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October 4, 2021

For Marketing, ROH (Return on Humanity) is as Important as ROI

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Note: This was first published in the Content Corner email newsletter. It’s written by Dennis Shiao (@dshiao), Founder of Attention Retention.

Marketing is my primary source of income and will continue to be for the next many years. But I’ve always thought that my marketing skills need to be applied to something bigger.

Something that helps those in need. Something that makes the world a better place. In addition to the big vision, I can do better in my day-to-day role as a marketer. Do less harm. Be more inclusive. Serve the underprivileged.

Yes, we can do those things in our day jobs. Small acts of good add up. I thought about these things as I attended sessions at Content Marketing World in Cleveland.

Cognitive bias

David Dylan Thomas talked about cognitive bias.

He showed us examples of harmful biases that lead users to make bad decisions. Next, David talked about strategy and design choices we can use to redirect or eliminate the impact of biases.

💡 Tip: Educate yourself about cognitive bias — here’s a link to David’s book. Then, identify small  steps you can take in your marketing. You can start with the copy you write.

Your trans and non-binary audience

Photo of Ruth Carter

Ruth Carter. Photo from Twitter.

Ruth Carter gave a talk titled “Guys, Gals, and Non-Binary Pals! Don’t Inadvertently Exclude Your Trans and Non-Binary Audience.”

Here’s the beginning of the session description:

“The world has approximately the same number of green-eyed people as it does non-binary people (meaning people who are not male or female).

While a company would never purposely exclude its green-eyed audience, they often inadvertently make their transgender and non-binary audience feel excluded, like they don’t exist.”

💡 Tip: Educate yourself in order to prevent unintentional mistakes. Next, make your marketing more inclusive.

Ruth showed us simple things we can act on right away. In online forms, update fields like gender and salutation to be more inclusive (e.g., male, female, non-binary; Mr., Mrs. and Mx.). After Ruth’s talk, I found a good example:

One million masks

Shafqat Islam, CEO of Welcome

Shafqat Islam: photo from Twitter.

Shafqat Islam is CEO of Welcome.

In the early days of the pandemic, Shafqat saw New York City hospital workers send out urgent pleas for masks. “How could this be?” thought Shafqat. We’re one of the wealthiest nations in the world and our emergency medical workers don’t have masks?

Shafqat set out to solve the problem. He started an initiative called One Million Masks to get one million masks to healthcare workers in New York City and beyond.

Shafqat says that he’s no expert in supply chain, but he found people who were. He partnered with other volunteers to deliver on the stated mission. Shafqat’s company sells marketing software, but he didn’t take the stage to talk about their software. In fact, he didn’t even want to talk about marketing.

Later that day, I met Shafqat. I told him that I’m not in the market to purchase the type of software his company sells; however, if that were to change, his company is the first one I’d call.

And it’s because of the admiration and trust he built with his talk and the fact that he’s serving the greater good of our world. This tweet from Jenn VandeZande says it well:

💡 Tip: What’s the “Shafqat project” you can launch next quarter or next year? I’m trying to answer this question for myself.

Also: when you choose partners and vendors for your business, evaluate if their values and actions align with yours.

The problem with chocolate

Jacquie Chakirelis

Jacquie Chakirelis. Photo via Twitter.

Good friend Jacquie Chakirelis spoke about her chocolate problem. Yes, Jacquie loves to eat a lot of chocolate.

But that’s not the problem she wanted to talk about. The problem is that the major chocolate makers control so much of the market that they’re able to drive down cocoa production costs.

The result is that cocoa plantations in Africa use child slave labor to harvest cocoa. Jacquie spoke about Tony’s Chocolonely, a small chocolate maker with a vision of 100% slave-free chocolate.

💡 Tip: Work hard to understand the wider ecosystem your company operates in.

If you work at The Hershey Company or at a vendor that provides them critical services, would you continue working there after discovering the child slave labor issue?

Next steps

Let’s be more intentional and think more about what impact our marketing is making with our audience and on the world. Let’s do better. Let’s help people who need it. Marketing has a larger mission. Let’s go.

P.S. If you have thoughts on this topic or want to brainstorm, please reach out: smfcdennis@gmail.com.

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