Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy?

Michael Brenner has a simple way to explain why it matters: “When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies naturally want to promote themselves. Their products. Their services. Their features. Their wins. Their best face to the world.

Michael argues that this instinct is exactly what makes empathy so counter-intuitive.

It feels strange to believe you can sell more by talking less about what you sell. But that is where better marketing starts.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview, about why empathy is one of the most practical ideas in marketing, sales, leadership, and culture.

Michael previously led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing. His work has focused on helping companies modernize marketing by creating content customers actually want and by helping marketers lead with usefulness instead of self-promotion.

We get into why brands struggle to stop promoting themselves, why marketers often forget what it feels like to be a customer, how empathy helps teams do work that matters, and why helping customers is not separate from business results.

If your marketing still starts with what your company wants to say instead of what your customers need, this conversation is worth your time.

Michael Brenner was CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview. Before that, he led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing.

Michael is a keynote speaker, author, and marketing leader known for his work in content marketing, empathetic marketing, customer-focused content, and helping companies create marketing that serves customers instead of just promoting the business.

Connect with Michael:

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner

“When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.” — Michael Brenner

“It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.” — Michael Brenner

“We forget how to market to people just like us.” — Michael Brenner

“It starts by helping, not selling.” — Michael Brenner

“Culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization.” — Michael Brenner

“We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.” — Michael Brenner

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Brian Carroll: Hello. This is Brian Carroll, and I’d like to welcome you all to today’s B2B Lead Podcast.

I’m really excited to have Michael Brenner with us today. Michael is someone that I’ve followed for a long while. In fact, as we were just talking before this interview, we’ve both been mutual fans of one another.

Michael has received recognition across the internet for his knowledge in shaping content marketing. He’s a keynote speaker, an author. He’s also CEO of Marketing Insider Group, and so I’m really excited to bring his thoughts on empathy.

Michael, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. Thanks Brian. It’s really a pleasure to be with you today, and looking forward to talking about empathy, which I think is so important in today’s landscape.

To make a long story short, as we get older I find that I need to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to have to, but I have a 20-plus year career in sales and marketing, and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small.

Most recently, about 10 years ago, I was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing. I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing and essentially helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking.

Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to talk about.

What I found is that there was just such a need as I got out in the marketplace and started speaking and writing. There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand. They want to do it, I think, but really struggle with how to get it done and how to change the culture inside their organizations.

That’s what I’ve been focused on. I built Marketing Insider Group essentially as kind of a one-man agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments.

I understand the politics and the culture challenges that marketers face today, and I’m really dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.

Brian Carroll: Well, that’s fantastic.

I came across the article from LinkedIn, and actually several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian, you should check this out.”

I wanted to ask, what inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well, as you know it’s not something I’ve been doing for a long time. I’ve been kind of talking around it.

What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives, and maybe we’ll get to a really good story a little bit later on, but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey, this digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers, we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”

In the course of the conversation, what I end up finding is that there’s an executive usually, or someone in a position of power, who has their arms folded asking the challenging questions, “Well how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?”

I co-authored a book called The Content Formula to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was how do you show ROI from this approach?

In the book, I talk about how you can actually show a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people actually want.

Even after all of those financial objections were removed, I still found that there was resistance inside a lot of companies.

What I realized is that there’s this cultural underpinning, and it’s really a natural instinct. There’s a natural instinct inside a business to want to promote itself.

Yet that’s counter-intuitive.

That’s why I came to this realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time and I really look to you for the leadership on this topic, is empathy.

It’s empathy that’s missing, and a value on empathy inside corporate cultures and structures. It was kind of a rant in a way, but that’s why I put that out there.

Brian Carroll: Well, you described it as this counter-intuitive secret to success. Why is that?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, so like I said, the natural instinct, this is true for all of us. It’s human nature.

The example I love to give is the posts that I put up on Facebook. I don’t do a lot of business content on Facebook. It’s mostly pictures of my kids and the trips we take, and it’s essentially me putting my best face forward to the world.

