Research reveals that marketers have struggled to empathise with social change and global issues affecting their customers.
Some 81% of brand representatives surveyed in July said they adapted their marketing strategy due to Covid-19 but 60% found it difficult to display appropriate empathy when doing so. The top three empathy focuses identified in the research for brands right now are: Covid-19, Black Lives Matter and mental health.
The two most common barriers stopping brands from responding faster and more effectively to change are; the inability to measure and analyse sentiment; and a lack of knowledge around how to use data to predict the success of future campaigns.
To help solve these issues, 97% of brands want to adopt technologies such as AI, to help them use data more effectively for predictive analysis and automated decision making. The research among 250 senior marketing decision makers in the UK, was conducted by Sapio on behalf of marketing AI company datasine. datasine helps marketers improve the performance of customer’s creative content using data-driven insights.
Chris Loy, CTO, datasine, said: “A brand’s ability to respond rapidly and appropriately to external events affecting its audiences and customers has probably never been tested more than it has in the past six months. Truthfully, it’s becoming critical to their success. Digital marketing demands instantaneous response to the things that are happening in the world. That requires marketing professionals to be able to use data to adapt their creatives, message, visual and textual content on a continual basis in line with changing audience attitudes.”
