Does Empathy Improve Marketing Performance? The Role of Cognitive versus Emotional Empathy in High Autonomy Sales Environments

Increasingly companies empower salespeople with a high degree of autonomy in how they price and sell services. This practice is particularly prevalent in emerging economies, especially where companies such as Unilever attempt to reach remote rural markets through autonomous salespeople drawn from those communities. The performance of salespeople, however, varies greatly across individuals in these environments. Why do some salespeople in high autonomy environments perform better than others? The authors propose that a salesperson’s ability to see the world from a customer’s perspective (cognitive empathy) versus their ability to feel what a customer feels (emotional empathy) differentially influences pricing, volume, and service quality outcomes. The authors test their thesis on data from a high-autonomy salesforce in Bangladesh. To deal with the possibility of a potential omitted variable that simultaneously drives both cognitive empathy and sales performance, the authors use the ratio of the number of daughters relative to the number of children that salespeople have as an instrument for cognitive empathy. The results suggest that cognitive empathy increases salesperson prices, sales volume, and service quality outcomes, while emotional empathy increases sales volume but decreases prices and service quality outcomes.