As AI-powered products flood the market and quick commerce platforms fight for brutal speed wars, startups are discovering an uncomfortable truth that innovation & speed alone no longer guarantees relevance. In a world where products are getting increasingly similar, and constant targeting is raising customers fatigue, ‘Empathy’ is rising as a serious startup ‘Moat’.
Empathy is interchangeably confused with sympathy. You sympathize when you can’t do much despite feeling the problem, while ‘Empathy’ is when you choose to listen, acknowledge and understand a customer’s lived reality, before acting.
Imagine a doctor who asks several questions, gain clarity, before prescribing medicines.
A doctor never begins by prescribing you variety of medicines or procedures, to later figure out the potential cause of the sickness by way of removal. That will be horrifying.
Unfortunately startups begin exactly like that.
Build first, differentiate later.
Founders obsess over innovation, tech, speed, and disruption, in a world where products are increasingly getting similar. Another organic food, another low-fat chip, another healthy snack, and another AI-App.
Differentiating claims only to appear different, feels more like replacement opportunitism race, then any significant addition to customer’s life.
Differentiation must level up.
Empathy as a Moat
Moat is a fundamental architecture. Not a communication pivot.
The idea of ‘Empathy led design’ is a tool, to fundamentally overhaul your product and communication design, and not just a marketing gimmick.
Communication happens in multiple ways like précising pricing, hyper relevance, and by establishing greater match between product’s intended uses with customer’s deemed intentions.
Customer centricity is often confused with feature’s feedback. Customization or personalizations are not customer centricity, contextual understanding of customer persona is, and that is what ensures longer engagement.
Hyper-segmented Customer Persona
Effective deployment of empathy as strategy requires hyper segmentation. With hyper-segmentation comes deeply isolated customer personas.
It widens the lens, and gives a broader understanding of product’s potential universe size, and various use cases.
There is lot to learn from FMCG companies when it comes to hyper segmenting, and deeply isolating potential use cases. Think baby cereals category for an example.
The ask is not to cater to every segmented persona; but to understand each persona deeply, and decide on few that carry the highest relevance, and must be targeted.
Deep psychographic investigation
Founders spend more time with dashboards than customers.
Dashboards present logs of customer interactions with your business and touch points, while providing no deep insights into their lived realities.
Deep investigation means developing socio-economic and macro-economic context for each segmented persona, and identifying emotional and psychological triggers driving engagements.
A 30-year-old earning fifty thousand with two kids has vastly different priorities than another 30-year-old earning the same amount of money, but living alone, than the other 30-year-old, who is about to get married.
Studying reference groups influencing customer behavior, life stage, and lifestyle aspirations reveals a lot about their priorities.
On other hand, studying disposable income in context of macro-economic environment, will help framing “Needs v/s Wants”, and reveals true affordability.
Another key rising trend is the influence of political environment on consumer behavior. Politics is shaping the societal behavior more than ever, and a customer mostly can’t remain unaffected.
Each layer of study highlights a different set of triggers.
Precision pricing
Pricing talks.
Pricing is one of the most effective communication tools with max influence on decision making. Lowest price doesn’t work all the time, but the price that best matches customer desire, does.
A customer may expect low prices in category X, but may be willing to pay a premium in category Y. Different desires. Different expected outcomes.
Pricing taps directly into psychology.
Zudio, a fashion chain by Tata Trent, achieved explosive growth post-covid, by aligning it pricing strategy with shifting socio-economic, and macro-economic conditions. The strategic pivot from Westside-led to Zudio-led expansion shows more than just pricing shift.
It’s a strategic empathetic shift. It’s more of an alignment towards market conditions, and not just competitive opportunism.
Just match the price with intent.
Communication reflections
An ‘Empathy Led Design’ lens differentiates a business structurally, where everything falls in place organically when it comes to brand communication.
Your brand story, communication campaigns, PR efforts, touch point experiences, and post-purchase journeys, everything begins to appear in sync naturally.
See, after a certain point, trust matter more than the novelties in offerings. Trust comes from well matched intentions, by design, and not just by communication.
Gaurav Pandey is a PR and marketing advisor with more than two decades of experience working with startups and growth stage companies.
He can be reached out to on LinkedIn.
