This undefined emotion might unlock your marketing potential
Easy Read
Sometimes, when my mental pen is low on ink, I’ll take myself off to a coffee shop to refill it.
I’ll order a drink and sit watching people come through, chat with the barista, leave and repeat.
Most of the time I’m looking for nuggets to pick up on, human behaviours, stories I can weave into my writing.
Sometimes though I’ll have a moment of awareness.
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I’ll see a grandad laughing with his grandkids, a cyclist in for a caffeine hit, a lady walking the dog and think …
… all these people have their own set of individual wants, needs, desires, fears, life pursuits, favourite coffee’s, behaviours, fantasy’s etc. I’ll realise that we’re all the same. We’re all bound tightly by this mortal coil.
This awareness … this emotion, is called Sonder. It’s a Neologism. An undefined feeling.
John Koenig coined the name in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and his definition is something that, if you’re in marketing, might unlock your potential to connect and empathise with your audience much, much deeper.
Koenig’s definition:
noun. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
How profoundly eye-opening.
I’m sure you’ve felt this before? About the people you pass in the hall, the ones you see at traffic lights, those standing in line at the post office.
When you do, lean into it. Let it enter you like the holy spirit.
It’s the key to empathy. The key to truly understanding your audience. As writers and marketers we have a much better chance dancing with others instead of insisting they get with our program.
Allowing yourself to feel Sonder can make the Waltz that bit easier.
Don’t let those strange and unusual people saunter by unnoticed. Watch them. Wonder about them. And use what you come up with to power your writing.
By Ryan Heaney.
