Empathy, the new obsession for brands

Empathy has become the new buzzword in the world of marketing and so brands are adopting the practice of infusing empathy in their advertising campaigns to great effect. 

Salma Jafri, a video content strategist speaking at the Nest I/O's 021 Disrupt conference, emphasised for brands and organisations to make business personal. 

Jafri stressed upon using a softer approach in marketing, and as a video content strategist, said it is important to "show customers you care".

She asked the participants of the session, titled 'Business is Personal', to use the power of videos to convey their message to people. 

"The goal is to create shareable content," said Jafri.

She also talked about how businesses and other organisations can benefit from videos which establish a personal connection with their customer base and convey a strong message using the video medium.

"When you try and put yourself in the customer's shoes, means you are being empathetic," said the strategist.

Jafri talked about cognitive, emotional and compassionate empathy. Explaining the concepts, she said cognitive empathy is the ability to appeal to customer's values and morals, while emotional empathy is the ability to appeal to your customer's emotions and feeling. She added that compassionate empathy is the ability to appeal to the customer's sense of right and wrong. 

"The goal is to evoke emotions," further said the speaker. 

The content strategist also shared with the audience that today's consumers are not just interested in passively consuming content, rather, they are actively seeking out content which prompts change, in both themselves and the world around them. 

Talking about the benefits of videos in today's interconnected world, Jafri referred to a study conducted by Youtube, focusing on millennials, which showed that up to 45 per cent of millennials used videos to better their lives. 

The video content strategist also laid emphasis on the happiness factor in videos after showing a small video showing an infant with a cochlear implant hearing his mother for the first time and responding positively. 

"Happiness marketing works," said the speaker. 

"Put a name and face to the business and make it personal," was her advice to the audience of the session. 

The 021 Disrupt conference is one of Pakistan’s biggest entrepreneurship conference forums, with active participation from venture capital firms and tech celebrities from the Middle East, Singapore and the US.

Startups, during the conference, will get the opportunity to directly interact with leading international investors. Sixteen institutional investors from Pakistan are also attending to search for investable startups.

“We conceived this conference in the hope of bringing together players from the local and international startup ecosystem to spark meaningful conversations and ignite interesting and innovative ideas that could solve the global challenges we are faced with today," said Jehan Ara President of P@SHA and The Nest I/O.

In order for our ecosystem to grow it is important that the requisite support is provided to the talented young entrepreneurs in this country, she added.

The Nest I/O is a technology incubator set up by P@SHA. It was launched in January 2015 with grants from Google for Entrepreneurs, Samsung and the US State Department. As of October 2017, the Nest I/O has incubated 117 startups in the retail, education, fintech, healthcare, mobile gaming and special needs segments.