Many marketers see being able to empathize well with their target group and/or the mindset of potential customers as the key to sales success. After all, you can only offer user-centricity and tailor-made problem solutions if your company understands its customers.
What really drives your customers, what problems do they have and how can you solve them better? The Empathy Map answers these questions for you. With their help, you illuminate what a customer perceives, what he thinks, and what emotions drive him. In this way, you can make your offer even more valuable for them.
What is an empathy map and where did the concept come from?
The empathy map is a technique designed to enable you to better empathize with your customers. This allows you to find out how they “tick”, what obstacles they encounter, and what dreams they have. On this basis, you can then improve your products and your service and – ideally – convince your prospects.
This technique was developed by Dave Gray as part of a toolkit called Gamestorming. Using the techniques included, companies can develop a deeper understanding of their customer’s problems and needs. The empathy map is the most well-known of these techniques and allows you to put yourself in the customer’s place, even without extensive data, so that their obstacles and motivations become more tangible. You use a template to ask yourself various questions.
How does the empathy map differ from the buyer persona?
The empathy map is purely hypothetical. While the buyer persona is ideally substantiated by surveys and data collection, the empathy map only springs from your head. The information from the two techniques can overlap.
Of course, the buyer persona should also make it easier for you to find out what benefits your product or service can bring to your customers. However, a buyer persona puts the focus a little differently and also includes demographic data: This is more about who is buying from you. The Empathy Map should tell you why someone buys from you. However, this part can also be included in the buyer persona as a psychograph. In many cases, however, the empathy map will be much more detailed and less abstract.
Many design thinking teams use the persona as the basis for the empathy map. Conversely, hypotheses of the empathy map can also be secured through customer surveys and then become part of the buyer persona.
Creating an empathy map is easy due to its hypothetical character. You do not have to plan more than 15 minutes for this once you have dealt with the concept.
In which areas can an empathy map be used and in which not?
Because the Empathy Map is created so quickly, it is very versatile. It is mainly used in agile processes and design thinking. There it is a tool that is used quite frequently, which is usually used when thorough research on a target group is not possible or disproportionate.
You can use the Empathy Map anytime you want to get a deeper understanding of what drives a customer. This is possible at every point of the customer journey , because the map can support you in many decisions:
- You can use it to define the salutation appropriate for your customers.
- You can better determine which channels your marketing should be active on.
- You can find out how to improve your product.
- You can more easily determine which USPs are particularly important to your customers.
- You find out where you can improve your service.
However, you must not forget that the empathy map is based on your hypotheses. As long as you haven’t backed them up with data, you shouldn’t use them as a basis for making far-reaching decisions.
This is especially true when your customers are very far away from your own reality of life. It’s difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a high earner as a fifty-year-old when you don’t have any children yourself. That’s why it can be very helpful to create a team in which at least one person is as close as possible to the target group.
How do I create an empathy map?
An empathy map is created quickly: you basically only need a whiteboard or a large piece of paper on which you draw the template. Check out gamestorming.com for an updated template from inventor Dave Gray. You don’t need any other tools for this and even the template is not absolutely necessary because the concept is self-explanatory.
Does your team work remotely? Then you can use any pinboard tool with sticky notes, such as Lucidspark, Miro, or Microsoft Whiteboard.
As part of the Empathy Map, you’re trying to identify:
- What your customer perceives, i.e. hears and sees (and where)
- what your customer says
- what your customer does
- What your customer feels
- What your customer thinks
Thinking and feeling also make it tangible what his pain points are, as well as his goals and gains.
You don’t have to stick to a predetermined order. However, there are definitely advantages to going from the “outside” to the “inside”. Once you note what the person sees, hears, and feels, you can empathize with them and delve into their thoughts. Thoughts, feelings, pain points, and goals/dreams can then be guessed much more easily.
