In today’s hyper-competitive, AI-driven marketing landscape, understanding and empathizing with customers is no longer optional – it’s the ultimate advantage. Yet, as Kim Donlan, Lecturer in Marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business highlights, the increasing complexity of reaching target audiences is compounded by government regulations that limit the language used to define and segment customer groups. Without the right words and data, brands risk losing their ability to personalize, target, and engage with those who would benefit most from their offerings. Donlan argues that “radical empathy” is the path forward, deeply understanding and connecting with customers on a human level, despite the challenges posed by data restrictions. As the marketing world shifts toward hyper-personalization and AI-driven solutions, Donlan shares insights on how the brands that prioritize empathy will stand out, build trust, and forge lasting relationships.
All marketing is based on identifying target customers and meeting their needs. That’s the whole point of bringing products and services to market. Businesses create value by offering goods, services, and experiences customers are willing to pay for—with money and loyalty. The brands that provide the most value build trust, credibility, and long-term relationships. The brands with the deepest relationships build equity that can be extended to new products and services.
Marketing sounds simple, but every marketer will tell you it is not and never has been. Add a fiercely competitive landscape, the introduction of marketing AI automation, and the profoundly challenging ability to grab attention – much less the right target customer, and you have a complex job with little time and resources to do it well. Marketers have only one advantage – the ability to know the customer better than anyone else. The ultimate competitive advantage is understanding customers – empathizing with their experiences of the world. With empathy, we design and develop products, services and experiences they will love. If you truly empathize with your customers, you can reach them and break through the noise to engage.
Reaching the right customers – and defining a sizable market for your products and services may have become even more complex due to the current government ban on words. If we don’t have words to describe and define people, it inhibits our ability to target and position products to potential customers. Defining the size of a market segment and understanding how to reach new segments requires access to multiple databases that hold critical information. When looking to size a market, databases are key sources to know how many potential customers and where they live. Marketers want to understand as much about the customer’s lives as possible. By accessing multiple state and government databases, brands can size potential segments and consider how different types of customers might value their products and services.
There may never be a more critical time for brands and marketers to customize product and service offerings to niche markets. With the focus on customer experience, AI-driven search, LLM-based social search, and the power of community engagement, targeting customers with relevant content that matches a specific customer intent is the most direct path to brand awareness and customer acquisition. In this new AI-influenced world, customizing offerings is hyper-personalization of messages, offerings, and experiences – showing the prospective customer you are the brand to build a relationship with – you are the brand that will fulfill the need. Your brand understands. Your brand gets them. Your brand is the one to trust. You, the marketer, understand me, the customer.
However, the ability to target the best customers is lost if marketers cannot access valuable data about the people who could benefit most. If state and federal databases eliminate key targeting information like ‘female’ and ‘women,’ what does it mean to those brands who want to target women? Or if you have a non-profit offering a program geared towards unrepresented or underserved communities, there is no longer an ability to determine how many communities and the location of those communities. Our ability to reach people and communities is severed if we cannot quantify their existence.
As a human-driven marketer and a customer-centric brand, deep empathy for the customer is the foundation for building a trusting relationship deserving of loyalty. The messaging and offerings MUST be personal and relevant to the customer. But if we can’t find, connect, or justify the size of specific segments with data, we cut off the ability to select the people who would most benefit from our products and services. Eliminating words that describe segments of people is not isolated to only the government documents. It impacts businesses and non-profits who want to reach prospective customers. Businesses suffer if they cannot size all the potential niche markets. A data-rich story is a strong case for entering new markets, and without the data, marketers have less evidence on how to grow.
We are in the marketing age of what I refer to as radical empathy. Empathy is all you have to break through, win against the AI systems, and engage in community. Connecting with relevant experiences and content means you have worked to understand the human being on the other end of the message. You know their world, their life, their struggles, their needs, and their pain. You also know their desires, hopes, abilities, and promises. The emotional connection is the one asset markets have always had. Empathy means we can connect with anyone who might benefit from our brand. But if we eliminate the words that describe and identify them as people, we have made reaching people much harder. We have cut off lucrative markets.
Radical empathy might be the best response to branding and marketing we have right now. The path forward is a commitment to understanding and connecting to any market that could benefit from our products and services. Eliminating words for the government can’t lead to removing people from markets. The only sane responses are hyper-personalization and dedication to a spectacular customer experience for everyone who can benefit from your brand.
