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How to Enhance Your Creative Empathy

Better understand different types of audience and build empathy with your customers through your creative work.

394 enrolled on this course

A couple of cartoon characters are talking to each other. Another is sat working on a laptop with a lightbulb icon overhead.
  • Duration

    3 weeks
  • Weekly study

    3 hours

Connect with your target customers and get better results with your work

At the heart of all brilliant, commercial creativity lies people. An end audience who you, as a creative, need to connect with in order for your brilliant ideas to land and get results.

This course dives into the head and hearts of humans and will help you understand and build empathy with them.

Learn how to research and understand an audience

It’s vital, especially in creative industries, to understand your customers. With creative work usually needing a lot of time and money to produce and use, missteps can be costly.

On this course, you’ll learn the essentials to getting into the minds of an audience and how to obtain and use quantitative and qualitative data to better understand your audience.

Develop the tools to build accurate customer journey maps

Once you know more about your audience, you’ll look at the tools you can use to step into the shoes of your customer. You’ll then learn about customer journey maps and how to apply these tools to build maps of your users’ journeys. This will ultimately help you to develop audience personas that align to your existing customer base.

Make an emotional connection with customers through your work

Emotions play a big part in both customer decisions and advertising. To be successful with your product, especially in marketing it, you need to create an emotional connection with your audience.

You’ll look at how to create campaigns that utilise emotions and make compelling solutions. By the end of this course, you’ll be better equipped to build empathy with your end audience, user, or customer, and produce exceptional creative work that makes an emotional connection.

What topics will you cover?

  • Researching and understanding an audience
  • Qualitative and quantitative data
  • Customer journey maps and personas
  • Building empathy with your end audience, user or customer
  • Making an emotional connection with an audience through creative work

Learning on this course

On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

  • Explore different methods of researching your audience
  • Identify who your audience is and how to understand them
  • Develop empathy maps, personas and customer journey maps
  • Interpret your audience research to uncover key insights
  • Explore bias and how to use it
  • Reflect on creating an emotional connection with your audience

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone in a creative industry looking to empathise and connect more with their audience.

You may be interested if you’re a creative, strategist, marketer, or communicator wanting to better understand your audience.

If you want to further your knowledge, you may also be interested in these courses, from the same provider, that share the same subject and overall learning outcomes:

Who will you learn with?

Innovation leader, educator and investor. Unlocks creativity, courage and customer centricy for value creation. Expert in digital product, brand and leadership development.

CSO @The Gate London. D&AD Masterclass leader.

Senior Learning & Development Manager at D&AD. I'm constantly inspired by brilliant creative ideas, and how to help others bring them to life.

Who developed the course?

D&AD

Since 1962, D&AD has been inspiring a community of creative thinkers by celebrating and stimulating the finest in design and advertising.

Learning on FutureLearn

Your learning, your rules

  • Courses are split into weeks, activities, and steps to help you keep track of your learning
  • Learn through a mix of bite-sized videos, long- and short-form articles, audio, and practical activities
  • Stay motivated by using the Progress page to keep track of your step completion and assessment scores

Join a global classroom

  • Experience the power of social learning, and get inspired by an international network of learners
  • Share ideas with your peers and course educators on every step of the course
  • Join the conversation by reading, @ing, liking, bookmarking, and replying to comments from others

Map your progress

  • As you work through the course, use notifications and the Progress page to guide your learning
  • Whenever you’re ready, mark each step as complete, you’re in control
  • Complete 90% of course steps and all of the assessments to earn your certificate

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