Empathy Lab wants marketing to think

The revealing detail in Empathy Lab’s work for Joe & The Juice is a reorder button. A customer wants the same thing again. The app makes that easier. For a business selling sandwiches and juice, remembering yesterday’s order can matter more than inventing tomorrow’s advertising language.

In the agency’s account, three ordering changes were designed, launched and A/B tested in 30 days. They included easier reordering and a map for finding stores. The team paired these immediate improvements with a larger rethink of loyalty and fulfillment. The appeal is the sequence: make something useful, examine what happens, then use the evidence to support a bigger investment.

This is a useful entrance to a company that calls itself an AI-native agency. The label can sound abstract. Ordering lunch is wonderfully concrete.

A new name with a long memory

EPAM launched the current Empathy Lab brand in Europe on February 25, 2025. The announcement included rebranding Emakina in Belgium and the Netherlands. Emakina had joined EPAM in 2021, bringing advertising, consulting, content and digital-platform capabilities into a company known for engineering.

There is a wrinkle in the name. EPAM had already acquired a US digital strategy firm called Empathy Lab in December 2012. That business was founded in 2005. So the 2025 date describes the present agency brand’s launch, while the people and capabilities have a longer history. Treating it as a startup appearing from nowhere misses the interesting part.

The operating proposition is straightforward: put strategists, designers, data specialists and engineers close enough to solve the same problem. The current service menu groups that work into marketing, commerce and loyalty. A brand can commission the thinking about an experience and the systems needed to deliver it.

That places Empathy Lab between a creative agency and a technology consultancy. Its distinction rests on access to EPAM’s engineering capabilities alongside agency talent. Buyers should judge that combination by what it produces: a working checkout, a connected rewards experience, or a decision made with better evidence.

The partner list makes the implementation role tangible. It includes Adobe, AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce and Shopify, alongside commerce and loyalty specialists. This is work inside the enterprise software ecosystem. The buyer already has systems, and the useful question is how well a proposed experience can work across them.

The data had to meet first

At Mars, the problem was connecting media investment with sales in physical stores. The business already used sophisticated measurement, but retailer and media data remained fragmented. Empathy Lab helped bring those datasets into a BigQuery repository using Google Cloud Cortex connectors and models.

Then came geographically targeted tests with matched comparison groups. In one test, the agency reports, an audience segment delivered five times the impact of others. The scope matters: this was a finding within a test, rather than a promise that every campaign becomes five times better.

The broader lesson is almost stubbornly unglamorous. Before intelligence can inform a commercial decision, the relevant information has to meet somewhere. Better connections between systems can be the precondition for the impressive demonstration everyone wants to see.

A platform people actually use

Reckitt supplies another version of that coordination problem. Its published account says isolated AI use cases were insufficient for a strategic shift. Empathy Lab helped build the Genesis Marketing Platform, connecting tools across marketing workflows, including strategy assistance, planning and performance monitoring.

The relevant change is organizational as much as technical. A collection of tools becomes more useful when people can move work between them. Here the customer is an enterprise marketing organization, with the complexity that implies: different teams, markets, approvals and expectations.

Empathy Lab sells consulting, creative services and implementation around such problems. A client-built platform is part of an engagement; it should not be mistaken for a consumer app anyone can download. A sensible buying brief would specify the workflow, the people using it and the result the business intends to measure.

The useful limits of make-believe

Some of the work is deliberately playful. With IAMS, Adam&EveDDB and Google, Empathy Lab built a mobile web experience that turns a questionnaire into a personalized, 90-second pet-adoption movie trailer. The agency reports more than 8,500 videos created in less than two months.

The technical choices explain the work better than the novelty does. Google’s Veo 2 supplied video generation, ElevenLabs supplied voiceover, and Gemini-powered filters supported moderation. Mixing pre-generated material with real-time elements helped manage waiting times and unwanted outputs. The experience gave users room to participate inside a designed set of constraints.

With Mars, Synthetic Audiences addresses a different need: exploring product ideas through simulated consumer personas. The published description presents this as a way to augment traditional research. That distinction is essential. A plausible simulated response can help formulate a question; actual people still determine whether an idea has a market.

“For years, we talked about personalization, but we forgot the person.”

Patrick van der Vliet, Empathy Lab

That gives a prospective client a practical distinction to consider. Simulated audiences can widen the range of ideas a team explores before commissioning deeper research. They do not turn every hypothesis into evidence. The responsible handoff is from a promising direction to a test that can challenge it.

Start where the customer gets stuck

In February 2026, EPAM expanded Empathy Lab into North America, appointing Ben Hall to lead growth in the US and Canada. The move extended a proposition aimed at marketing leaders who must coordinate technology, customer experience and commercial outcomes.

The choice of partner follows the problem. A contained campaign may call for a creative specialist. A customer experience spanning payments, fulfillment and rewards needs implementation skills as well. Empathy Lab’s pitch makes the most sense where the brief crosses those boundaries and someone must take responsibility for connecting them.

The copyable idea is modest enough to try. Pick one task. Follow the customer through it. Identify which team and system controls each step. Test a change with a defined measure. Build the broader case from what happens, as the ordering project did.

That approach depends on access to usable data and people willing to coordinate decisions. More generated content cannot repair a disconnected checkout. Synthetic interviews cannot settle every question about real customers. Empathy Lab’s interesting bet is that creative judgment and engineering can work through those constraints together. The reorder button is a good place to start looking.