Empathetic Marketing Definition + Tips for Small Businesses

The relentless pace and competition for people’s brain space has pushed consumers’ fatigue with branded content to new heights. People are also becoming increasingly savvy and disillusioned by campaigns feeling forced, inauthentic, salesy, or tone deaf.

Case in point: Google received serious backlash for its 2024 Olympics ad. It depicts a father and daughter using the Gemini AI tool to craft a fan letter to the daughter’s hero. What should’ve been a moment of meaningful connection led to online criticism. The brand was accused of appearing out of touch with the cultural conversation around AI.

Keeping up with your customers’ challenges and concerns is key to empathetic marketing. Below, discover how to market with empathy and create unique creative that genuinely helps your customers. The result can help you build loyalty and trust, improve customer engagement, and fuel your company’s growth.

What is empathetic marketing?

Empathetic marketing is a strategy that puts your user first when developing materials and campaigns. You demonstrate that you empathize with your customers and genuinely understand their emotional needs. An effective, empathy-based marketing strategy also shows them how your business or service offering can help solve their problem—without sounding disingenuous or self-serving.

A golden rule of empathetic marketing: Your customer is always the hero. Practice empathy and create marketing materials that make them feel heard, understood, and taken care of.

What is unempathetic marketing?

On the opposite end of the spectrum is something you’ve probably seen or experienced more than you care to recall: tone deaf or unempathetic marketing campaigns that missed the mark. This includes ads lacking cultural awareness and campaigns launched at the wrong time, which can come off as insensitive. It also involves hollow influencer ads for products they have no connection to, and more.

Fallout from an unempathetic campaign can be painful for a business; it’s not easy to regain brand trust and loyalty with your audience after alienating them.

Tips for marketing empathetically

• Let the data guide you
• Test and iterate
• Ask for reviews
• Delight and communicate with your customers
• Ensure your campaigns meet the moment
• Prioritize authenticity

Infusing customer empathy into your marketing strategy can be transformative. Here’s how to go about it, with real-life examples of brand success from the founders of SURI, a sustainable toothbrush startup that generated more than $30 million in sales within two years of launching.

Let the data guide you

Prior to launching SURI, co-founders Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore took a wise first step, fueled by genuine curiosity. They went deep on research—running surveys, tests, focus groups, and interviews—to uncover valuable insights about their target audience’s unmet needs. This armed them with the valuable data, patterns, and throughlines they needed to develop a product that met existing gaps in the market.

“It’s business 101,” says Gyve on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “The first step? Ask people what they dislike about their current products or routines and listen to them.”

Despite their modest budget, the team ran as many surveys as possible to collect audience data. They started with the most cost-effective survey tools they could find, including SurveyMonkey and Attest.

Test and iterate

SURI’s co-founders took a similar tack while experimenting with their website’s earliest iterations. They conducted A/B testing to see which messages resonated with their target audience and spoke to their product needs.

Strategically, the team did this before spending any large amounts of money on marketing or product development.

“We were very cost-conscious, and we looked at things like, ‘How can we make it look the best? How can we be scrappy but not crappy?’” says Gyve. “So that's kind of one thing we say internally in our company, like, ‘How do we spend the least amount of money and get the most beautiful thing?’”

Research and data collection will be an ongoing and iterative process that you should continue prioritizing post-launch. It brings valuable insights to help guide you across each step of your company’s growth journey.

Ask for reviews

The SURI team waited until they identified the gaps in the toothbrush market before launching. This helped them confidently release their product to early adopters and request reviews.

“I think that sort of early momentum led more people to try the toothbrush,” Mark says. “And the more people that tried it, the more reviews we got, and then we started getting press. And the press started saying they loved the product, and it snowballed from there.”

You can use social listening tools to track how people are talking about your brand on forums, review sites, and across the internet. Tracking customer sentiment helps you identify areas you can improve and amplify positive feedback.

Delight and communicate with your customers

The SURI team credits its customer loyalty to delighting and supporting users with great customer service from the start. This first paid off when they faced shipping delays on preorders. They decided to take a proactive, empathetic approach to communicating the issue with customers. Not a single person requested a refund following the team’s thoughtful approach to managing expectations.

It’s these moments that people want to share with friends and family, maybe even recommending your business to them. An opportunity to help encourage word-of-mouth marketing is worth pursuing.

Ensure your campaigns meet the moment

Stand-out marketing campaigns don’t just say something interesting; they meet the moment. Lush, a pioneer in the bath and beauty space, shows it understands its audience’s needs and lives up to its cruelty-free brand values. The company meets the cultural zeitgeist with emotionally intelligent marketing and products that match customer’s values.

For example, between 2018 and 2019, Lush rolled out an innovative line of “Naked” bath products. The products are low-waste, sustainable, and vegetarian. The effort paid off because now 66% of Lush products sold each year share these elements of sustainability.

Lush’s “How It’s Made” video series, featuring Lush employees, highlights how the brand tackles ethical sourcing. At the same time, it invites the audience in, letting them feel like they’re behind the scenes and part of the process—an empathetic content marketing win.

Building on this trust, the brand demonstrated its empathy and cultural awareness in another campaign. It focused on customers sensitive to holiday marketing (Father’s Day, in this case).

Rather than attempt to capitalize on holiday sales, Lush invited people to opt out of marketing materials. The seemingly selfless act made the brand’s most loyal customers feel seen and cared for.

Prioritize authenticity

Authenticity is key; your audiences are savvy to tone-deaf tropes. If you commit to “walking the walk” to deliver your brand promises, you’ll set yourself up to build a strong and loyal fanbase. This is the ultimate goal when it comes to lasting growth and relevance.

Build a checkpoint system, enlist a committee, or designate a team stakeholder to review content before it goes live. Check all marketing and social media materials for sensitivity, multicultural awareness, nuance, and other essential criteria.

Even after content is reviewed and approved, there may be moments where you hold off on publishing to remain respectful.

During times of crisis (e.g., major tragedies, sensitive news moments, etc.) it is important to pause all branded social media posts—both organic and paid.