Empathy: A Key Strategy for the Small Business

Harvard Business Review conducted research and found out customers want to connect with businesses or brands. Actually, the study went a bit further to say that consumers are capable of emotionally connecting with a business brand. Not only that, but consumers have emotional motivators. In fact, there were hundreds of emotional motivators identified but only ten were considered highly relevant for consumer bonding to occur to a brand. One such motivator was to have “a sense of well-being” and another was to “feel a sense of belonging.”

Both of these desires or motivators have at their root a need for empathy. A company culture saturated with empathy will get to the root of its customer’s emotional motivators. Empathy drills down to the core of people’s needs and wants, thereby enabling companies to deliver the products most useful for their customers. Here are 3 reasons why empathy is so important for every company:

• Empathy, by its very nature, seeks to understand the other, and thus makes the other individual feel important.

• Empathy draws out the needs of the other individual, therefore creating an opportunity for the business to fulfill the need (i.e.companies are enabled to deliver the products most useful for their customers).

• Empathy is based on emotions and customers thrive on the emotional connection.

• Empathy as a brand characteristic is rare and makes the company stand out from the rest.

Empathy as a brand characteristic
If you, as an individual, have empathy, that is a positive step. However, empathy needs to be more far-reaching in its scope. When empathy becomes a brand characteristic, then it permeates the entire culture of your workplace. This requires more than you the owner or manager making a change within yourself; it takes a revolution of culture to infiltrate all of the team members so that empathy is first and foremost. Getting to know your customers, anticipating their desires, and understanding their pain points is the beginning of the journey.
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