Empathy Advertising: The Brief Most Brands Get Wrong

Empathy advertising is the practice of building campaigns around a genuine understanding of what your audience feels, fears, and wants, rather than what you want to say about your product. Done well, it creates the conditions for brand preference before a purchase decision even forms. Done poorly, it is just sentiment dressed up as strategy.

Most brands say they do it. Very few actually do.

Why Empathy Advertising Is Harder Than It Looks

Early in my career I sat in a lot of briefs that described target audiences in demographic shorthand. Women, 25-44. ABC1. Urban. Health-conscious. The team would nod, someone would write it on the whiteboard, and we would proceed to build a campaign for a fictional composite who had never actually existed.

The problem was not that the data was wrong. It was that demographic data tells you who is in the room, not what is keeping them up at night. Empathy requires the second thing.

I remember a brainstorm early at Cybercom, working on a brief for Guinness. The founder had to leave partway through for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. My internal reaction was somewhere between flattery and mild panic. The room was full of people who had been working on drinks brands for years. I had not. What I did have was a genuine curiosity about what the Guinness drinker was actually buying into. Not the product. The identity. The ritual. The permission to slow down in a world that was speeding up. That became the thread we pulled. Not because I was more creative than anyone else in that room, but because I was asking a different question.

That is what empathy advertising requires. A different question at the start of the process.

What the Brief Usually Gets Wrong

Most creative briefs describe the audience from the outside. They summarise behaviour, channel preferences, and purchase triggers. What they rarely do is articulate the emotional context in which the audience will encounter the advertising.

Think about what that actually means. Your ad does not appear in a vacuum. It appears while someone is scrolling through news that has made them anxious, or watching a show they use to decompress, or trying to get their kids out of the house on a Tuesday morning. The emotional state of the audience at the moment of contact is not a footnote. It is the brief.

Brands that understand this do not just ask “what do we want to say?” They ask “what does this person need to feel, and what is the most honest version of our brand that can meet them there?”

That is a harder question. It requires actual knowledge of your audience, not assumptions about them. It requires qualitative research, not just quantitative data. And it requires a level of honesty about your brand that some organisations are not comfortable with.

For brands thinking about how empathy fits into a broader commercial framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic architecture that empathy advertising needs to sit inside to drive real outcomes.

Empathy Is Not the Same as Sentiment

This is where a lot of campaigns go wrong, and it is worth being direct about it.

Sentiment is an emotional register. It is the warm music, the slow-motion footage of families, the voiceover that tells you this brand cares. Sentiment can be manufactured. Empathy cannot.

Empathy is earned through understanding. It shows up in the specificity of the insight, not the warmth of the execution. You can feel the difference immediately. Sentimental advertising makes you feel something generic. Empathy advertising makes you feel seen.

I have judged the Effie Awards, where campaigns are evaluated on proven business effectiveness rather than creative ambition. The entries that consistently stand out are not the ones with the most emotional production value. They are the ones where the insight is so specific and so true that the execution almost does not matter. The work that wins is built on a brief that started with a genuinely uncomfortable truth about the audience, not a comfortable aspiration about the brand.

Sentiment is easy to produce. Empathy requires you to know something real about the people you are talking to, and to have the courage to build your campaign around that rather than around your product features.

The Commercial Case for Empathy Advertising

There is a version of this conversation that frames empathy advertising as a values choice. A way for brands to be more human, more responsible, more aligned with what consumers expect. That framing is not wrong, but it undersells the commercial argument.

Empathy advertising builds brand preference before the purchase decision forms. That is its primary commercial function. And brand preference, built early and maintained consistently, is one of the most durable competitive advantages available to a marketing team.

I spent years overweighting lower-funnel performance in my thinking. It took time to recalibrate. The honest reality is that a significant portion of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. Someone who was already in-market, already brand-aware, already predisposed to buy, clicked an ad and converted. The ad captured the demand. It did not create it.

Creating demand requires reaching people before they are in-market. It requires making a brand memorable and meaningful to someone who is not currently thinking about buying. That is what empathy advertising does when it works. It is not a soft metric. It is the upstream activity that makes downstream performance possible.

Think of it like a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is many times more likely to buy than someone who just browses. The fitting room is not the sale. But it is what makes the sale likely. Empathy advertising is the fitting room. It closes the psychological distance between the brand and the person before any commercial transaction is on the table.

Understanding how this fits into market penetration strategy is worth exploring. Semrush’s breakdown of market penetration is a useful reference for thinking about the relationship between awareness, preference, and acquisition at scale.

How to Build an Empathy-Led Brief

The brief is where empathy advertising either gets built in or gets bypassed. Most briefs bypass it, not out of cynicism, but out of habit. Here is what a genuinely empathy-led brief looks like in practice.

Start with the emotional context, not the audience profile. Before you describe who you are talking to, describe what their life feels like right now. What are they managing? What are they avoiding? What do they want that they are not saying out loud? This is not about psychographics. It is about honest observation.

