The Empathy Gap and How to Bridge It
Giving creativity’s other half the airtime it deserves
By Samira Brophy and Adam Sheridan • 10 mins read
Understanding your audience and showing some empathy means that success can be found even in the humble carrot stick.
Explore how demonstrating empathy in your advertising, combined with fresh creative ideas, can drive +20% on short-term sales lift potential.
Key takeaways:
Some campaigns are so good, they make you wish you had made them, with plenty of Gold Effie campaigns inspiring envy. This is one of the criteria for judging a Gold Effie. With campaigns like these, there is a dance between Creative Experiences and Ideas and something more overlooked, Empathy and Fitting In.
Empathy and Fitting in as we talk about it in this paper is not a sentimental concept. It is what everyday people perceive as either 'for them’ or is concurrent with the brand world as they know it. Put simply it is either your brands gets them, or they get your brand.
1
Ipsos testing data and Effie case data shows that campaigns that combine fresh creative ideas with ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ are more likely to be effective and perform +20% on short-term sales lift potential.
2
Want to win a Gold Effie? Understand your audience and help them understand you. Higher Award levels were more likely to get ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ right.
3
The strategic planning process unlocks campaigns, finding ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ from a variety of sources (human truths, product, brand, shopper insights, etc.)
Campaigns that help the audience understand the brand or take pains to truly understand the audience drive results. For example:
Tesco and BBH ‘Together this Ramadan’ campaign increased footfall amongst four million British Muslims, who felt appreciated by their commitment.
Lucky Generals helped people truly understand Yorkshire Tea and how everything there is done ‘proper’, helping it grow from #3 to #1 in the UK tea category.
Dell helped people suffering from Motor Neuron Disease keep their identity by creating an easier and more empathetic way to bank their voices.
ITV and Adam&eveDDB really understood how children think. They knew they hated vegetables and got them to eat 981 million extra portions anyway.
The Mayor of London and Ogilvy UK’s ‘Have a Word’ campaign modelled behaviours for men to overcome the bystander effect when witnessing misogyny.
McDonald’s and Leo Burnett drove £86m of additional profit, helping people connect with McDonald’s at Christmas by re-framing the humble carrot stick.
As we navigate the current polycrisis, 73% of us globally wish we could slow down the pace of our lives. In the UK, agreement with this statement has gone up by 48% over the last 10 years. The implication for marketers when reaching out to some very overwhelmed people is twofold:
1
Can you avoid the temptation to complicate things?
2
How can you maximise the effectiveness of your outreach while still respecting your audience?
The most effective campaigns are those which harness high quality strategic planning to identify a simple, compelling idea and express it with creative that is entertaining, different, and feels empathic or familiar for the audience.
This paper explores the role of empathy in advertising as, in the search for simplicity and meaning, empathy creates the most meaningful point of connection with audiences – because there’s no deeper connection than an emotional one.
Knowing exactly who your brand is and arriving at a simple idea to help tell your story is one of the hardest things to crack in advertising.
Samira Brophy
Senior Director, Creative Excellence, Ipsos
Empathy and creativity as two sides of the same coin
We are at a point in the effectiveness conversation where creativity, rather than performance or efficiency, is back in the spotlight. Thank goodness. Yet this conversation can be rather one-dimensional, focusing on the need to be “brave”, to be “bold”, to be “different”.
In MISFITs, Ipsos explored people’s responses to advertising and identified three types of discrete experiences that emerge.
1. ‘Creative Experiences’ are unique, surprising, entertaining, and talkable.
2. ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ is a different experience to the ‘fresh takes’ delivered by the other two. Contrastingly, it is about delivering a familiar anchor, reaffirming something that the audience knows about the brand or an truism from their own lives.
3. ‘Creative Ideas’ teach the audience something new and cause them to see the advertiser as different to other brands.
Source: Ipsos Global Ad Testing Meta-Analysis (n=1,734 cases)
While divergent ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’ are important, we know from assessing thousands of ads that effectiveness isn’t driven by creativity alone, ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ is equally important.
Why empathy and strategic planning matter
Evidence from the Ipsos brand tracking database shows that ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ matters to market share growth. The perceptions that a brand understands and helps its customers are consistently observed as drivers of choice.
