Marketing.
It covers a huge range of practises today – both digital and traditional.
But Marketing has also gone through a lot of changes over the last few decades, from aggressive advertising to collaborative solution making.
What about today? Well, people expect a different relationship with brands than they once did. That means we need to ensure we add a human element into marketing. Here’s how.
People are powerful
Marketing just because we can is not a good enough reason.
So, what do brands need to do with their Marketing?
What’s the answer, then?
This is completely possible now too, given advancement in technology: it is us as Marketers that need to catch up.
Our products and Marketing efforts must actually matter to people, not bombard them because we now have access to more channels than ever before.
We need to conduct our efforts to truly thrill by putting ourselves utterly in the customer’s shoes, rather than spam the market and hope in the statistics that tell us a handful may care: this is now a zero-sum game.
Our products and Marketing efforts must actually matter to people, not bombard them because we now have access to more channels than ever before.
What is Empathetic Marketing?
Empathetic marketing is the development of a strategy which focuses on catering to the human person.
These modern methods of marketing are now far more effective and people-friendly.
For example:
- Blogging is a way to reach people with general informative content which engages them in a less intrusive way.
- Interactive content draws people in and encourages them to join the conversation, thus creating highly coveted word-of-mouth.
- Podcasting is usually free and enjoyable for people to listen to at their convenience, and will gain a following of people who actively download each episode, ending up as advocates.
- Social media connects people to each other and offers advice and opens forums, easing the barriers to purchase.
These examples demonstrate the approach of empathetic marketing in that they treat customers as humans with individuality, not just as consumers with money to be extracted.
The distinctive feature of empathetic marketing is that it encourages all marketing efforts to offer people value, and not just the final product itself. By offering information and interesting content rather than pretty pictures of the product with a price tag, it’s more catered to their satisfaction at all touch points.
Empathetic marketing is the development of a strategy which focuses on catering to the human person.
People expect more than noisy, forceful messages.
They want to be catered to, appreciated, wooed and persuaded. They distrust forceful messaging, and look to other sources they deem as more trustworthy.
These other sources are essentially other types of marketing executions (for example, blogs, podcasts, etc), so it’s, therefore, crucial for an organisation to provide these avenues, facilitate them or at least participate.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can use marketing to manipulate them in newer, subtler ways, as that’s not true. Today, people are highly educated and informed, and are extremely judgemental about these channels, so effective marketing requires high-quality efforts. Poor executions and uninspired campaigns will surely fail.
Today’s marketing channels are new, innovative, fluid and highly digital, and so marketing efforts must reflect this, offering the consumer engagement, well-researched information and interactive advice.
The P that the old Marketing Mix forgot was People.
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