That’s what I think we all generally tend to do in the social world that we live in to the connections that we have. It’s our natural instinct.

I think there’s really nothing wrong with wanting people to see that you’re happy and you’re healthy, and you’re doing fun things.

That’s the natural instinct we carry with us when we walk inside the companies that we work for.

The natural instinct of the business person is to want to promote itself and put the best face forward. That’s why I think it’s counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.

That’s why I think empathy is so counter-intuitive.

Brian Carroll: I know it’s something that I struggle with and I think everyone does when we’re focusing on getting our needs met, whether that’s hitting a number, as you talked about achieving ROI.

It’s a challenge, and I think you talked about this collective amnesia we have. Why is it we change as we walk into the building, that we start thinking differently when we put on our marketing and sales hat?

How can we overcome this amnesia to better relate to our customers?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, and I mean it’s really interesting. I love the term.

It was actually coined by Noah Fenn, who is head of video sales and strategy at AOL. He talked about how this natural instinct to self-promote is collective amnesia.

What he means by that is that although we’re real people, when we walk inside the buildings that we work in, we kind of forget that we are real people.

We forget how to market to people just like us.

That’s essentially the collective amnesia.

We walk in, we want to present and promote the companies and the products that we sell. Yet that’s exactly the kind of thing that we as consumers don’t want.

A head of marketing who makes an ad buy is doing that with the knowledge that he might, or she might, hate ads. That’s the collective amnesia.

When you’re watching a TV show, you don’t need to see an ad for Chevy 15 times over the course of the 45-minute show. But the ad buyer for Chevy is making that decision.

There’s a person, there’s a group of people generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article.

We make decisions in the business as people that often forget that we’re marketing to real people just like us.

Brian Carroll: It’s funny, and I think it’s interesting.

As I talk to marketers, we just realize how cynical we can be too, because we feel it’s a game or we know it’s a game.

I think really just getting out of our heads and, it sounds like what you’re saying, is we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and remember we are too.

What do you wish marketers and sellers would do in this respect? What are some suggestions you have on how we could get better at this?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well I think the counter-intuitive nature of it is this insight that when you help your customers, and I use this line in the article, when you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.

I think we often sort of defend our actions, our self-promotional actions by saying, “Well that’s the game we’re playing.”

Like you said, we’re kind of skeptical and we live in a noisy world. The loudest shouter kind of gets the most attention.

Yet that’s exactly the thing that I think the data that we now have in the digital marketing landscape is proving isn’t working.

As people, we know it’s not what we want. We have to resist that sort of notion, and put our customers first.

It starts by helping, not selling.

What that doesn’t mean is that we have to let go of the need to drive results.

That’s why I really love the line that when you help your customers, it’s the best way to help your business, as opposed to when you promote your business is the best way to promote and sell more of your business services and products.

That’s what I wish every marketer would get.

It’s really why I ranted in the article about the secret to success. The secret to being effective and efficient with the marketing that we do starts with this understanding that we are real people, we’re trying to market to real people, and the best way to do that is to actually be helpful.

It’s to want to really help them. Not just with the products and services you sell, but to help them as people and help the society at large solve its problems.

I think it’s a nobler cause, and it’s a much more challenging thing to do inside corporate cultures.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’m so glad you’re bringing this up.

You’ve probably experienced this as you’ve talked to your clients and marketers out there, but my experience when I talk to marketers and sellers is that they don’t want to just feel like they’re making an impact on the top line and bottom line.

They actually want to feel like they’re making a real impact or real difference, that what they do materially matters, and they feel good about it.

I think what you’re talking about can help us do just that.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. This is really the direction that I’m kind of going on the content and thought leadership perspective.

We all understand and we’ve seen there’s enough people out there talking about this desire to work for companies that have a real purpose or even a kind of social mission.

Even at the individual level, like you said, we all want to do work that matters.

