Empathy is key in business
Using empathy for your gain in the art, business, and blogging world.
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Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Emotions move us and persuades us to be pro-product, pro-art form, or pro- way of thinking. Whether its sexuality, passion, peace, security, glamor, reliability, or happiness, it causes empathy to come into play and help us make our choice on various issues.
You could be buying a painting, giving a sales pitch about lipstick, or doing a blog post about baby toy’s.
But the key reason to connect with your audience is making them remember their feelings.
How the object in the painting reminds them of their beloved family member. The lipstick color reminds the boss of his beautiful wife and her claim on him with her lipstick. And how much a mother cares for her baby and want safe, non toxic toys, so they can play safe.
Here I’ll be showing examples and tactics on how people new to the business, art, and blogging world can use empathy for their gain.
The Business Side
In business, whether its advertising, marketing, sales, etc. Empathy can be your greatest Ali. The emotional, affective approach attempts to bring out strong emotions that lead to choice.
During a sales pitch or showing a new advertisement idea to the company executives, you need to evoke emotion to trigger a bond to what they are selling or a memory of how they felt in the past.
The business world uses empathy as a very powerful tactic that works well because it can make you feel something, act a certain way after exposure, and remember the advertisement and the memory that related to the emotions you were feeling.
Here are some ways that empathy should be used:
- Testimonial: have a customer who had an emotional experience or emotional need either for your product or helped by your product. Other customers will be more open to try the product because the advertisement is coming from another customer making the product look more trustworthy.
The art side
The business and advertising world aren’t the only place that can use empathy to persuade a customer or sell a product. The art world is huge for its emotion and passion, they have been the key ingredients that an art piece gets sold.
Art is created using emotion, whether hidden or out in the open for all to see, it’s there. But the imminence of empathy can be the key that makes people buy your art. If you’d like to see a prime example, click here to check out finding passions blog post
You can show it in the description on how you were inspired to create the piece. Or your process, what you went through to get to where you are with your art if you’d like to see and example of this click here to read about my sail away painting piece
It could be in your artist statement also. But remember there is no BS in the art world, and there is no BS when you are describing your art or your process because whatever you are trying to say about your art will be true. Because it either happened or your art reminds, inspires, and or draws out nostalgia. And that is real.
Here are some tips to help you put more emotion into your work:
- Classical music or movie scores
- Watch movie clips that inspire you or cause a strong feeling
- Look at old pictures
- Think of emotional times, the good and the bad and use that, just start creating to put it into your art
- Read poetry or scripture and draw or paint exactly what comes into your head in the way the words make you feel
The blogging side
Now I think speak for every blogger out there when I say that we all want to grab hold of our readers and entertain them while feeding them knowledge. One great tactic to do now and then is to let people in to see you as a real human who doesn’t have it all together all the time, has your ups and down and wacky experiences.
Empathy helps people relate and connect to each other, which means it’s a vital key in blogging. If you can’t connect to people you have very little chance of growing and audience.
Here are some blogging examples that you can use for blog posts or just random add ins to your blogs every now and then:
- Sharing an experience that happened (that either relates to the blog post, topic or something) and what you learned from the experience.
- Share and event that changed the way you feel about something and how it changed you.
- Give your testimony.
- If you had an amazing day or a really hard one, share how you are happy and thankful or how you can make it better.
- Here and there give inside scoops on your experiences and how you felt during that time.
Empathy and essence are what I utilize in my art. I try to put a sense of emotion or nostalgia in my art so the viewer can enjoy my art as much as I do making it. In any of these sections and many more we should give it our all and contribute empathy so that we can attract more people/customers.
This topic is often overlooked or barely even touched on by bloggers, artists, and business people alike. But sometimes people just need a little wake up call.