of Baby Hand Mouths. And then six, easy things you can go
back and do today to help close the gap. And I’ll share all of the tools I
mention at the very end so you don’t have to race to write everything down
as I go.

@johnstauffer
Here’s what I mean. We actually have so much data about our consumers
that we just sort of assume we understand what they’re thinking, feeling, and
doing. We’ve all see these personas that are data-rich but short on ”why”

@johnstauffer
Don’t worry if you can’t read this because if you’ve worked in digital marketing
for one minute you’ve seen or created this. I found this by googling “persona”
but we’ve all worked on these or used these as a way to segmentation our
audiences and personalize content, experiences, etc.
Meet Clark here. He’s a good looking guy. He looks well rested! He opens
our emails at 10:30am every Tuesday. He listens to Red Hot Chili Peppers on
Spotify on the way to work. He top-ranked skill on LinkedIn is Project
Management. He has 560 friends on Facebook. His favorite color is blue. He
saved a camping tent in his shopping cart. He voted in the last 3 general
elections. And he just liked one of our videos on Facebook!
A persona that tries to capture a whole bunch of data. Mostly quantitative
data. And mostly demographic quantitative data. There’s certainly nothing
wrong with that. But it’s not the full story. But have we met him? Or anyone
similar to Dave? Have we talked to him in a way that allows us to describe
him as his own friends would? Too often marketers mistake personalization
and smart segmentation for true empathy.

@johnstauffer
The next way to spot an empathy gap is to understand the power of
something called scope neglect.
Big Data is everywhere. But we humans are not good at “big” anything when it
comes to numbers. Research shows we identify with the feelings of smaller
groups of people versus large masses.
It seems counter intuitive but academics refer to this as “scope neglect,” and
it’s all around us. In short, as numbers scale up, our brains can’t quite scale
up at the same rate. As they get too big we sort of subconsciously give up
and channel our compassion or empathy to the smaller data set.

@johnstauffer
In fact, when presented with otherwise identical scenarios, we’d sentence
perpetrators who harmed three victims to longer prison terms than those
who harmed thirty.
The most famous example of Scope Neglect from academia was an
experiment in which participants were asked to determine the penalty for a
hypothetical oil spill. When asked how much an oil company should be fined,
the researchers found that participants would assign stiffer penalties to oil
companies that harmed 2,000 birds than an oil company that harmed
20,000.
Do you see the relevance for marketing? As numbers scale up, our brains
can’t quite scale up at the same rate.

@johnstauffer
Chart Junk is entirely accurate yet totally useless data visualizations.
As marketers we have to be able to report on sales, bounce rate, average
order value. But as marketers we also have to be able to represent the voice
of the customer in every single meeting you’re in. What happens in our
industry is the DMPs, the data visualizations tools, programmatic buying – all
fosters a quantitative-driven culture of consumer insights.
And here is a secret I’m literally a little nervous to share publically. Every
single great insight I’ve been apart of. The really true consumer insights that
fundamentality changed the direction of the creative solutions – all of those
insights were born through a qualitative nugget – some germ of an idea- and
then backed up and supported and validated by quantitative measures.

@johnstauffer
Now, we’re going to talk about six ways to close the Empathy Gap.

@johnstauffer
Here’s what the founder of WordPress – one of the widely used web
platforms in the world – has to say about getting your ideas out into the
marketplace.

@johnstauffer
There are tools that allows us to easily, quickly get our strategies, our ideas
out into the world. We don’t need to be trained statisticians to be curious
about what people think.
Two great tools:
Google Surveys & Typeform

@johnstauffer
Normally people hear research and run out of the room. Because there’s this
misnomer that if you weren’t trained in sample size and regression analysis
you can’t do research. That’s just not true. I believe as digital marketers we
all have a responsibility to be curious about people. And it’s okay if your
curiosity compels you to do some research-like things. Like fielding a short
qualitative study.
The thing is, you’re not a scientist working on something that’ll be peer-
reviewed in an journal, you’re a marketer trying to get smart. Maybe this
means changing up the questions you ask partway through a study, or
dealing with an less than perfect sample size.

@johnstauffer
This is called Applied Research. Borrowing methods from scientific research
and applying those methods to solving business problems. There’s a great
book on this subject called “Just Enough Research.”

