Empathizing with Your Audience is Post #4 in a series from a presentation entitled 11 Great Creative Slip-Ups: The Most Common Mistakes in Brainstorming. The introduction to the series begins here.
The Problem: Thinking the target audience is simply a statistic
Here’s an embarrassing but true story.
Well before I was a creative director, I was an account supervisor in a Chicago public relations agency working on one of our largest clients.
A new account director joined as we were handed a new, important assignment. She called a strategy meeting among our core group in a few day’s time.
To prepare, each team member dug through volumes of research that the client had sent to our offices. By the time we walked into the meeting, I thought we had a good handle on the target audience.
The new account director’s first question to me was: “So, what’s her name?”
I didn’t understand the question. Her name?
“Yes, who is she?” she asked.
I froze. I knew all the data, the numbers, I could even even compare and contrast the data with the numbers.
Befuddled, I said, very very stupidly. “I don’t know. She’s a sterotype.”
To this day, I’m still surprised I wasn’t fired on the spot.
Never treat your audience as a pile of statistics. If you’re going to create ideas for them, empathize with your audience by treating them with respect, as if they’re a flesh-and-blood, real-life human being like you are. Giving your end user a persona or profile with a name is an excellent place to start.
The Solution: Empathize with Your Audience
It’s one thing to learn about the target audience from reading research and reports. But the best way to learn about your audience is to go out and meet them, face-to-face.
1. Conduct a focus group
I’ve conducted formal focus groups and I’ve simply invited people together for an informal conversation. Either way, you want to learn as much as you can about them, their situation, the context of the problem, etc.
There are some basic ground rules:
- Talk only in questions, never sentences. More so, you listen to what they are trying to tell you, not what you’re waiting to hear.
- Whatever they believe is true to them. Your opinions are irrelevant and should never enter the conversation.
- Do not go into the conversation thinking you already know the answers. Go in expecting to learn, which means you need an open mind.
- Don’t JAB your audience. Don’t Judge them, don’t Assume anything about them, and don’t throw any Bias on them.
- Remain 100% neutral. Even if you go to the point of showing them ideas, do not take their opinions personally. If you can’t trust yourself to be neutral, hire a professional facilitator. And, if they don’t like the ideas, ask them for their opinion on how the idea might be improved or changed. ENGAGE with them: ask questions.
- Keep the conversation going by asking: “Why is that important to you?”
Keep the meeting to no more than an hour. Serve nice food and wine, and if possible, pay for their services and opinions.
Go here for an excellent overview by Inviqa on how to run a focus group.
If you want even more detail, I suggest the book: Conducting Successful Focus Groups by Judith Sharken Simon.
2. Go on a field trip
Where focus groups remove people from their environment, a field trip is a way for you to empathize with your audience directly because it’s the most natural and honest connection.
Some of the fondest memories in my career are the days when I left my office and went out to talk to people. I spent a day on a crew line at McDonald’s. I’ve talked to people on factory floors. I spent a day with the call center staff for Holiday Inn. to learn how to sell black hair dye to Asian women. I’ve interviewed nurses in cancer wards and school children about ice cream. I have always learnt something new – and very often extremely insightful – by spending time with the people who are the end user.
Interviewing People is an Art
Here are some reminders about empathizing with your end user through interviews.
- Don’t surprise people. Try to find someone who can introduce you. If it’s someone new, spend as much time as possible (with inconveniencing them) to establish some rapport.
- Don’t surprise people with the questions. Few people like to be articulate on command. Ask if they’d like to see a selection of your questions in advance so they’re more comfortable about why you’re talking. And …
- Tell them it’s OK for them to ask you questions. I’ve learn just as much by the questions they ask as the topic between us.
- Be conversational, respectful and considerate.
- Take nothing personally. Be ready to deal with emotions. Frankly, I’ve learnt when they start to get emotional, the best thing you can do is actively listen to their perspective. They’re giving you a gift, and sometimes being a sounding board can help both of you. Remember though: be careful with what someone tells you privately or in grief. Those moments should be left off the record.
- With their permission, take pictures – not necessarily of them, but of the situation and environment. It’s amazing what some people do to help them decide on how to choose something.
- Invite them to brainstorm with you. They may have some wonderful ideas of their own.
- Bring someone with you if you’re not a good listener and a good note-taker. The other person (the note taker) does not talk. Don’t gang up on a person.
If it helps, here are other articles about listening.
3. Give the target audience a name.
We named the husband and wife who drank boxed wine “Bruce and Sheila.” The fitness fanatic was “Tess.” “Sabrina” represented women who had no qualms wiht Botox. “Hank” loved auto supply stores.
Naming the person reinforces the concept that your ideas need to resonate with an actual person. It’s a great ice-breaker for the brainstorm. You can spend the first 10-15 minutes coming up with realistic and descriptive names. It’s also good homework for people to bring 3-5 names that they believe best represents the audience. As an added bonus, the name is also good short-hand internally among your colleagues. One mention of the name, and instantly everyone knows who you’re referring to.
If you can, use the name during the pitch. Find one photograph which represents “Margo” or “Howard” or “Chandler.”
You’ll know you’re on to something when your client continues to use this name after the meeting, especially when they use it when they visit your competition for the business.
How else have you empathized with your target audience? Please add your comments and thoughts below.
If you want to return to the original article with links to the other ‘Slip-Ups’, click here.
1 Comment
“You do not talk. You ask questions, and more so, you listen.” The listening part is the most important and difficult. Thanks for sharing your experience.