The shrewdest thing a marketer can do today is to be genuine.
Most of us have grown up with the idea that keeping our cards close to our chests, is smart. Trying to go one-up on someone, is smart. And as competition and consequently, clutter grew over time, these ideas sounded wiser still.
But somehow for our times today, the exact opposite seems to be the smartest thing to do.
With the proliferation of technology and internet access, information is less distributed and more bombarded. The average person is confounded with a cacophony of images and videos, a kaleidoscope of animated gifs and iconographies, and a myriad of live streams and podcasts, it is no less than a war crime on the senses. And as the competition grows, so does the need to do more — faster, quicker, better. And so continues the cycle.
Simply put, in this sea of noise, if a brand decides to listen rather than talk, ask rather than tell, it is little surprise that it will stand out a tad bit, wouldn’t it?
But if it sounds too simple to be true, that’s because it is.
Deciding to listen rather than talk, asking rather than telling — all these sound great as TED-talk bullet points, it is infinitely more difficult to practice. For one, what does listening really mean? Does it mean simply running polls, doing call-ins, creating live Q&As? And even if that is all that it took, then who’s going to turn up or even care if you’re a new product?
Listening, quite simply, means empathy. It always did. However, this more than anything else, shapes our world today, quite simply because there is a palpable lack of it. Every single aspect of our lives today is coded, measured, machine-learnt, and artificially-reengineered for us. And most times, that’s good, at times, even life-saving. But every now and then, this results in a sort of overwhelming exhaustion that is difficult to understand, let alone quantify. And right here, on the cusp of technology and the urge to renounce it all, lies the new-age marketer, with a gentle feather in one hand, to soothe her potential customer to sleep, and a conversion tracking pixel on the other. And it is this balance that needs to be perfected by the new marketer.
But again, TED-talking here, what does it mean in actionable terms? Well, crudely put, it means giving stuff away — for free. Without worrying about views or clicks, CPCs, or CACs. It comes down to genuine empathy that you can feel for your potential customer. And this admittedly will lead to a kind of communication that may or may not be what you want to say, but it will undoubtedly be what your customer needs to hear.
And the new CMO might as well be called the Chief Empathy Officer. That’s because besides tracking all the targets and numbers, he needs to shepherd the team to ‘help out’ their customer. And if think choosing empathy over bottom-line requirements will hurt a product’s profitability, you only have to look at genuine examples that emphatically show the polar opposite.
From Elon Musk tweeting a reply to acknowledge and look into a customer’s complaint, to the even more inspiring Zerodha’s Nitin Kamath advising people to not trade recklessly when it is the exact product he sells, show that their brands get even more entrenched as pioneers when they behave empathetically.
But the thing to truly understand about empathy is, it is extraordinarily difficult, if not downright impossible to fake it. As they say, you can’t be a little pregnant, you either are or you aren’t. Much is the same with empathy. It pays dividends over time, especially marketing in the attention-deficit world we wade through, but its price needs to be paid in the near term.
It is not an easy choice to make. Precisely why, the smartest thing one can do is to be genuine while trying to.
