The Empathy Map
One of my favorite insights from Richard Saul Wurman (writer, thinker, information architect and creator of the TED conferences) is most professional communicators suffer from "the disease of familiarity."
It means that as our own knowledge about a subject grows, we forget what people need to know. We make assumptions of what they know and what they need to know.
One way to get back in touch with understanding consumers is with an empathy map.
XPLANE, the visual thinking company, developed the empathy map as a way to enhance and improve a company's understanding of current and prospective customers. Alexander Osterwal popularized it in his remarkable book, Business Model Generation.
It can also be a powerful tool for writers and designers. The core of the map is six fundamental questions about a customer. In total, there are 27 questions that will refocus your attention on a customer's situation, environment, challenges and wants.
It changes your perspective from a marketing mindset (company pushing) to a customer mindset (pulling).
You may need to change the view of your browser to increase size of graphic. Graphic (c) Alexander Osterwal
Creativity Central
3 Comments
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Reader Comments (3)
Nice chart. And a great guide to the questions that a company should be asking. As far as Marketing firms, these are a terrific bank of questions that should be added to their arsenal of strategies. Although, my opinion is that these are questions that should have been part of the arsenal when evaluating prospective clients from the beginning. So, grab this chart and add it to your collection of tools.
Some of my favorite questions are here. We hold a similar conversation when defining the target customer at the beginning of experience mapping.
Since every customer experience starts with a person who has a need, problem or desire they would trade something of value to have solved -- we must understand the customer and their need before we begin to define the experience that can solve it for them.
Getting smart about this makes all the decisions down the road most impactful. Thanks for sharing.
LCI
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