TNS Blog

THE ART OF CONSUMER EMPATHY IN INNOVATION - PART I

March 29th, 2010

[From Food Trends Blog: Food & Beverage Matters]

In Pursuit of Actionable Consumer Intimacy

As marketers, we are on a continual quest for approaches that bring us closer to our consumers through conversation and observation. We seek not just knowledge, but to sip from the same glass in a way, to make us smarter brand stewards able to impact our brand growth trajectory. Our eagerness to unravel the desires, motivators, barriers, and white spaces of consumer attitudes and behaviors is reflected in our adoption of psychographics in the seventies, our reliance on qualitative tools in the eighties, an almost cult-like pursuit of ethnography in the nineties, and our love affair with online social communities more recently.

While these techniques can unearth insight and improve our understanding, changing the playing field requires another important factor be present in the organization: consumer empathy. Consumer understanding makes us more knowledgeable brand stewards; consumer empathy makes us more sensitive to the nuances of consumer motivations, exposing opportunities we might otherwise overlook. Empathy can improve the relevance and success rates of our innovation and grant us sustainable competitive advantage.

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