A few weeks back, Mark Ritson wrote about “spreadsheet jockeys” in his Marketing Week column.
Then, this morning, I picked up Tom Peter’s book, The Little Big Things and he wrote in the introduction about “the connection economy.”
Recently, someone mentioned that I write about what is becoming known as “the empathy economy,” which I wasn’t really aware of and didn’t feel that attached to, but which made sense the more I thought about it.
After flipping through Tom’s book for a few moments, I realized that the advent of “the empathy economy” actually provided a great opportunity to talk about some of the things that I feel are important and often missing from today’s business environment.
So this is going to be the first post in a series of posts about “the empathy economy” called “Big Ideas in ‘The Empathy Economy.'” With the first one being specifically about the challenge that so many of us are dealing with right now, which is too often the way businesses treat us is like some large, undifferentiated mass that they can yell at.
One of my favorite examples of out of touch business decisions is the $12 Bud Light that I see when I go to a lot of games.
This circles back on the idea that spreadsheet jockeys have gained so much control that key decisions aren’t made by how you want your customers to feel by spending their time, money, and attention with you. But instead they are made by people that use data as a weapon that has all the answers, good or bad.
In “the empathy economy” we are going to have to take a step back from our all encompassing love of data to begin thinking about what the people on the end of our offers consider to be important, not just what they will stomach.
In other words, it isn’t about you but about them.
In “the empathy economy,” thinking about what is in it for the customer will mean that you are likely to have to revisit many of your long held assumptions about what will and won’t work for a customer:
- Is your pricing tolerable, or is it a turn off?
- Is that line at entry or check out acceptable or just simply tolerated?
- Is your service great or just passable?
- Are you providing options to your clients based on your best thinking or only what you think will scale or be simplest?
- Are you making decisions that you can justify to yourself as being something that if you were on the other end of the buying equation you wouldn’t mind or not?
In “the empathy economy” you are going to have to realize that the ultimate decision maker is the buyer and every decision you make is about them.