@johnstauffer
Just for example, I’m working for a client to better understand why people
donate to charitable causes. We’re running pretty sophisticated modeling on
their current donor base. We’ve pulled the latest research on donor behavior
from across the industry. We’ve segmented their likely donors – those with a
high propensity to donate. But, in an effort to close the empathy gap, we’ve
also talked to people.
We asked them to describe the most memorable volunteer experience you’ve
had within the last five years. We ran this across the US through Google
Surveys. It took one day to get 1,000 responses which is all I wanted. And
this particular survey cost me 15 cents per completed survey. Who says
Empathy isn’t Cheap?
I got some great stuff….

@johnstauffer
Someone wrote about a non-profit called Boomerang Bangs which is trying to
reduce plastic bag waste.

@johnstauffer
I was surprised to read so many responses about firefighting. Being a
volunteer firefighter. Benefiting from the help of a firefighter. One person
wrote about volunteering to cook in the kitchen at her local fire station. It
was just a very specific pattern given the broad nature of the question.
This is one of those things you just sort of circle in your notebook. A small,
sort of unexpected thing. Sometimes strategists will refer to these as
trailheads. Something we might want to explore a bit further.

@johnstauffer
Someone wrote about her inability to volunteer on a tight budget. It’s so easy
to extend your own circumstances into your marketing strategy. If your
weekends are open and you’re free to plan your time as you wish then
volunteering is an enriching way to spend time. If you’re like this person, it’s
an out of reach luxury.

@johnstauffer
Mixed in the responses from people who gave their time were people who
benefited from charitable organizations.
I bet when I talked about volunteerism most everyone in this room thought
about giving time, resources. And that hardly anyone – maybe not anyone in
this room – immediately thought from the perspective of people who are the
recipients of chartable denotations and resources. Or put another way, you
pictured yourself working in a soup kitchen and not standing in line.
This organization treated this woman like royalty. How she was treated was
more memorable than what they provided for her.
Do you see how this sort of thing can help get you out of your comfortable
zone and empathizing with people who are different from you? That’s the
most important thing!

@johnstauffer
Also, just in case you’ve never actually ran an open ended survey and you
don’t know what it’s like to hear from 1,000 real, anonymous people. I have to
warn you. You always have this guy in there. He’s important too.

@johnstauffer
If you have this sort of information you will be 1,000 times more prepared
than your competitors, or your clients.

@johnstauffer
This is a way to look at the volume of search queries from Google Trends.
This is helpful. It give us directionally important context but it’s hardly ever an
answer by itself.
For example, this is the volume of Game of Thrones search queries over the
last five years.
But volume is a pretty uninteresting way to tell a story about what’s
happening. And it produces a lot of uninteresting chart junk. Charts that are
completely accurate but totally useless.

@johnstauffer
Shallow volume based “insights.”

@johnstauffer
Search volume is important but to really empathize with consumers at what
Google we need to be able to compare and contrast variations in search
behavior as a way to understand intent.
One way to better empathize with your audience is to speak their language.
We talked about Baby Hand In Mouth. Another example came from some
work I did with an anti-bullying nonprofit who wanted to better design
solutions aimed at middle school aged students. The best way to peak inside
the online lives of middle schoolers was a search query….

@johnstauffer
Of “Middle School Sucks”
Middle School Sucks was this magical doorway into hundreds of results –
mostly videos actually – from middle schoolers about the challenges they
faced and what they could change if they could. It was better insight than any
focus group or survey could have given us.
Think about what the “middle school sucks” equivalent is for your customers
pain points How would your customer – not you – search to solve that
problem?

@johnstauffer
Let’s pretend for a second you’re a Pet Food Brand and you’re launching a
new dog food product for overweight dogs.

@johnstauffer
You might start with a keyword tool like Keyword.io that taps into Google
Keyword Planner data. There are a ton out there and remember I’ll share all
of these tools at the end. I’m trying to show only free tools today so that
everyone can literally go back to their desk and starting putting this into
practice…
Here are some of the top questions related to overweight dogs….
In order to close the empathy gap you can start to tell a story from the
perspective of your target audience using search. Maybe you’re exploring
some of the early triggers in a purchase decision. So maybe your story starts
with “Why did my dog get fat?”

@johnstauffer
We’re now at the moment of truth. We’re moved from consideration and now
in our story our potential customer is shopping for health weight dog foods.
Maybe he’s looking for reviews on a particular brands, comparison shopping.

