I hope the next global trend is empathymaxxing.
Yes, I know. It sounds like something you’d discover at 2am after falling down a TikTok rabbit hole. But hear me out.
Imagine if being kind became the new flex. What if listening properly or making someone’s day a little better became something we encouraged in each other, even with a bit of showing off?
Perhaps a little peer pressure isn’t always bad. If someone shares an act of kindness and it inspires thousands of others to do the same, maybe the outcome matters more than the performance. There is a line, of course. Filming yourself helping someone vulnerable is very different from sharing a moment that makes people smile. That’s where empathymaxxing gets interesting: can something be both genuine and performative?
The internet is obsessed with optimisation: looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, productivitymaxxing. It has also shown that niche ideas, from the manosphere to tradwife content, can go mainstream. So why not empathy?
The idea behind it is rather lovely: deliberately trying to become better at understanding other people. Listening before responding, being slower to judge. None of this is revolutionary. Our grandparents managed it without a hashtag. But perhaps giving it a name makes us think about it differently.
What if kindness became the new status symbol?
We’ve become very good at displaying what we buy, where we travel and how busy we are, effectively running our own tiny PR agencies.
But what if remembering someone’s name was impressive? What if noticing that someone is struggling was a status symbol? What if admitting you were wrong made you look confident rather than weak?
I’m not suggesting medals for letting someone merge in traffic. Though some might deserve one.
Why should PR and marketing care?
Marketing has become extraordinarily good at identifying people. But knowing who someone is doesn’t mean understanding them. That’s the challenge empathymaxxing presents.
Instead of asking, “What do we want to tell our audience?”, the better question might be, “What does our audience actually need from us?”
At The Ripple Effect, that audience-first thinking is central to how we work: listening to the conversations around a brand and looking beyond the obvious for the stories that matter. It means accepting that an audience might read our carefully crafted message differently from how we intended. That gap is often where the interesting stuff starts.
There’s a media lesson here, too. Publications such as Positive News have shown there is an audience, and PR value, in stories that leave people a little more hopeful. The best journalists don’t just chase the clickable headline; they try to understand the people behind the story. Empathy doesn’t mean losing rigour. It means asking better questions and resisting easy assumptions.
Communication isn’t really about what we say. It’s about what happens when someone else receives it. A beautifully written campaign about caring is one thing. A company that actually listens, responds to criticism and changes when it gets something wrong is another. People can usually tell the difference.
And here’s the problem
The moment empathy becomes fashionable, we risk turning it into another performance. It’s easy to post about kindness; harder to be kind when nobody is watching. It’s easy to say we value different perspectives; harder when one makes us want to throw our phone across the room.
Brands face the same problem. If empathymaxxing becomes another buzzword, we’ve missed the point. The goal isn’t to look empathetic but to actually understand people better.
That doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone. You can understand someone’s point of view and still think they’re completely wrong. It simply means not treating everyone we disagree with as an idiot or a villain, even on LinkedIn.
So, could empathymaxxing become a global trend?
Maybe the word will disappear. That’s how micro-trends work. But the idea is worth holding onto: a world where caring is aspirational, listening is impressive, curiosity is attractive and changing your mind means you’ve learned something. Not because we need another thing to optimise, but because we could all spend a little less time trying to impress everyone else and a little more time paying attention to them.
For those of us in PR and marketing, that’s the bigger lesson. What if the future of effective communication isn’t just saying the right thing to the right person at the right time, but genuinely understanding the person we’re trying to reach?
Now that would be a trend worth maxxing.
