I agree with Daniel Murray, empathy is a superpower in marketing. The less of a distance there is between how you see your value, and how your audience sees it, the easier it is to translate knowledge into profit.
However, ending that lesson there leaves the gate wide open to one of the great evils of business decisions: false positives.
Because of how our brain works, the more we learn about something, the less we can empathize or imagine how do people who don’t know what we know even think. It’s called “the curse of knowledge“, but in order to maintain the superhero theme, I’ve renamed it for this purpose.
If empathy is a superpower, I’d say the curse of knowledge is the kryptonite that strips specialists of that superpower and even does it in an insidious way so that they don’t really feel the power is gone.
Here’s the thing: to most specialists, it seems like marketing should be the easiest thing in the world, but in practice, it’s frustratingly hard. People act as if they are dumb, deaf, and horribly uncaring about it. They are none of those things, they simply can’t see what you see.To make your marketing messages stick, stop working on what to say and focus on who you say it to. Go and find groups that share some of your experiences, values, and traits, not knowledge. Once you do, your same old marketing will overnight become super effective, pun intended.