@johnstauffer
You now have a starting point to begin to craft a customer-oriented journey
using their language at every step of the way. From there you’d want to see
how your brand stacks up to competitors at each step along that way. And,
often, those search queries give you great insight into new content ideas.
For example, maybe you write a blog post “Is An Obese Dog Really a Big
Deal?” because you see that’s a popular question along the customer journey.

@johnstauffer
Lots of people think of this sort of research when you talk about UX.

@johnstauffer
User Experience is a pretty hotly contested title. It’s always changing. There
are many different flavors of UX. But at their core, UX methods meant to
improve web experiences turn out to be great methods for empathizing with
people. For understanding behaviors well beyond the confines of a webpage.

@johnstauffer
Consider “hacking” UX testing platforms to close the empathy gap. For
example, give people a small simple task and watch what they do on your
website or app. Very quick, inexpensive way to get raw, unfiltered video /
audio from real people.

@johnstauffer
For example, if you’re a pet food company you might recruit 100 pet owners
to test your site with a task like “Search for a healthy weight dog food.” Or
maybe you’re a Sporting Goods retailer trying to grow ecommerce sales. You
might run a test with something like “think of a person you know who loves
fishing and pretend you’re going to buy him a gift for his birthday.”
Again, this is a research but it’s not clinical, peer-review, scary research. It’s
not white lab coats research. Its you, as a marketer, hustling and being the
person that knows more about your audience than anyone else in the room.

@johnstauffer
Focusing on the Jobs to Be Done is important and sometimes more
productive that focusing on traditional persons which focus too much on the
differences between people.
From JTBD framework: it turns out:
“…many people with diverse attributes have very similar motivations, those
motivations are fast to research, and the focus on what you build can be
captured in a series of short, memorable sentences.”

@johnstauffer
One of my favorite Empathy Gap insights was understanding that empty-
nesters were inhibited to purchase a down-sized condo until they figured out
what to do with their old dinning room table. The condo developer had all
the top of the line fixtures and appliances. Yet the hold up for many potential
buyers was an old dinning room table that would no longer fit in a small
condo. It had enormous sentimental value.
By talking to hundreds of buyers that realized…"People kept saying, ‘As soon
as I figured out what to do with my dining room table, then I was free to
move”

@johnstauffer
Situations over Personas
Motivations over desired actions

@johnstauffer
Great community of Jobs to be Done practitioners at #jtbd hashtag on
Twitter.

@johnstauffer
Most industries have a few top-tier influencers, a somewhat larger minority of
people creating a bit of content, and then a big chunk of “lurkers.”
This ratio is often referred to as the 1-9–90 rule. That is, 1% of a segment
online are truly setting the agenda, another 9% develop content and share
opinions, and 90% are largely silent but consuming content from the other
10%.
That ratio changes from category to category but 1–9–90 is a good heuristic,
a useful rule of thumb that guides our thinking.
That means keyword-driven research on the web misses huge swaths of
people. Because the 90% that aren’t creating content, aren’t getting caught in
your keyword nets.
There is a giant iceberg hidden below the surface of keyword-based digital
research.

@johnstauffer
A person’s unique set of connections can tell you a lot about them. And more
importantly, at the aggregate level, patterns in those connections can point
you toward previously unseen segments based on common affinities, people
who all tend to follow a common combination of handles.
Those patterns give researchers great insight into how ideas are likely to
spread among the 90%.
Social and digital media monitoring tools have made it easy to spot vocal
influencers. That is still important. Now, the democratization of social network
mapping tools gives us a new layer of data that helps us make sense of the
90% of people online who share and consume content but don’t create much
themselves.

@johnstauffer
For more theory on the importance of small connected groups, check out
Grouped: How small groups of friends are the key to influence in the social
web from Paul Adams. He offers a compelling, persuasive case for thinking
about small groups vs. head of tail traditional influencers.

@johnstauffer
There is no short cut for the final step in closing the Empathy Gap.
I believe for every one hour you spend working on a chart or a presentation,
you should spend two hours out in the field talking to people. Your
customers. Your prospects. Your competition.
Collecting as many anecdotes as possible.

@johnstauffer
Summary of all the tools mentioned. To be clear, this barely scratches the
surface of tools we use at DEG. But I’ve included ones here that are either
free or very inexpensive and easy to use.
I want everyone, regardless of access or budget to be able to begin to close
the Empathy Gap in your own organizations.

Closing the Empathy Gap

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Closing the Empathy Gap

Similar to Closing the Empathy Gap (17)

More from staufferjohn

More from staufferjohn (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Closing the Empathy Gap