Win with empathy.

Big brands are winning with empathy

Those companies who know and understand their customers are gaining market share and customer loyalty that far exceeds competitors.

We talk a lot about innovation and creating bigger, better products, but sustainable growth isn’t possible without factoring your consumer base into the equation.

For every successful product or service that’s brought to market their are countless other flops. In our experience what makes your product or service sticky is designing, marketing and delivering with your customer in mind. The big brands like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and others who are recognized as leaders in empathetic business approaches today, get that to shatter the glass ceiling and gain major market share, every business decision and move has to be dictated by the customer. And this isn’t just a new, soft concept being rolled out by hipster millennials. This concept is ingrained in the very fiber of some of our most beloved brands whose market share has stood the test of crisis and time.

There is no better illustration of this than how Johnson and Johnson handled their Tylenol scandal in the early 1980s. After several deaths attributed to cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules, the company made the unheard of decision at the time to recall millions of bottles and offer free replacement with the safer tablet pill. It cost them incredibly and the scandal dropped their 37 percent of the market down to 7 percent.

Johnson and Johnson recovered and regained 30 percent of the market the very next year. The company’s credo since 1940 has been to make their responsibility to those they serve their number one priority. The way they handled this scandal is because of this priority, which has remained of the utmost importance as Johnson and Johnson has grown and maintained market success for decades.