The Empathy Gap in B2B Content
I was at a B2B marketing conference last year and the keynote speaker said the word "customer-centric" fourteen times in thirty minutes. I counted, because the speech itself was not customer-centric enough to hold my attention, which is the kind of irony that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.
After the talk, I wandered the expo floor and collected brochures from about twenty companies. That night, in my hotel room, eating room service pad thai and questioning my career choices, I read all of them. Every single one said some version of "we put our customers first." Not one of them made me feel like they actually understood what it's like to be a customer.
That's the empathy gap. It's the distance between claiming to understand your customer and actually understanding them. In B2B marketing, that gap is the size of the Grand Canyon, and most of us are standing on one side shouting "we get you!" across a chasm of jargon and product features.
The jargon wall
Here's a sentence from a real B2B website. I'm not going to name the company because I'm not cruel, but I promise you this is real: "Our end-to-end, AI-powered platform leverages best-in-class integrations to deliver holistic, data-driven insights that empower cross-functional teams to optimize workflows and drive measurable outcomes."
I've read that sentence five times and I still don't know what they do. I have a master's degree. I've been in this industry for fifteen years. I don't know what they do.
You know what a customer feels when they read that sentence? Nothing. They feel absolutely nothing. Because that sentence wasn't written for them. It was written for the VP who approved the copy. It was written to sound impressive, not to communicate.
Empathy in B2B content means saying "we understand your problem" in words that actually demonstrate understanding, not in words that demonstrate you own a thesaurus.
Why B2B gets this wrong
I have a theory. It's not scientific. It's based on fifteen years of observation and a lot of conversations at hotel bars after conferences.
B2B marketers forget that B2B buyers are also just... people. Regular humans who eat lunch, worry about their kids, complain about meetings, and scroll Instagram when they should be reviewing vendor proposals. The "B" doesn't stand for "bot." These are humans making decisions, and humans make decisions based on feelings as much as features.
But somewhere along the way, B2B marketing decided it had to sound "professional," and "professional" got translated as "emotionless, complicated, and vaguely intimidating." Like a law firm's voicemail greeting.
Bernadette Jiwa writes about how the best marketing is about the customer's story, not the company's story. But B2B content is almost always the company's story. Our platform. Our features. Our integrations. Our ROI. Even when it says "your," it means "ours."
What empathy actually looks like in content
I worked with a cybersecurity company a few years back. Their content was the usual: threat landscapes, attack vectors, compliance frameworks. All accurate. All technically correct. All completely lifeless.
I interviewed their customers. And you know what I heard? Fear. Not about "threat landscapes." About getting that 2 AM phone call. About being the person who has to explain the breach to the board. About the gut-dropping moment when you realize the alert you dismissed last Tuesday was actually the real thing.
That's what we wrote about. Not "our platform reduces mean time to detection." We wrote about the 2 AM phone call. About the fear. About what it feels like to be responsible for security and know you can't catch everything.
Traffic went up. But more importantly, the sales team told us something wonderful: prospects started saying "it's like you read my mind" in discovery calls. That's empathy. That's the gap closing.
Three questions that close the gap
When I start working on B2B content, I ask three questions before I write a single word:
1. What is this person afraid of? Not what business challenge do they face. What are they actually worried about? Getting fired? Looking stupid in a meeting? Falling behind their peers? Being irrelevant? The fear is where the empathy lives.
2. What does their Tuesday look like? Not their buyer journey. Their actual Tuesday. Meetings, emails, a sandwich at their desk, a to-do list they'll never finish. When you understand the daily texture of someone's life, you write differently. You write content that fits into their real world, not the fictional funnel world we've created.
3. What would they tell their spouse about this problem? Not what would they put in a business case. What would they say at 7 PM with a glass of wine? "I spent all day in meetings about the thing that's supposed to save us time and it's actually making everything take longer." That's the real language. That's the voice your content should match.
B2B buyers don't want to be talked to like buyers. They want to be talked to like people. This is not a radical concept, and yet here we are.
The cooking parallel
You knew this was coming. Of course there's a cooking analogy.
Empathy in content is like seasoning. You can make a technically correct dish with zero seasoning and it will be nutritionally sound and structurally complete and nobody will want to eat it. The seasoning is what makes people actually want to be there.
B2B content without empathy is unseasoned food. It's got all the right ingredients, presented correctly, and it tastes like nothing.
Season your content. Understand who's eating it. Know what they've had a long day doing and what would taste good to them right now. Write for the human on the other side of the screen who is tired and busy and has seen fourteen "leverage" sentences today and is begging, silently, for someone to just talk to them like a person.
Be that someone.