As always in the field of design thinking and visual thinking, your most important tool is at least one partner. It’s about opening your eyes and thinking outside the box. It helps when more than one head thinks about it. However, too many cooks spoil the broth: More than seven people usually do not add any further value.
Tip: With a larger group of five or more people, it is worth appointing a moderator who does not participate in the content of the discussion.
A concrete example of an empathy map
How do I develop such an empathy map? I created one and will now walk you through the steps.
Who is the person you want to focus on? You should choose a name, give her an approximate age, and come up with a realistic scenario for her:
- What is her situation?
- What role does she play in this situation?
- What does the person need or want to change?
- What decisions does she have to make?
The name of the model customer that we now want to empathize with as well as possible is Marie. She is 17 years old and argues with her mother about sun protection.
Hear & See
As a simple first step, you should consider what sensory perceptions and information your customer receives:
- What does he hear friends/parents/supervisors/ influencers /ads/colleagues say?
- What does he see in his immediate surroundings?
- Which competing products does he perceive?
- What does he read or hear in the media?
Marie hears and sees a lot on this subject: Her mother tells her to put sunscreen on before she goes to the pool. Her boyfriend tells her that he likes tanned skin. Her best friend never uses sunscreen and has never been sunburned, although she has a much darker skin type than her. In social networks, she sees tanned people as the ideal of beauty. On TikTok and Instagram, she follows influencers who incorporate sunscreen into their daily beauty routine. In the drugstore, she sees dozens of different products with different properties.
Sagen & Tun
In the next step, a larger transfer capacity is already necessary. Because now you have to put yourself in the inner world of your model customer:
- What do you imagine your model customer will say?
- What have customers said in similar situations?
- How does your model customer behave? What behavior have you observed, and what can you imagine?
Marie is health conscious, so she will buy sunscreen and rub it on herself. However, she will regret not tanning as quickly as a result and will be annoyed with her mother. She will choose a product that she has seen on influencers. However, Marie is also environmentally and health conscious and concerned with ingredients and packaging.
Thinking & feeling
Now it’s time to get down to business. Ideally, this is where you develop a deeper understanding of your customer. Because this is about what pain points and what wishes he has.
Pain Points
What are your customers’ fears, concerns, or frustrations?
With Marie it is:
- get sunburned
- Not tanned, so not to be attractive
- Good creams may be too expensive
- Difficulty distinguishing good from bad products
Goals/Wishes/Dreams
What does your model customer want? What drives him personally in this situation to find a solution, what are his wishes?
With Marie it is:
- Getting tanned and attractive (like influencers)
- have healthy skin
- Do not burden the environment unnecessarily
- No conflicts with mother
As you may have noticed, I’m following Dave Grey’s updated version for guidance. That’s because I like this little circle much better, from which you slowly come from the outside into the “inside” of your model customer. You can of course just make two columns with three rows, that works just as well. Many templates that circulate on the Internet also do without hearing and seeing. I think that’s an oversight because at this point you have to think about how and where your model customer is influenced.
I’m also lumping together things that are “officially” supposed to be cooked separately. In this imagined situation, I find it an unnecessarily complicated brainteaser to separate hearing from seeing, saying from doing, and thinking from feeling. However, I also want to show you that you do not have to stick rigidly to a template and that this is above all an aid. If I brainstorm with others or want to fill out a template, I can quickly separate the individual actions.
Accordingly, I do not think that an infographic like this one is quite sufficient to bring the advantages of this technology to bear:
It’s also not as graphically consistent as the updated version of Grey. Nevertheless, this template can also be fed with the corresponding information. However, I would then recommend that you think through “hearing” and “seeing” as a preparation.
In the end, it doesn’t matter which template you use. You must understand what this technique is about, namely the step-by-step approach to the mind of your customer.
Conclusion: An empathy map helps you to address your target group better
The Empathy Map doesn’t give you any set-in-stone insights, but it can be useful for perceiving other aspects that you might not discover without this technique. It is always useful if you cannot or do not want to carry out extensive research.