There’s an email in my inbox right now from a successful copywriter. In a nutshell, the email says,
“Don’t take Advil if you’re a marketer. It’ll blunt your empathy!”
(Apparently, Advil reduces not only physical pain, but transferred emotional pain, too.)
This is a common trope in the marketing world. “Empathy! Empathy! How else can you connect with your audience?”
But you don’t need empathy to be a good marketer. Case in point: Sociopaths, who have zero empathy, are very good at all kinds of persuasion, including marketing.
(In fact, I suspect some of the marketers who most vocally preach empathy are themselves sociopaths. If you don’t believe me, check out the Salty Droid blog.)
So if you don’t need empathy, then what?
All you need is something called “theory of mind.” That’s the understanding that other people have unique selves, unique ambitions, unique current thoughts, and unique information.
Once you accept this fact, you just have to truffle out where your prospect’s mind is at the moment. You can get there with cold-hearted, robotic research.
No empathy required.
But what if you do have empathy? Does that make you a better marketer? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it just makes you useless.
A while back I read an article about Jo Cameron, a nurse from Scotland. Cameron has a happy-go-lucky disposition and literally never feels pain, including empathetic pain.
Speaking about Cameron, a professor from Yale had this to say:
“Empathy can actually get in the way — if you are in terrible pain and I feel so much empathy for you that, being with you, I feel it, too, I may decide to stay home… [Jo Cameron is] my dream girl. She doesn’t feel the pain of others, so she doesn’t feel empathy per se. But she cares for others.”
So if you’re cold and selfish, there’s hope for you as a marketer. It might even be an advantage, as long as you care. At least about making the sale.
All you have to do is learn how to do research, like I mentioned above. This is something I might cover in more detail in my email newsletter. The way to sign up for it is here.