🧑‍🔬 How To Make Your Customers Empathetic

Brand: World Vision UK

Psychology Concept: Identifiable Victim Effect

Days Running: 38 Days
(This gives an indication of how it’s performing)

🧪 The Identifiable Victim Effect

The Identifiable Victim Effect refers to our tendency to feel more empathy and a stronger impulse to help when we see a specific person in distress, rather than a large, undefined group facing the same situation.

🤳 How World Vision UK Uses The Identifiable Victim Effect

World Vision UK uses the Identifiable Victim Effect by clearly identifying a specific person in their ad and briefly telling the story of Esther.

Doing so makes the ad much more effective than just broadly speaking about child abuse.

🧠 How You Can Use The Identifiable Victim Effect

The key to using the Identifiable Victim Effect is to focus your ad on one customer’s (or potential customer’s) experience. This can be either showing life with your product (and how it’s helped them) or life without (and why they need it).

And although the Identifiable Victim is probably most relevant to charities and non-profits, it can actually be used across a variety of industries.

While the bias is specifically about feeling empathy when a person is in distress, we also tend to feel more connection and empathy when we can identify with a person in general (rather than a brand).

For example, a politician can use their constituents stories to help people identify with their message:

Or, more commonly, a brand can identify a specific person’s story in their testimonials (rather than a more broad “used by thousands of customers” message):

We’re able to better connect with brands when their ads are about a specific person and their story.

We crave connection and the best way to feel it is through real-life experiences.

Both of these ads, along with the ad from UK World Vision, do a great job of highlighting specific experiences.