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It has been shown that empathy has a direct impact on everything from customer loyalty to innovation to profit. Here are five of the proven benefits.

1. Empathy inspires innovation: If you understand your customers, you can keep up with changing needs and desires. Google's Aristotle project found that their most innovative and profitable ideas came from teams that led with soft skills like empathy.

2. Empathy aligns you according to customer wishes and needs: The better you are in tune with your customers, the faster you can deliver the most suitable products or services before your competitors prevail. To know what customers want, you have to see things from their perspective. When you create an ideal customer profile, you know what your life looks like. For example, Steve Jobs focused on understanding a customer so well that Apple's product designers knew what the customer wanted before doing it.

3. Empathy improves employee performance: Employees with more empathy and collaboration skills can often do faster and make progress than those with purely technical skills to succeed. The Google Oxygen project found that soft skills contributed to the individual success of team members.

4. Empathic brands – and jobs – address millennials and Gen Z: As specialists, they belong to different generations of the workforce and try to use different perspectives to solve difficult business challenges. You stay with employers who take on new perspectives and appreciate their perspectives. As consumers, they are loyal to companies and brands that care about something and make a difference.

5. Empathy promotes sales, growth and market performance: The best and most advanced companies have started to use compassionate business tactics that have improved their position in the market. Brighton Jones has adopted this philosophy and is now one of the leading providers in the wealth management industry.

ContriBranding Strategy Insider by: Maria Ross, excerpt from her book The Empathy Edge: Using the value of compassion as an engine for success (a playbook for brands, managers and teams)

The Blake project can help: Discover an empathic advantage in measuring brand value

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy that specializes in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and brand building

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