Cryptocurrency business leaders sometimes fail to leverage empathy with their users and customers. Many of the top industry players also engage in infighting, causing them to miss amazing opportunities to market their achievements to the world.
It's upsetting to witness the squabbling and heartache. Too much talent gets squandered in the process. In turn, founders and creators wonder why their business models suffer or their clients sell their tokens only to exit the ecosystem.
Arguably, when the crypto markets crashed in 2017, it was a result of infighting within the space. Users and customers witnessed the infighting and realized they didn't care to deal with the egotism of the community. So they packed their bags and sold their crypto.
For those who witnessed the crisis, the current analysis makes sense. Programmers, techies, and the digerati aren't always the most socially adept people. Some even say this group suffers from autism, in the sense they cannot pick up on social cues or understand emotions.
Emotional Intelligence in Business
If the community lacks emotional intelligence, it damages their ability to connect with peers. It also hurts their business. Their customers and clients expect to be treated well. They don't want to be mistreated; and if they are treated poorly, they take their business needs elsewhere.
However, many crypto people forget about this perspective. They don't focus on emotional intelligence, which defined means, "the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically."
Instead of trying to empathetically connect with their customers, they merely create a product and hope for the best. They believe they can build a widget via a feat of magnificent engineering, and hope it sells purely on its technical merit.
Times are changing, though. People can always find attractive products with similarly attractive features. Almost nothing created with code is so revolutionary that people must have and use it. That might have been true at the birth of the internet; but it no longer holds as an absolute truth, even while new crypto inventions crop up with exciting regularity. People now have options. They have an entire market of software as a service (SaaS) at their fingertips.
So how do companies come to understand their customers better and learn to connect in order to sell their product?
The Empathy Map: Learning about the Customer
Technology and crypto businesses, above all, should develop empathy maps to learn about their customers. They must attempt to stand in the shoes of the people they are trying to serve. It's through the process of understanding their clients that they learn how to empathize and build relationships.
An empathy map is a collaborative tool that helps businesses connect with their customers. Prior to launching a product, the empathy map is akin to a form of market verification. It allows the company to determine what their customers want and desire. It provides data on who the customer is and why a product may peek their interest.
The empathy map consists of 4 quadrants and two sections for pain and gain. Each quadrant represents an aspect of the customer's world:
- What is the customer hearing?
- What is the customer saying and doing?
- What is the customer seeing ?
- What is the customer thinking and feeling?
Leveraging the map will not only help the business learn more about their customers, but it will also compel business stakeholders to work together more efficiently and with greater empathy. In a way, the empathy map helps teach businessmen and engineers the quality of connection.
Empathy Marketing
At the end of the day, crypto businesses don't just need to be creating and selling products, like a factory churning out a multitude of cogs. They need to be developing and building relationships. They need to be going to great lengths to understand their clientele and those who they serve. If they miss the opportunity to connect with their customers in this manner, they'll forfeit their business.
Today, marketing is about empathy. It's about building human connections. It's not just about creating the most beautiful widget and slamming it down on the table. What people want are partnerships, intimacy, and depth. In this sense, the crypto community has missed an opportunity. What Pathfinders hopes to do is reinvigorate the community with a sense of empathy, and with a drive to connect with users on a fundamental level. It's through this conduit of connection that a new era of digital business will arise and push crypto into the limelight.