123: Voting with your wallet, ruining marketing with purpose, feminist merch, and uncommon founder rules
Hi friends, it's been a minute, but I'm back.
(PS: Met Gaga while I was away. Amazing.)
PS: Two Boston marketing things happening NEXT WEEK you should know about:
Nov 13 - Massachusetts Marketing Mentors networking event hosted by Heidi Erdmann featuring a talk by growth marketer, Meredith Franks, evening.
Nov 15 - Brand messaging training and workshop hosted by Kim Donlan, CEO of Redswan5, 9:30am - 4:00pm. Only a couple of seats left for this.
In this edition of The World's Best Newsletter:
1. Should You Buy Into Fashion's Feminism Merch?
2. Winnie Sun Interview! Pandermonium, Authenticity, and Voting with Your Wallet
3. This Agency Founder's 3 Uncommon Rules
4. "Don't Let Purpose Ruin Our Industry" (preach!)
5. What Happened When a CMO Challenged an Analyst
6. Jessica Kao Gives Lessons on Life and Nurture Campaigns
7. Quote of the Week: Lauren Brown
1. Should You Buy Into Fashion's Feminism Merch?
I was interviewed by the intrepid Casey Bond for HuffPo in her piece, "Does Your Favorite Feminist Merchandise Actually Support Women's Causes?"
By commercializing feminism and diminishing it to cutesy slogans and platitudes, the inherently political nature of the movement is ignored. “We threaten to reduce this very real fight for equality down to a hashtag, or down to an act of swiping a credit card, when the real work is a lot more difficult and a lot more serious,” Martell said.
2. Winnie Sun Interview! Pandermonium, Authenticity, and Voting with Your Wallet
This week I chatted with a fellow Adobe Insider, Winnie Sun, wealth whisperer, entrepreneur, speaker, and media personality. Link to the full livestream -- we chat about exceptional truths, brands pandering to movements, and how consumers can vote with their wallets.
3. This Agency Founder's 3 Uncommon Rules
I met Jaqi Saleem a decade ago here in Boston. Now, she's growing one of the most talented digital customer experience agencies, Qualified Digital.
The truth is, she started the agency by accident. Read her story, and 3 uncommon principles that guide her and the team every day. My favorite:
"Digital matters, but people matter more.
We hire human beings first – people who are comfortable making mistakes and who treat each other well.
People who are willing to work on a team that helps one another.
People who, yes, are exceptional practitioners but first and foremost are honest, kind, resilient human beings.
Digital is what we do, but human beings are who we are at our core and who we serve with the experiences we create."
4. "Don't Let Purpose Ruin Our Industry" (preach!)
In a recent talk, Dentsu's creative director, Toshihiko Tanabe warned that ill-conceived purpose campaigns are ruining the industry.
We all want to do meaningful work and be successful in our jobs, but it’s getting out of hand, he told a packed crowd at the Spikes Asia 2019 Inspiration stage.
Tanabe spoke of an actual meeting he had at Dentsu in Tokyo two weeks ago, along with with two writers, an art director, the executive creative director and a digital executive. The ideas pitched in the meeting were to:
Save the rainforest
Fight Alzheimer’s disease
Bring people from isolated regions of Japan into the modern economy
"In short, they were trying to save the world," Tanabe said. But the brief was not from an NGO or even a client such as National Geographic. "The brief that we were working on that day was to introduce a brand new flavour – macaroni and cheese – for the crisp brand we were working on."
'What the hell does this have to do with the brief that we’re working on?'
Read the full article.
5. What Happened When a CMO Challenged an Analyst
I came across an article this week on LinkedIn that took chutzpah to publish from Rachel McClary, PhD and CMO at enterprise backup tech company Arcserv.
"Stepping Out and Speaking Up; Challenging a Trusted Industry Voice."
What happens when your team, despite jumping through all prerequisite hoops (and then some) to brief and manage a relationship with an industry analyst ends up being misrepresented in the published report and quadrant, a tool used by buyers to make a purchase decision about your category?
What happens when that analyst tells you your tech is superior but what you "really need to do is throw bigger parties with big shrimp" (....seriously?)
We were left with a choice: remain silent and accept public perception that the flawed methodology and irreconcilable results were without issue, or share our concerns and risk public perception of appearing emotional.
...I think what we need to do is allocate our marketing budget much more wisely, and stop investing any further into a relationship that’s not going to live up to the basic standards that vendors have come to expect in terms of transparency, objectivity and fairness.
Read the full post here.
6. Jessica Kao Gives Lessons on Life and Nurture Campaigns
I love Jessica Kao. A scientist for eight years who became a marketer and now uses that experimentation / data-driven background to help other marketers navigate marketing operations and demand gen. Also a yoga instructor, of course.
Watch our livestream with Marketo + Adobe.
Some takeaways:
Experimentation matters
Nurture looks like email, but shouldn't be measured the same
Despite the unknown, you're more ready than you think (ommmm)
7. Quote of the Week: Lauren Brown
The late Lauren Brown was a journalist, editor, and one of the founding editors at Quartz who died of breast cancer at 37. You can read more about her truncated career here. She wrote a poignant piece about life in your 30s that I found thanks to reporter Lauren Johnson.
"It takes a little while to locate that signal, the one that tells you what really matters to you. But it’s a signal worth following.
Hope can be disciplined. Change can be strategic.
Fun can mean being the unpopular one."
Read Lauren's full article here "In your 30s, you’ll discover happiness is just persistence and sheer will."
I hope your changes this weekend are strategic, and that you choose wisely.
Have a great weekend, and thank you as always for reading.
Katie
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Just some of my favorite upcoming events:
Growth Marketing Conference, December 10-11 in San Francisco
I'll be speaking at SXSW 2020, March 13-22 in Austin
See you at Oracle's Modern Business Experience, March 23-26 in Chicago
Book me to speak or emcee!