One of the insights that I’ve found is that being effective in my job was never enough to make me happy. I was only ever happy when I was effective and making an impact with something that I believed in.

It’s the combination of both meaning and impact.

If you go to my Twitter account, I think you’ll see I have a line in there that says, “Life is short. Do work that matters.”

We all make an impact. It’s just about whether we make an impact in the right direction for the right cause, for the right purpose.

It can be a corporate purpose. It can be a financial purpose, but there has to be a customer at the end of that financial decision that’s being made where you’re actually solving a problem.

Again, I think it just comes back to being empathetic. It allows us as employees, as people, to really feel like we’re making an impact in a way that really matters to somebody.

Brian Carroll: I love it, and I loved what you said when you said, “We all make an impact, whether it’s for good or bad. We’re making an impact right now.”

I’m really glad you’re bringing up this point.

I think earlier in our interview you mentioned that you had a story this year, and I wanted to see if you had any examples or tips of how applying empathy has made a difference or impact.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. I have a positive story and a negative story.

Maybe I’ll start with, which one should I start with? Should we start with bad news first?

Brian Carroll: Well, let’s start with the bad. Let’s start negative. I like to resume positively if we could.

Michael Brenner: It’s not negative. It’s a lesson that’s become public, and I sort of got a glimpse of it in private.

The company, I’m actually a customer and a huge fan, and I have to say as a caveat to this, huge fan of Wells Fargo. In fact, I was on the phone with them this morning on a mortgage refinance I’m trying to work through. I’m still a happy, satisfied customer with them.

I had an opportunity to present to their marketing team about six months ago before the scandal broke. Maybe it was nine months ago, before them trying to sort of force accounts on people.

The conversation we were having was very much like this one.

It was about how content marketing requires a focus on really solving customer problems, and there’s one way to really know if you’re doing that. That’s with engagement.

You can measure engagement in the form of time on site and in the form of social shares, and in the form of whether people subscribe to your content.

Those are all deep measures of not just are you reaching people, but are they voting? Are they giving you a vote of confidence in the content you’re creating?

One of the senior marketers on the team spoke up and was resistant to this idea.

This person said that, “Here at Wells Fargo we are just buying reach and frequency, the kind of classic TV ad buying model. We are measured on reach and frequency.”

I said to the person that, “You have a choice in the world, the noisy world that we live in, because everybody can buy reach and frequency. Anybody can do that.

The brands that set themselves apart are the ones that are really looking to engage the right people.”

The example I used was, “You can shout into the wind, or you can speak one on one to the people that you can really help.”

That’s the choice you have as a brand.

I don’t think that analogy went over very well.

It was really only a few weeks later that the story broke, and I think we’ve all seen what’s happened there.

I’m optimistic that they’ve learned a lesson. I think that they have such an amazing corporate history and a culture, and I think that there were just a few of the wrong people in leadership positions who were forcing a value in pushing the business over the needs of the customer.

It’s exactly, I think, the wrong way to approach this whole idea of help your customers and you help your business.

It’s the opposite.

That’s kind of my negative story.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, well I think it’s just, I’ve written about this, I think when we focus on the wrong thing, we can almost become sociopathic trying to get our needs met at the expense of others.

In this case, clearly Wells Fargo customers didn’t get the benefit as Wells Fargo was getting its needs met of revenue.

I think they’ll turn it around as you talked about as well, and they’re working on addressing that.

Let’s switch to a positive example or a story that you could share.

Michael Brenner: Well I think the main lesson for Wells Fargo, and it’s kind of like it’s in their mission statement, is they really want to help customers.

The problem was, I talk about this when I do speeches on leadership. Culture, people talk about we need to change the culture.

Well, culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization. Leadership is just a personal expression of values.

I think what Wells Fargo learned was that they had the values in place. They had named them. They had documented them.

They just weren’t actually putting value behind them. They weren’t promoting people. They weren’t making a good example of the people that were actually promoting the right values for their business.

I’m going to go back to my former company, SAP.