Identify the tension. Every strong empathy-led insight sits at the intersection of a real human tension and a credible brand position. The tension is not a problem your product solves. It is a feeling your brand can acknowledge. There is a difference. Products solve problems. Brands acknowledge feelings. The best advertising does both, but it leads with the feeling.

Test the insight for specificity. If your insight could apply to any brand in any category, it is not an insight. It is a platitude. “People want to feel good about themselves” is not an insight. “Parents of young children feel like they have lost their sense of self, and they are embarrassed to admit it because they are supposed to feel grateful” is an insight. Specificity is what separates empathy from sentiment.

Define what you want the audience to feel, not what you want them to know. Most briefs define a rational message. Empathy-led briefs define an emotional outcome. What should someone feel after encountering this campaign? Not what should they think. What should they feel? That shift in framing changes everything about how the brief gets interpreted creatively.

Check the brand’s right to be in the conversation. This is the discipline that prevents empathy advertising from becoming opportunistic. Does your brand have a genuine, credible connection to the emotional territory you are entering? If the answer requires significant justification, the territory is probably wrong.

Where Empathy Advertising Goes Wrong

The failure mode for empathy advertising is not cynicism. Cynical brands tend to produce forgettable advertising, which is a commercial problem but not a reputational one. The more damaging failure mode is superficiality: brands that perform empathy without practising it.

This happens when a brand identifies an emotional territory that resonates with their audience, builds a campaign around it, and then fails to back it up with anything real. The advertising says “we understand you.” The product experience, the customer service, the pricing, the policies, all say something different. The gap between the advertising and the reality is where trust breaks down.

I have worked across more than 30 industries, and the pattern is consistent. The brands that do empathy advertising well are the ones where the insight in the brief is actually true inside the organisation. The people building the campaign believe it. The people answering customer calls believe it. The leadership team has made decisions that reflect it. The advertising is an expression of something real, not a claim built to paper over something absent.

When there is a mismatch, audiences notice. Not always immediately, but consistently over time. The brand that ran the empathetic campaign about understanding working mothers, and then made it harder to return a product, or buried the customer service number, has not built brand equity. It has created a debt.

Tools like Hotjar’s feedback and behaviour analytics can help identify where the gap between brand promise and customer experience is widest. That is a useful diagnostic before you commit to an empathy-led campaign, not after.

Empathy Advertising Across the Funnel

One of the persistent misconceptions about empathy advertising is that it belongs at the top of the funnel. Awareness campaigns. Brand films. The stuff that wins at Cannes but does not show up in the performance dashboard. That framing is too limiting.

Empathy is relevant at every stage of the customer experience. At the awareness stage, it creates the emotional connection that makes a brand memorable. At the consideration stage, it differentiates by showing that the brand understands the specific anxiety or aspiration the customer is handling. At the conversion stage, it reduces friction by acknowledging the hesitation rather than ignoring it. At the retention stage, it builds loyalty by continuing to see the customer as a person rather than a transaction.

The execution changes at each stage. The emotional intelligence behind it should not.

There is a version of this that plays out well with creator-led content, where the authenticity of the creator’s voice carries the empathy in a way that brand-produced content often cannot. Later’s work on go-to-market with creators is worth reading for anyone thinking about how to extend empathy-led messaging through third-party voices without losing the integrity of the insight.

The challenge across the funnel is consistency. Empathy advertising that is warm and human at the awareness stage but cold and transactional at the conversion stage creates a dissonance that undermines both. The emotional register needs to hold across touchpoints, even as the message adapts.

Measuring Empathy Advertising Without Losing the Point

Measurement is where empathy advertising often gets undermined, not by bad data, but by the wrong framework.

If you measure an empathy-led brand campaign against the same metrics you use for a direct response campaign, you will almost certainly conclude it underperformed. That is not a finding. That is a category error. Empathy advertising operates on a different timeline and creates a different type of value. Measuring it against short-term conversion rates is like measuring a foundation by whether it holds furniture. Technically true, entirely missing the point.

The metrics that matter for empathy advertising are brand salience, unaided awareness, emotional association, and long-term share of preference. These are harder to measure, slower to move, and less satisfying to report in a weekly dashboard. They are also more predictive of sustainable commercial growth than most short-term performance metrics.

I am not arguing against measurement. I am arguing for honest approximation rather than false precision. Knowing that your brand’s emotional association scores improved by a meaningful margin over 12 months is more useful than knowing your empathy campaign generated a 1.2x return on ad spend in week three. The first number tells you something real about where the business is going. The second tells you almost nothing.

The Forrester intelligent growth model provides a useful framework for thinking about how brand investment and performance investment interact over time, and why optimising exclusively for the latter tends to erode the conditions that make performance marketing work.

The broader point is that marketing does not need perfect measurement. It needs honest measurement. And honest measurement of empathy advertising starts with defining the right outcomes before the campaign runs, not retrofitting metrics after the fact to justify the spend.

If you are building out the strategic architecture around how empathy advertising connects to your commercial objectives, the thinking in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader framework for aligning brand investment with business outcomes.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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