Empathetic Marketing: How to Satisfy the 6 Core Emotional Needs of Your Customers

I’m only a chapter in and already happy with this purchase. It offers insights on many layers!

The author does a very good job of explaining how six need states influence our purchase decisions throughout our life. I like how he uses a continuum to compare and contrast different need states.

To say I was pleasently surprised with this book is an understatement. This book has helped me to identify my target client base as well as understand what signs to look for in what the client really needs. I would highly recommend this book to anyone in the sales world.

Obvious content, pompous writing. Nothing new here.

I was curious to know when someone would combine insights from several quite different concepts and write a book such as this one. For example, from Robert Greenleaf's essay, "The Servant as Leader," the development of the concept of emotional intelligence (Charles Darwin, E.L. Thorndyke, David Wechsler, and most recently Daniel Goleman), and Howard Gardner's research on multiple intelligences (notably his book, Frames of Mind). Well, without drawing upon these specific sources, Mark Ingwer has written that book and it is brilliant.In essence, marketing creates or increases demand for whatever is offered. It could be a smart phone but it could also be a political platform or membership in a professional association or support of a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. Now we have a definitive guide to a unique marketing methodology. That is Ingwer's singular achievement. As he explains, in order to satisfy "the 6 core emotional needs" of current prospective customers, one must understand those needs and be convinced that it is a privilege to serve them; also, one must possess emotional intelligence as well as highly developed reasoning skills because, as Ingwer explains, "emotions and ruling behaviors are the foundation for satisfying complex psychological needs. Our individual well-being - self-esteem, success, relationships, and happiness - is a result of our meeting emotional needs. An individual's needs are satisfied when he or she is connected meaningfully to others, and through these connections comes to find his or her own unique value and identity. It is a ceaseless, evolving, lifelong endeavor."Ingwer devotes a separate chapter to each of the six "core emotional needs" (i.e. control, self-expression, growth, recognition, belonging, and care) and explains with rigor and clarity how and why needs-based marketing initiatives must accommodate, indeed nourish human emotions as well as deliver a convincing, indeed compelling "message." Long ago in his poem "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman asserted, I am large/I contain multitudes." Marketers would be well-advised to keep Whitman's comment in mind. According to Ingwer, "The motivation and emotion behind our quest for needs satisfaction and identify fulfillment all too often are not always consciously available to us." True, but they are certainly available to empathic marketers such as Steve Jobs who realized long before anyone else did how appealing and personally (as well as functionally) fulfilling various iProducts would be.Here are some of the most important subjects for which Ingwer provides information, insights, and counsel:o The frequently hidden (or at least unrecognized) human needs that drive purchase decisionso What the Needs Continuum is and why it should be coordinated with a psychological perspectiveo How best to empathize with consumers' core needs for control, self-expression, growth, recognition, belonging, and careo A few core guidelines for how companies can take an empathetic approach to marketingAs indicated earlier, with all due respect to this brilliant book, all of the opportunities that await empathetic marketing initiatives as well as everything that Mark Ingwer recommends to take full advantage of those opportunities mean nothing unless and until an organization has people at all levels and in all areas who are - literally - servant leaders, who possess or are in the process of developing emotional intelligence, and who consider it a privilege to satisfy the core emotional needs of everyone with whom they are associated.I presume to add a footnote: With only minor modifications, all of the principles that Mark Ingwer introduces would also be appropriate for improving the communication skills -- and especially persuasion -- of those who interact with others within and beyond their workplace.

Those of us in marketing or sales have heard many times over that emotion is a key part of the consumer's or customer's (or anyone's) decision-making process. But more is written about facts than about feelings in business. This book is a great guide to working smart with the emotional side of pleasing the customer. Mark Ingwer lays out the spectrum of human emotional needs, and devotes a chapter to each one, giving examples of how each need has been handled well or poorly by companies in the past, and how to build a pattern of transactions that are mutually satisfying to both seller and buyer by being savvy about the audience's feelings, and focusing on serving the buyer's emotional as well as practical needs. If you need to grow your business, solve a brand's problems, or simply design the future of your business, you need to read your audience, and reading this book will help.

This book addresses an area that is missing in many books on marketing--an analysis of the role of emotional needs in buying decisons. The author clearly shows the role that emotional needs have in decisions and shows how understanding these underlying emotional needs makes "irrational" decisions much more rational. I love the examples throughout the book. They really hit home and show how the author used his understanding of consumers' core emotional needs to explain their behavior. There are numerous examples of ways that the author helped his clients tremendously through identifying the core emotional needs of consumers and then translating that insight to market a product or service. This perspective is sorely lacking in many books on marketing. I highly recommend this book for anyone in marketing and market research.