I don’t know who does the study, but there’s a study done every year. I read an article in Harvard Business Review a couple of months ago, Top 10 Empathetic Companies. SAP is number 10 on the list, and I’m really proud to see them make that kind of recognition.

Their CEO, a guy named Bill McDermott, was really instrumental in my career and essentially almost personally mentored and created an opportunity for me to do what I was able to do at SAP.

He had a life-changing experience. He had an accident about a year, maybe a year and a half ago.

He came back transformed from that experience and decided that it wasn’t just about making the numbers.

This is a hard-charging sales guy. Really super successful individual. One of the most charismatic leaders I’ve ever met.

He was really good at motivating SAP to hit the number, hit the number.

He came back, I think, really transformed as the first American CEO of this German company.

There’s an article I think out on Forbes, or Fast Company, about this journey that he’s taken, and he’s making empathy a valued, rewarded, recognized value inside the organization.

They’re starting to see they’ve turned the ship.

They’ve changed their culture, not because they tried to change their culture. They’ve changed their culture because they focused on putting a value behind this very touchy-feely, hippy-dippy sort of emotion called empathy.

I think it’s a great example.

You can see it in their advertising. They don’t talk about their latest product. They talk about how they help their customers run better.

Their whole tagline is a customer focus, so even when they do advertising, it’s at least customer-focused messaging.

You can see it was the reason I was able to implement the content marketing program I did, and the reason why I think they’re a leader in the technology marketing space for sure.

Brian Carroll: Well, and for our listeners, I’ll put a link to this article that Michael mentioned so you can check it out.

I agree, and I’ve also read stories about how Bill McDermott is using empathy to build more powerful teams.

I think what you brought up as the example is it’s hard for us to be empathetic outside unless we first have that transformation inside, in how we relate to others, how we relate to our teams.

It really, from what I’ve seen, does take leadership to do this. Even self-leadership.

What advice do you have for those who want to sell the idea of empathy to leaders or to others inside their company?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, it’s a great question.

It’s specifically the topic that I’m looking to address in a lot of my outreach and content, and keynote speeches this year.

It’s essentially this notion of what I call champion leadership.

It’s easy if you’re Bill McDermott. You’re the CEO. You can decree that empathy is now important.

But what do you do if you’re like most of us? You’re down the pole a little bit and you’re looking up, and maybe you don’t feel that it’s valued across your organization.

I think the best way to do this, it’s something I’ve learned in the course of my career, is you need to be empathetic by putting that recognition on others inside your organization that are pushing these ideas.

What do I mean by that?

If you see someone who is fighting to create a customer-focused piece of content versus a self-promotional ad, support that person.

We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.

If you’re not getting support from the top, the concept I’d like to encourage people to think about is we’re all leaders, but do we champion other people’s great ideas?

It starts with, I think, just being again, almost self-sacrificing to begin with, which can be just as hard in a hard-charging corporate culture as empathy can be.

I think just starting with that concept of who can you help inside your organization to promote the great customer-focused ideas, the empathetic ideas that they have?

Brian Carroll: That’s really great advice.

It is also challenging too because I find in my own experience that it’s easy in a split second to switch from thinking of others to thinking of myself. That’s just a continual thing.

As you’re talking about it, it really is setting that intention to value others, to value their ideas. Again, the whole spirit is helping.

This has been a really great interview. I’ve come away with some great insights from you, Michael. Thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you, and to get exposed to more of your thinking?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. I appreciate that.

MarketingInsiderGroup.com is my website, which I’ve kind of modeled after this whole empathetic approach. Instead of really pushing products and services, it’s essentially more of a blog where I’m sharing content that I think is helpful, with a little bit of an explanation of what we do.

You can also follow me on Twitter @BrennerMichael or connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m happy to connect with the audience there as well.

Brian Carroll: Awesome.

Again, for our listeners, I’ll have links to all these resources.

Michael, thank you again. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

Michael Brenner: Yeah, thanks Brian. I think it’s an important topic. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about it.