Author, Minter Dial, says marketers need to be courageous with their decision-making this year, and offers five traits from his new book You Lead - such as empathy and karmic energy - which could help
Independent of whether or not you actually like tattoos, the Brand Tattoo Test examines your employees’ desire to permanently etch a representation of your brand on their body, regardless of whether they plan to stay forever (which of course they can’t anyway). It’s a courageous question that I suggest serious marketers need to ask.
On a temporal basis, there were the two halves of 2020; and we have seen dramatically different experiences around the world. It’s also been obvious that some companies have rocketed during the pandemic while others have plummeted. The rich are seemingly getting richer [see the Guardian article, Billionaires’ wealth rises], while at the same time we are seeing dramatic forecasts for increased poverty and starvation as a direct result of reduced economic activity worldwide. With consumers and businesses suffering hardships – that include illness, mental health and financial woes – it will be evermore important for marketers to be courageous in their decision-making going forward. For one, messaging will need to be adjusted to be contextually relevant while trying to pierce through the noise, when many brands are having to work with reduced resources.
Secondly, marketers will want to lean in on their brand’s purpose, creating more meaningful campaigns and bringing to the fore positive actions (not just words) that bring to life the brand’s values. Lastly, marketers will need to learn to bring vulnerability and humility to their game. As Brené Brown has brilliantly championed, being vulnerable takes courage and is a sign of strength.
I believe leadership – and marketers in particular – will benefit by developing and accentuating five traits which I capture in the CHECK* acronym that’s a central tenet of my new book, You Lead. I’d like to focus on two of these traits here.
Not only is empathy a necessary skill in designing a product or user experience, it’s invaluable for understanding your consumers. Empathy is a truly useful skill for thinking through slogans, product claims, blog post headlines and email titles. But most emphatically, to the extent that marketing relies on so many different moving pieces of the company in interacting with the customer (e.g. social media, customer service, sales, influencers, store personnel, ecommerce …), empathy is vital for building fully functioning interdepartmental teams. I exhort leaders to treat their employees as they would have their employees treat the customer. This alignment is crucial for the long-term health of your sales and marketing efforts because it will help to render your messaging and customer relationship more consistent and congruent.
which can bring a marked difference to your brand efforts. Karma is often misunderstood as being something akin to fate or can be mixed up with the aphorism: life’s a bitch. In fact, karma is about intention and action. In the way you and your team are behaving, you are shaping yourself. By acting with good intentions, you are creating an extra energy, one that gravitates within and without you. We’ve long talked about the power of word of mouth. In the context of inbound marketing, we also know how useful great content is. Give out superlative content – that doesn’t smack of self-promotion and salesy or, worse, spammy titles – and customers will absorb, share and return. By using empathy to create the useful, engaging and shareable content, the message will provide and encourage word of mouth.
At its heart, I talk about karma because it’s about thinking through your intentions and making sure these are genuinely shared and believed in the inner circle of the company. Your karmic actions are putting into motion your purpose, the unique reason your company exists. I use the term of the inside-out model where the brand’s absolute number one fans are its employees. When the karma is good and the purpose is a de facto reality, you’ll find your brand will drive word of mouth and pass the Brand Tattoo Test.
You can read about Minter’s CHECK framework and more in his new book, You Lead, How Being Yourself Makes You A Better Leader (Kogan Page), which is available now.
Minter is an international professional speaker and a multiple award-winning author, specialised in leadership, branding and transformation. An agent of change, he's a three-time entrepreneur who has exercised twelve different métiers and changed country fifteen times. Minter's core career stint of 16 years was spent as a top executive at L’Oréal, where he was a member of the worldwide Executive Committee for the Professional Products Division. He's penned two prize-winning business books, Futureproof (2017) and Heartificial Empathy (2019) and his next book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader (Kogan Page) is out now.
Previously, he wrote the award-winning WWII story, The Last Ring Home (a documentary film and biographical book). He’s an NED at SBT-Human(s) Matter and on the advisory board at ECV Digital. He’s been host of the Minter Dialogue weekly podcast since 2010. He is passionate about the Grateful Dead, padel tennis, languages and generating meaningful conversations.
Find him @mdial or on his blog minterdial.com
