Empathy Storytelling: Where Brands Relive Audience Realities for Relatability -By Ugochukwu Ugwuanyi

Just like calling someone’s name often makes them look your way, there’s hardly a better way for brands to secure attention than by tying their messaging to human truths. Some of the best conversions happen when businesses step into their customers’ shoes. A story lands when audiences can glaringly see themselves in the narrative through a graphic representation of their lived circumstances. Brands that know what customers are grappling with will always outperform self-centred competitors.

Empathy storytelling targets human connections in public relations by deliberately making stakeholders heroes or protagonists of the plot. It subjects the brand or organisation to playing a supporting role in the lives, struggles, wins, and aspirations of audiences. It’s a strategy that puts the people first in order to win them over. Understanding and embodying the emotions, objections, and motivations behind a potential patronage is what separates the storytelling that gets read from the one that converts.

The best messaging isn’t built around businesses but inspires a dialogue about people, problems, and change. This is what will turn audiences into advocates. A post that engineers 100 genuine discussions is often more valuable than one that reaches 100,000 people and is forgotten the next day. Empathy storytelling is like human-interest journalism that funnels into conversations people actually want to join.

Factoring In the Critical ICP Framework

ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. It involves getting a 360-degree picture of your archetypal audience so you can speak to them with empathy and effectively assuage their pain points. ICP makes for laser-focused messaging so that the writer can turn from a generic, scattered narrative into personalised storytelling that cuts through the noise. When you speak directly to an ICP’s specific problems and goals, your storytelling becomes significantly more persuasive.

The framework guarantees better word choice by enabling the storyteller to ditch corporate-speak and industry jargon, embracing vocabulary and tone that resonate with the reader. Businesses are prone to describing their products in argot, while customers express their problems in simple, emotional terms. The closer your messaging is to your audience’s language, the easier it is for them to feel understood and trust what you’re selling. Before delving into storytelling, the ICP framework should be used to flesh out the following:

Desires: What is the ideal customer’s end goal? What, in specific terms, are they trying to achieve?

Problems and Pain Points: What is standing in their way? Why are current solutions failing them? Taking note of negative 3-star reviews of your competitors on Amazon or Alibaba gets you the exact phrasing that will make your storytelling convert.

Voice of Customer (VoC): Great messaging usually sounds like the customer wrote it themselves. What are the exact words they use to describe their frustrations? You can analyse Amazon reviews, stalk Reddit threads, support tickets and YouTube comments to pull phrases that will make your reader be like, “You’ve got me there!”

Rehashing customers’ vocabulary and phrases is the ultimate hack for high-converting storytelling that feels deeply personalised. Finding and using the exact words people use to describe their problems will make your content land more naturally and relatably.

The Situational Theory of Publics

Empathy storytelling will miss the mark without audience segmentation or stakeholder mapping. Enter the Situational theory, which hypothesises problem recognition, constraint identification, involvement, and information seeking as the four determinants of how people react to an issue or an organisation.

This model helps the storyteller achieve empathy by identifying and segmenting publics, understanding their needs and preferences, so that communication with them can be meaningful. The following is how situational theory segments publics based on their levels of problem recognition and information seeking:

• Non Publics: Individuals with zero connection to or interest in the issue. They are unlikely to engage with your message.
• Latent Publics: People who are affected by an issue or an organisation but are unaware of it or do not perceive it as a problem. The opportunity here is to build awareness.
• Aware Publics: Individuals who are aware of an issue or a business but do not seek information or take action.
• Active Publics: People who are fully aware, personally invested, and actively discussing, organising, or advocating around the issue.

All of this can be deciphered from community discussions, forums and social media comment sections where patterns can be gleaned when similar questions and objections appear repeatedly. From the derivable insights, you can then use empathy storytelling to either increase the problem recognition of latent publics or reduce the constraint identification of aware publics.

The Bubble Trap: Company Excitement Doesn’t Approximate Audience Attention

Living inside your organisation’s bubble is one of the greatest pitfalls of PR. This is particularly true for complex industries such as tech, medicine, energy and finance. It plays out when an upcoming activity or launch attracts so much enthusiasm and anticipation within that you start feeling as if it’s the same without. That’s assuming that everyone else is as excited as the internal teams. But until the comms team comes to terms with “Why would anyone outside this room care?” they don’t yet have a story.

Probing every idea with an external lens brings fresh perspectives and puts PR tactics on the same page with prospects. Nothing beats having someone explain their frustrations, goals, and buying decisions in their own words. People need to feel heard and believe that the person or organisation communicating with them understands their concerns and values their perspective.

You will communicate with confidence when you come out of your company’s cocoon. Businesses with strong public confidence often enjoy increased customer trust, stronger partnerships, improved media relations, and sustainable brand recognition. A good sense of news judgement can be lost when buried in your own brand for long enough.

Having frequent conversations with people who aren’t in your company but active in the industry as audiences goes a long way in maintaining the filter. Given that PR doesn’t exist to reward effort, if you can’t explain why somebody outside your business should care, journalists won’t bother either. Neither will your customers give a hoot!

AI Must Remain an Assistant, Never the Master Storyteller

The imperative of field findings and human connection in broader storytelling (let alone the empathy variant) means that the crafting of stories and the thought process that goes into it must never be outsourced to a machine. The best stories aren’t stilted, formulaic or templated but are discovered, as has been expounded in the ICP framework and the situational theory of the publics.

If only for the resonance that the Voice of Customers guarantees, organisations can’t rely on automated summaries and other generative artificial intelligence that sounds professional but feels disconnected. AI knows the words but doesn’t know the people. You cannot stop scrolls, let alone convert audiences with banal AI-esque cliches like “Building resilience”, “Creating sustainable change”, “Empowering vulnerable communities”, “Transforming lives through partnerships”, etc.

From a mile away, experienced communicators can spot an AI slop, differentiating between a story that has been lived, listened to and understood – and one that has been generated. An organisation’s reputation is under threat when they rely on a soulless bot for content creation. An AI-generated piece of writing passed off as one’s own is deceitful and chips away at credibility. There are also ethical concerns, as information created by machine learning isn’t always factual. AI-generated images or videos can sometimes make it difficult to distinguish between real and manipulated content.

AI chatbots should therefore be confined to their assistant role, where they help with research, proofreading and polish for brevity, tone and clarity. Machine prompts shouldn’t go beyond transcribing interviews, organising ideas, improving grammatical structure and accelerating content production. A copy, writing, or asset that is nuanced in the attributes of audiences, portrays their concerns and dignity, identifies potential risks, and is ready at the right time would always trump synthesised content. The synthetic can never be as good as the authentic.

Ugochukwu is a branding specialist, storyteller and media trainer who can be reached via nmiringwu@gmail.com