#262: Forced Empathy, Postman Effect & Tilting at Windmills
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Getting Personal
I. Forced Empathy
If you’re ever held hostage, remember Forced Empathy. This concept by negotiation expert Chris Voss is sort of the counterpart to his concept of Tactical Empathy.
Forget repeating your hostage taker’s name to build rapport and create a personal connection. Chris says that actually makes people feel manipulated and defensive. Instead, do the opposite: force them to say your name. Volunteering your name and some heart-warming personal info triggers Forced Empathy. It humanises you, making it harder for the other side to treat you as a faceless non-person.
Forced Empathy works beyond kidnapping scenarios, too. It’s closely related to the Chris Discount and works well from any inferior position. Negotiating with a hyper-aggressive business partner, for example, or calling a customer service hotline.
II. Postman Effect
Your attitude to Royal Mail as a brand was almost entirely predicated (not exclusively) on whether you liked your postman. And my argument is that in brand terms, the personal actually carries more weight.
—Rory Sutherland, The Postman Effect
How good is your brand? As marketing heavyweight Rory Sutherland explains, in the case of the United Kingdom’s postal service, the answer was hiding in plain sight. They couldn’t quite figure out what their brand was about or how people viewed it. Until they discovered the large effect people’s attitudes towards their postman had. Something that appeared “random and polarised“ at first suddenly became explainable.
If you adore your postman (like Rory does), you likely have a positive view of your postal service as a whole. But it also means that millions of dollars in marketing budgets are wasted on you if your postie slingshots your letters into your face before kicking your dog in the crown jewels.
III. Tilting at Windmills
Don Quixote, the protagonist of the Spanish novel of the same name, mistook windmills for long-armed giants. So he attacked (tilted at) them on horseback. As writer Gurwinder explains, we’re not so different from 17th-century fictional Spanish novel characters. Today, we’re Tilting at Windmills by fighting imaginary enemies online:
An online stranger doesn’t know you; all they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack “you”, they’re really just attacking their own imagination, and there is no need to take it personally.
—Gurwinder Bhogal
🐘
Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com