Chapter1: Why marketing strategists need empathy?

What is empathy?

- Researchers agree that empathy has two components:

1. A cognitive capacity to take the subjective perspective of another person.
2. An affective (‘emotional’) response to another person which can involve sharing that
person’s emotional state.
- In other words, we need to have conscious awareness, knowledge and understanding about
how someone else thinks, feels and behaves to have empathy with their situation.

How do organizations really develop marketing strategy?

- Traditionally in commercial organizations, marketing strategy is developed annually in a formal

process. This process identifies viable strategic positions in specific markets, describes for each
the target customers. A marketing strategy is a long-term one (e.g. five-year).

Strategic learning vs. strategic planning:

- Strategic Planning: Forward-looking approach, identifies specific market positions and

implementations.
- Strategic learning: Emergent approach, Strategy shifts based on organizational learning.

Marketing strategy formation is both planned and emergent:

- A key role of leadership is not only to plan deliberate marketing strategy as a strategic and
operational framework but also to manage the process of strategic learning whereby new
strategies can emerge.

Strategic learning based on empathy and strategic

empathy:
- Strategic learning starts with the individual but it cannot remain individualized. Turning
individual learning into collective organizational learning is critical to the process of developing a
marketing strategy.
- Learning must be focused on creating empathy with consumers as a basis for marketing strategy
formation.
- Shared empathy-based learning which is activated into strategy is called Strategic Empathy.
- The Strategic Empathy Process is a leadership tool for empathy-based strategic learning and
marketing strategy formation.
Chapter2: Strategic learning frameworks:
The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of four theoretical frameworks which offer a solid
foundation for multi-disciplinary strategic learning which will help insights and marketing professionals
develop empathy with consumers and customers as a basis for marketing strategy formation.

- Framework One: emotions:

Emotions can be primed and socially defined and influenced. We remember emotional events
better and for a longer period. Findings about basic and complex emotions have implications for
brand positioning, marketing mix and the use of insights tools to elicit emotional memories and
observe non-conscious consumer emotions.

- Framework Two: needs, goals, and values:

Needs and values are internal sources of motivation which influence goals and emotions.
Consumers are generally held to have functional, emotional, emotional, self-expressive and self-
actualizing needs.

- Framework Three: culture:

The purpose of culture has been variously defined as: fulfilling human and physical needs;
strengthening the collective ideas with give society its unity; and makes meaning based on
underlying and universal thought processes and codes of communication.

- Framework Four : decision-making:

Costumer decision-making was traditionally assumed to be linear and rational. However,
research in psychology and economics point to the fact that decision-making is non-conscious
and even more complex through the costumer’s 24/7 access to information about brands via
social media and the internet. Context – the environment in which consumers see your brand -
also influences brand decision-making.

- Future Perspectives: Research in all these fields is ongoing and offers exciting
future opportunities for deep insights research and marketing applications; research fields such
as neuro-marketing, which is also known as consumer neuroscience in order to determine how
consumers react to marketing stimuli. Also, Empathy Research, which is the study of how other
people’s thoughts and feelings can affect our own thoughts, feelings and behavior, is emerging
as a multi-disciplinary field of study with implications for marketing strategy.