Blog · Listening
The importance of empathy in marketing
Whatever your trade, empathy is the quality that separates a relationship that lasts from one that ends at the first negotiation. But it's also the word most nonsense gets said about: it doesn't require truly understanding what the other person feels, and it isn't a sales technique in disguise.
Published 22 April 2021 · revised 16 August 2026
What it is
Empathy as identification
In its driest definition, empathy is "the ability to place yourself in another person's situation": putting yourself in the other person's shoes. It sounds simple and it isn't at all, or we'd get along with anyone — and we know it doesn't work that way.
When the other person's experience resembles your own, identification comes naturally. Most of the time that isn't the case, and that's where the trouble starts.
The phrase that breaks trust
"I understand you perfectly."
Said to someone who knows perfectly well it isn't true, it produces the opposite of the intended effect: irritation, and a little less credibility. Sometimes we can't know how the person in front of us feels. That's normal — and you can still be empathetic anyway.
How it actually works
Empathy is a form of communication
It doesn't ask you to feel what the other person feels. It asks you to recognise that they're feeling something, and to tell them so.
The step that matters comes after recognition: communicating your support. Letting the person know that you're there and that, if they want, you can be useful to them. It happens through questions, encouragement, reassurance — and above all through listening.
Only when someone truly feels listened to, and therefore understood, do they give you their trust. Not before. And trust is the only raw material everything else is made of: it can't be bought, sped up or faked.
One word at a time
Where empathy ends and the system begins
The 2021 version of this article closed by saying empathy makes you "extend the network of referrers and increase revenue". That's where the reasoning skipped a step, and it's worth putting it back.
What empathy does
It makes you someone others trust. That's the condition everything else can start from, and without which nothing starts.
What empathy doesn't do
It doesn't tell you who to introduce to whom. Being an excellent listener and having no idea which of the two thousand people you know is useful to the person in front of you is the normal situation, not the exception.
In the discipline, that step has a name and a mechanism: a deliberately designed introduction between the two right people is called a match, it's calculated on each person's Relational Footprint, and whoever makes it isn't a referrer but a Connector — because they put their own reputation on the line (Sixth Law).
Empathy opens the door. It doesn't tell you which door to open.
The first step
Where your company stands, in one number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the Relational Capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration required. Your browser calculates the score and it appears immediately, along with the dimensions where you're losing the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day someone calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to whoever takes the check-up: it's decided together.
Would you rather just talk it through? The number is 0549 888808.