Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Over on the Trusted Advisor, Charlie Green had a very interesting post last week entitled “A Marketing Company that Really Gets It On Trust.” In his article, Charlie talks about the marketing firm Unit7, with a special shout out to one particular campaign:

… on Type 2 Diabetes…They offered the entire office’s staff a chance to participate in a program: to conduct their lives for 14 weeks as if each of them had Type II diabetes. 67% of the team took decided to participate.  Sticking your finger twice a day.  Exercise.  Passing up foods.  Living a life not under your control. 

It was hard. And everyone learned a lot. And everyone came to really understand, at least a just little, what it must be like to suffer from that disease.

Predictably, I guess, the campaign has been criticized by some (including Seth Godin) who find it “disingenuous”, since nobody can really know what it’s like to have the threat of blindness, amputation, death, jeopardy to their children’s health, etc., hanging over them.

On this one, I couldn’t agree with Charlie more when he writes:

I couldn’t disagree more. The value of empathy in this world is precisely because of our inability to know another’s life directly.  To call an attempt at empathy “disingenuous” is to suggest there’s no point in my trying to empathize with women, or people of color.  Empathy is what gives us a ladder out of our daily existential reality to connect with another unique and different humanoid on the planet.  The issue is not whether we can gain total knowledge of another, but simply whether our attempts are sincere).

Of course, those of us who do B2B tech marketing are unlikely to get involved in anything quite this dramatic, but there are ways in which we can and should develop empathy with our customers. Here are a couple of them:

• Install the product following the instructions you give to customers.
• Actually go and use the product. (Remember how you used to write about how “intuitive” the interface is? Guess again.)
• Try to figure out something that you didn’t already know how to do using “Help.” Does it?
• Call the 800 number and see what happens.
• Call the helpdesk and see what happens.
• Sit on the helpdesk for a day and listen into some calls. (Remember how you used to write about how “intuitive” the interface is?)
• Try to answer a few of those helpdesk calls.
• See if a customer will let you shadow them during a time when they’ll be actively using your product. Make special note of all those workarounds.

These obviously won’t work in all situations, but the more empathy you can develop for the life (and plight) of your customer, the better you’ll be able to define and market products for them.

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