Are Marketers Equipped For The New Empathy Brand Mandate?

A recent Ipsos poll, conducted on behalf of PepsiCo Beverages North America, finds that Americans believe it is now more critical than ever that brands demonstrate empathetic qualities and take action to maintain customer loyalty and support. In response, companies have described empathy as the “brand mandate” from this point forward. 

Empathy has become the flavor of the day among marketers, but what does it mean in practice? Ultimately, empathy is about perspective-taking; it’s about walking in your customer’s shoes to understand their experience and how we can better help them solve problems in their lives. But let’s be clear, brands aren’t empathetic; the people who manage the brands have to be empathetic. As the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice protests thrust U.S. society into social and economic turmoil, what does this empathy brand mandate mean in practice?

 Given the call for empathy came from PepsiCo, we’ll use them as an exemplar to compare the consumers of the brand with people behind the brand. According to Media Mark data, the typical Pepsi drinker came into this pandemic with no better than a high school education and a household income under $40,000. They may well be among the 14.7% of Americans that have lost their jobs during the epidemic or are essential workers, putting their health on the line daily as they face food insecurity and eviction from their homes. In contrast, a PepsiCo marketer has at least a bachelor’s degree and, given they work for PepsiCo, it’s from a good university. They still have a job, and it will be a well-paid one. During the pandemic, they’re likely working from home as non-essential employees. PepsiCo consumers and PepsiCo marketers are experiencing the pandemic in alternate universes. What’s needed to bridge the gap between these two universes is the understanding and insight derived from empathy, but we can’t assume that marketers naturally have it.

According to influential psychologist Daniel Goleman, empathy is one of the five key components of emotional intelligence – a vital leadership skill. It develops through three stages: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and compassionate empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person might be thinking or feeling. It need not involve any emotional engagement by the observer. Cognitive empathy is a mostly rational, intellectual, and emotionally neutral ability. Emotional empathy is the ability to share the feelings of another person, and so to understand that person on a deeper level. It’s sometimes called “affective empathy” because it affects or changes you. Compassionate empathy is the most active form of empathy. It involves not only having concern for another person, and sharing their emotional pain, but also taking practical steps to reduce it.

Experts estimate that around 20 percent of the population is genetically predisposed to empathy. Can we assume then that they all found their way to the marketing profession? Surely professions such as health care, teaching, social work, social entrepreneur, veterinarian, psychologist, artist, librarian, and writer may tap the majority of this population. Marketing may scream creativity (think Mad Men and Blackish), and it’s recently latched onto computational thinking and data analytics, but can you name one time you’ve heard someone say, “you know, you’re a really empathetic person, you should go into marketing”?

However, Pepsico’s marketers may be better equipped than most to empathize with the lives and experiences of their brand’s consumers, especially during the pandemic. PepsiCo’s 2018 Diversity Report states that 40% of PepsiCo’s Global managers are women, and the global promotion rate for women and people of color is 23%. Psychometric test norms tend to show that women typically have higher natural levels of empathy than men. For example, the 60-question “Empathy Quotient” test measures E.Q. on a 0-80 scale, with 80 being the most empathetic possible. In a U.K. validation of the E.Q. with 1716 participants, researchers found that women have an average E.Q. of 48/80 (60%), and men 39/80 (49%), indicating that women are 11% more empathic than men. A shorter test EQ-Short found women scored 26/44 (59%) and men 20/44 (45%), indicating a similar discrepancy. An alternative empathy test (the TEQ – Toronto Empathy Questionnaire) also shows that women can score more highly. Finally, women tend to outperform men on a behavioral empathy test called the ‘Eyes Test’ (the full name is ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’), which tests people’s empathic ability to read emotions in people’s eyes. 

Unfortunately, the gender gap in the marketing industry means that men consistently outnumber women at all but the lowest organizational level. This imbalance means that those higher empathy female employees are also typically not in senior decision-making roles. A 2019 survey of the marketing technology and operations industry found that, while more women than men work in a staff role, director and C-Level positions are around twice as likely to be held by men. Low wage martech positions are more likely to see women filling the role. But when wages surpass the $125k mark, these positions can see around twice the number of men than women doing the work. The 2016 Future of Jobs survey by the World Economic Forum calls out this pattern of declining gender representation as seniority rises. The WEF predicted that in 2020 women would make up 37% of junior-level staff, 33% of mid-level staff, and 24% of senior-level staff within the consumer industry. That doesn’t leave much capacity for empathy at the top.

Given its emphasis on building a pipeline of strong talent, it may be no coincidence that PepsiCo has committed more than $45 million to combat the impact of Covid-19, providing vital local humanitarian aid and distributing more than 50 million meals worldwide. Unfortunately, most companies can’t claim anything near PepsiCo’s efforts on diversity or inclusion. 

But, as protests rage across America calling for racial justice, let’s make this real. Due primarily to developing grassroots campaigns as early as the 1940s and 1950s to increase sales among black consumers, according to MediaMark, black consumers over-index by 145% on the consumption of Pepsi. How equipped are Pepsico’s marketers to empathize with the experience of all types of black Americans in this country and authentically communicate with them? And how much pressure will be put on those black college-educated, well-paid employees to develop campaigns representing the experiences and frustrations of all black Americans? Rather than leaning on demographic diversity within the marketing industry, we have to equip all marketers to empathize and connect with consumers of their brands.

Just like the critical thinking, creativity, and analytical thinking skills that are touted as the mark of successful marketers, empathy is a skill. Companies put job candidates through case challenges, digital skills tests, analytics tests, and more. Yet, despite the declaration of empathy as the new holy grail of marketing, no-one measures whether job candidates possess the skill and to what degree. In practice, companies could choose from a variety of scientifically valid tools to measure empathy among potential employees, including self-report questionnaires, behavioral measures, and neuroscientific measures. Some measurement approaches focus more on the affective components of empathy, others focus more on the cognitive components, and some take a multidimensional perspective. 

If companies want to have empathetic brands, they need to recruit, hire, and promote empathetic people. To do this, companies need to assess empathy skills during employee recruitment and prioritize them when making hiring decisions. Then they need to follow PepsiCo’s lead in closing the gender gap that exists within their company that keeps women outside the realm of influence in the marketing industry.