I spend everyday walking in people’s shoes

Somewhere in a city square, there's a giant shoebox.

Not a model. Not a sculpture. An actual life-size shoebox, made of cardboard, standing in a public space where it has absolutely no business being. It might be next to the Thames. It might be in a square in Melbourne, Aarhus, or São Paulo. Since 2015, the Empathy Museum, created by artist Clare Patey and philosopher Roman Krznaric, has appeared in more than 35 locations around the world. Always a little unannounced. Always strange.

You walk in. Inside, there are rows of shoes. Real shoes, belonging to real strangers. You pick a pair, put them on, and clip on a set of headphones. Then you walk. And while you walk, you listen to the story of the person whose shoes you're wearing. It could be an immigrant. A healthcare worker. An athlete. For ten minutes, you live inside someone else's world. You hear what their morning sounds like. What keeps them up at night.

Then you take the shoes off, and you go back to being you. But something has shifted.

I first came across the Empathy Museum through Dr Paul Marsden, a chartered consumer psychologist. He described it so vividly I could picture myself standing in the shoebox, trying on a stranger's trainers, hearing a voice I'd never normally hear. It stuck with me because I realised I get to do a version of this every single day.

The work we do at Ada is profiling perspectives. Not demographics, not firmographics, not the things you'd find in a CRM. What we're actually building is an understanding of how people think. What pressures shape their decisions. What their industry is doing to their priorities right now. How the culture they work in affects what they respond to, what they resist, and what makes them feel understood. We do this across industries, geographies, companies, job roles, right down to the individual person. And every time I look at the output, I get that same feeling Paul described in the shoebox: a flash of someone else's reality, and my response isn't "interesting data point." It's "oh. Obviously."

I've only got my lived experience. I grew up in the south of England, I've travelled a bit, I've worked in four or five different industries. The point is that while I’ve got a good broad knowledge and understanding, I only know what I know.

I certainly don't truly know what a woman running a financial services team in Madrid feels when she's evaluating a new vendor. I don't know what someone in procurement at a German automotive company feels under the specific pressures of that industry, in that culture, at this particular moment. Those perspectives don't live in my head. Left to my own devices, I'd see every brief through the same lens. And I'd miss things. Not small things. Fundamental things about why a person would say yes, or say no, or say nothing at all.

That's what changed for me when we built Ada around behavioural psychology and AI together. Not that I stopped needing empathy (I'll come back to that). But that I could step into perspectives I could never access on my own. There is a massive opportunity for using AI as an empathy machine, where it helps you see the world from somebody else's perspective. Not artificial empathy. Assisted perspective.

Here's the uncomfortable part.

There's a stat I haven't stopped thinking about: only around a third of marketers are actually proficient at seeing the world from someone else's perspective. A third. Which means two-thirds of the people creating campaigns, writing emails, and building propositions are doing it from the inside out. Looking at their own product, their own message, their own priorities, and projecting those onto an audience they haven't truly tried to understand.

You can feel it in B2B. You feel it in every white paper that opens with a paragraph about the company rather than the reader's problem. You feel it in every ad that leads with a feature list instead of a question. It's the megaphone approach: we look at our own product and we try to force it onto people. We think our product is so fantastic that we go out there with a megaphone and just shout louder and louder.

The maths makes it worse. I was looking at a campaign recently where a brand had a single white paper relevant across seven industries, five job titles, and twenty-four European markets. That's 840 possible combinations of reader. They'd produced three versions. Three. Less than half a percent of their addressable audience received something that felt like it was written for them. The other 99.6% got something generic. And generic, in a world where people can feel whether you've made an effort, is just another way of saying "we didn't think about you specifically."

There's a piece of research from Bain that captures this. 80% of vendors believe their product delivers a best-in-class experience. Only 8% of their customers agree. That gap isn't a messaging problem. It's an empathy problem. It's the distance between how you see your offer and how the person on the other side actually experiences it.

There's a framework from psychology that I keep coming back to: trust sits on two dimensions, care and competence. Can you help me, and do you actually want to help me? Most B2B marketing over-indexes on competence. Here's what our product does. Here's the spec. Here's the integration roadmap. All competence. But if the reader doesn't sense that you understand their situation, that you've taken the time to see things from where they're standing, they don't trust you. Not because they doubt the features. Because they sense you haven't bothered to understand why those features would matter to them, in their context. Relevance is proof of care. And without care, competence is just noise.

When you do the work of actually seeing through someone else's eyes, everything downstream changes.

It's not just that the copy gets better (though it does). You start making different decisions entirely. You choose different channels because you understand where your audience actually pays attention. You lead with different messages because you know what's keeping them up at night, not what you think should keep them up at night. You stop building content around your product and start building it around their situation.

And when you can do that across layers (the industry someone works in, the country they operate from, the company culture they live inside, the specific job they do, the individual person reading the content), you stop producing one generic asset and hoping for the best. You produce genuinely different versions for genuinely different people. Not name-swaps. Not a logo change and a mail-merge. Content that's shaped by real insight into how each reader thinks, written natively in their language with their idiom and their structure, not translated from yours.

The shift is subtle but total. You go from "here's why our product is great" to "here's what your Tuesday actually looks like, and here's the specific thing we can take off your plate." That's a different conversation. And people respond to it, because for the first time, they feel seen.

Here's the paradox: AI really doesn't care. It can't care. It's an algorithm. It has no empathy. But the weird thing is that it can help you care more. The great gift we have as marketers is that we’ve got this technology that isn't empathic, but it can actually help humans be more empathic.

And if there's one thing we need to be as marketers, it's more human. Ironically, AI might be the key.

I explored a lot of these ideas in more depth with Dr Paul Marsden on the Steep and Think podcast. We got into the psychology of trust, empathy, what AI changes about how we connect with other people, and why Paul thinks heartbeats are the ultimate currency. Listen to the full episode here.

This blog was written by Ada Create Co-Founder Jonathon Bates.