Figure 1.
Relative importance of purchase drivers
Understands me
Values me
Helps me
Index
Source: Ipsos Brand Health Tracking Driver Analysis of Brand Desire, Consideration and Business KPIs, n=1,238 cases
A ‘Proper’ campaign ticking the ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ box helped Yorkshire Tea grow volume share from 18% to 26% whilst retaining the brand’s premium pricing.
In addition, advertising that demonstrates ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’ in combination with ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ has a 20% stronger performance than average. In comparison, campaigns that do only fresh or familiar regress to the mean, to mediocrity.
As marketers, we tend to think about empathy in one direction: the ability to put ourselves in our audiences’ shoes and understand how they think and feel. While that’s important, I like the idea that empathy can be a two-way dynamic: it’s just as much about inviting your audience in to understand the brand, as it is about the brand understanding them.
Andy Nairn
Founding Partner at Lucky Generals
Empathy widens the gap between award winners and finalists
Ipsos reviewed two years’ worth of Effie finalists in the UK and US to understand the relationships between ‘Creative Experiences’, ‘Creative Ideas’, and ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ amongst these 94 cases. We observed that award winners had a 25% higher score on the three MISFIT experiences compared to finalists.
When looking at the impact of ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ vs. ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’, we find that the former is a stronger discriminating factor between award categories than the latter.
Good work can make people laugh, entertain them, or provide a new experience, but truly great and effective work goes a step further by framing the campaign message in what the audience knows or can recognise.
When looking at the impact of ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ vs. ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’, we find that the former is a stronger discriminating factor between award categories than the latter.
So, whilst ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’ are well applied across award winning campaigns, ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ appears to differentiate categories more clearly.
But, why is ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ at least as important to winning an Effie award as a fresh experience or idea? It comes back to the most important element of advertising, your audience.
Good work can make people laugh, entertain them, or provide a new experience, but truly great and effective work goes a step further by framing the campaign message in what the audience knows or can recognise. The framing reflects their lives and habits, and where the brand fits within this, rather than promoting the brand in an abstract way. It’s this dance between the fresh and the familiar that matters most.
How strategic planning uses ‘Empathy and Fitting in’ to unlock campaign ideas
There are several learnings we can draw from Effie award winners about sources brands can mine for ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ insights, and the simplicity that can be achieved in the final campaign because of good planning.
In summary
From the evidence, we see that effectiveness is not solely driven by the traditional idea of creativity we are accustomed to.
Truly great work blends ‘Empathy and Fitting In’ with ‘Creative Experiences and Ideas’ to drive end business effects. We have observed this in both generalisable Ipsos data which captures responses of everyday people and as a discriminating factor between Effie award winners vs. finalists. Some simple rules to follow:
1
Take a walk in another person’s shoes
2
Let people get to know you
3
Find and solve real problems
4
Don’t be afraid of a Truism
5
Hold up a mirror – let people see themselves
6
Look for the gems in the “margins”
Methodology
Misfits analysis
We took a two-step approach to understand the contribution of creativity to advertising effectiveness. The first was to run a factor analysis on our measures of the advertising experience amongst a selection of 1,700 recently evaluated ads across 18 countries. Having identified the three MISFIT experiences, we then ran a regression analysis to understand the relationship between each experience and key advertising effects measured in Creative|Spark, which are validated to in-market sales effects.
Misfits experience coding approach for Effie cases
The classification was on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being no attempt or achievement in delivering the experience and 10 an extremely strong experience. The exercise was blind to the level of Award given and the Ipsos researchers assigned had no affiliation or relationship with Effie as an organisation.
Creative Effect Index
Ipsos’ sales validated measure of ad effectiveness.
Get in touch
Samira Brophy
Senior Director, Ipsos samira.brophy@ipsos.com
Samira is an Ipsos expert on brand and communication work, with 20 years of experience spanning creative and research roles. She leads Ipsos’ earlystage campaign development offer, is a thought leader on ad effectiveness, and works with clients to adopt a misfit mindset and make bolder, highly creative campaigns that audiences value.
