I have a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, and they couldn’t be more different. One likes to sleep in, the other wakes with the sun. One is cautious and careful, the other a born thrill seeker. And while I don’t always enjoy trying to keep two humans with completely different preferences happy at the same time, I don’t hesitate when making decisions for them—because I know them like the back of my hand. I have been listening to them and studying them for years. So all day long, I make choices on their behalf quickly, instinctively and with confidence.
Now imagine what that kind of informed decisiveness could look like for your brand. Where you know your customers so deeply—what they want, need and care about—you don’t have to second guess, stress or stall. Instead, you act with clarity and confidence. What if you had deeper customer understanding?
Customer closeness begins where data ends: How listening builds true audience understanding
You don’t know someone deeply by knowing their age or where they were born or even what they had for breakfast. You know them by listening to what they think and feel, what makes them happy, sad or angry, what inspires them to action, what their hopes and dreams are. Deeper human insights like these cannot be found in data alone. They come in stories, revealed through listening. Customer closeness happens when you’ve built an organization that’s customer-obsessed—one that wants to hear those stories and know its customers as people, beyond how they interact with your brand.
Six principles of empathy-led customer research
Companies that have built a culture of customer closeness follow six key principles in their approach:
- Telling stories with and about their customers, recognizing that storytelling is central to human connection—long before language or writing existed. Data supports or inspires stories but is not a story itself.
- Meeting customers where they are—physically, emotionally and mentally—engaging them on topics that matter in ways that are accessible, comfortable and easy.
- Leading with genuine curiosity and vulnerability, knowing that true customer empathy requires openness and a willingness to learn.
- Involving leadership, because cultural change often starts at the top, with leaders committed to embedding customers throughout the organization.
- Amplifying often unheard voices by creating spaces and opportunities for those perspectives to be shared.
- Recognizing that people evolve and so should your understanding of them. Building customer closeness is an ongoing process and must become part of the organization’s culture and DNA.
Customer closeness happens when you’ve built an organization that’s customer-obsessed—one that wants to hear those stories and know its customers as people, beyond how they interact with your brand.
Customer understanding in action: Driving cultural relevance by connecting brands and consumers
Over the past few years, C Space has partnered with McDonald’s to create UpClose, a branded content series dedicated to bringing McDonald’s closer to its customers. Through UpClose, we share real customer stories to move the needle from insight to intuition.
This began when McDonald’s wanted its marketing team to better understand Gen Z. As our client put it, “Generational research is hard. There is plenty of data and analysis on behavior, preferences, priorities, values, lifestyles and challenges—even deeper dives into profiles and personas. At McDonald’s we wanted to create an intrinsic, holistic and authentic connection with 18-24-year-olds across our marketing team to fuel our strategy drive cultural relevance.”
McDonald’s knew that gathering insights on a new generation isn’t a moment-in-time exercise, but an ongoing process of learning about their shifting needs and perspectives in deeper, more personal ways. Together we created UpClose: Gen Z, an 18-episode, virtually-shot, professionally-produced reality TV series following six Gen Z consumers. Our goal was not just to inform, but to entertain and engage a diverse group of McDonald’s employees in getting to know their new customers.
A year later, the need for deep, personal understanding became even more urgent. McDonald’s leaders met to discuss decreasing sales amid inflationary trends. They had seen all of the data—but numbers don’t create change. Stories do. To effectively address these issues, they needed a stronger understanding of lower-income households, grounded in empathy for their challenges.
C Space produced a UpClose: Currency of Courage, a mini documentary that brought the challenges of living on a lower income to life. Senior leaders sat together in person for 20 minutes to watch and reflect on the lives of four individuals, some living mere miles from McDonald’s headquarters. They came with open minds and vulnerability, reflecting on the similarities and differences between these people and their own lives. By documenting the real lives of lower-income consumers in this unfiltered way, we turned insights into something unforgettable: human connection. The video didn’t just inform customer strategy—it transformed the way McDonald’s leaders saw their customers, their brand and their purpose.
Data can tell you what people do. Stories reveal who they are. To design with confidence, move fast and stay relevant, don’t just analyze your customers. Know them. Because the most powerful business decisions aren’t made from dashboards, they’re made from intuition built on empathy-led insights. And that starts with showing up, listening closely and being human.
Have a range of insight challenges and need deeper relationships with your customers to solve them? Let’s build an insight community together.
