10 Principles for Kind Marketing and Communications in 2019

As a kindness practitioner and communications professional, I think often about whether the materials and messages that I put out into the world follow kind principles.

Any time we take our audiences’ time and attention, we tap into a limited resource, perhaps even more so in a world where every brand wants its customers to engage as well as to buy.

We also have to take a hard look at the attentional environments in which we work. In the three years since I initially thought through principles for kind marketing, serious questions about the social and political impact of media have emerged.

Kind marketing and communications means looking at the modern marketer’s engagement imperative as an ecological problem. We compete for, and ultimately affect, limited resources of emotion and cognition. Prospects and customers have to divide these resources in smaller and smaller slices to accommodate all the demands placed on them by brands and, more important, by their lives.

We also have to consider the channels where we disseminate our messages. In 2019, it’s a genuinely open question whether we can operate ethically and still use channels such as Facebook and Twitter. I just don’t have an answer to that question, although I have stopped using both for my own purposes for now.

If we look with compassion at the cluttered lives most people lead, and the toxic potential of the channels we use, marketing and communications seem inherently unkind, even complicit with destructiveness.

But by following the ten principles below, we can shift to a better way of contributing to the lives of our marketing audiences.

  1. Tell your truth: Before anything else, to practice kind marketing and communications, you must believe in the value of what you are promoting. You cannot compromise on authenticity. If you work in an internal marketing or comms department for a company you don’t believe in, then leave. If you work in an agency, take only the projects that align to your truth. If the product, service, or messages you promote do not increase the well-being of the world and of people in it, allow yourself the courage of moving on. While it may seem scary, it ultimately plays out to your benefit. The income comes back as you make yourself a stronger, truer kindness practitioner. I have left lucrative employers and clients, at the risk of short-term pain, but not once do I look back and regret it.
  2. Seek first to enrich, and only then to engage: The collateral you produce, from a simple tweet to a website, brochure, or video, should bring something more to your audiences than just a call-to-action. Kind marketers and communicators stand behind collateral that genuinely makes lives better. Stir up the audience’s kindness, appeal to their best emotions and selves, entertain them, or educate them. For example, in my recent work with a healthcare company, we directed all of our efforts to help patients focus on wellness. While we do intend to increase business through the use of the services we market, we put wellness first, then create experiences that allow patients to engage more directly in their own healthcare. Only then do we guide them to the care and services they need.
  3. Put empathy first in your plans: All good design thinking begins with activities that focus on empathizing with the customer. Put yourselves in people’s shoes to understand how they use your products and services, and what matters most to them. That empathy should drive your content strategy and marcomm plan. In addition, you can empathize with your audience beyond their role as customers. If one of your audience segments is working single mothers, for example, think mindfully of the pressures on their time and attention before you start making demands on it. Not only does this reflect kindness, but also it increases your chances to connect with them on the basis of something they will need and buy.
  4. Give customers just what they need, and no more: The low cost and relative ease of email marketing offer many temptations to marketers and communicators. Speaking from my own experience, I can think of several companies from whom I’ve made an initial purchase, only to regret giving them my business. Why? I enjoyed the product, but I did not expect multiple emails a day about every promotion and offer they might have. Much better to allow shoppers to opt in, at the time of purchase, and to specify their desired frequency of communication. To give a more positive example, one of my favorite online apparel companies sends me a discount or free shipping promotion along with anything they ship to me. I only see the one promotion, at the moment when I am opening a package and I am most excited about being their customer. That’s kind AND smart.
  5. Release only the best collateral: We all work within limited budgets, but we can create quality collateral even at low cost when we drive ourselves to produce the best. When cost matters, dozens of sites now exist where we can acquire good stock photography, video, or audio. We can hire professional voice or on-camera talent for individual jobs. We can always make sure that our copy does not contain grammatical errors, logical errors, or inelegant style. When cost matters less, we can really push ourselves to meet the standards of an artist rather than a hack. Neither style nor substance depends on budgeting, if you put the full force of your commitment to quality to the collateral that you release into the world.
  6. Open a dialogue: You may not directly interact with your audience, but kind marketers always find ways to treat marketing as a conversation. Tactics can include well-known tools such as Voice of the Customer surveys, focus groups, or Net Promoter. But tools alone may not suffice. As a marketer, you can make a mental shift by treating everything you do as part of the possible conversation between yourself, your product, and your audiences. You can listen to the way your friends and family talk about similar products, or how they react to various ads and promotions. You can watch what people do on social media, even how they move through stores, interact with products, and make buying decisions. As a kind marketer, you find the entire world becoming part of your conversation.
  7. Work with others: Going it alone can result in unfortunate missteps. I know this from my own experiences at the beginning of my career. It only takes a few sessions with product teams or with end consumers to realize that you do no one any favors by talking over their heads or speaking in an essentially private language. I also vividly remember, when in the role of a creative director, I had to break the bad news to a web designer. “Those are swastikas,” I pointed out. Having creative talent may feel that talent gives us permission to go rogue, but we ultimately must remember that we don’t see our own blind spots. A team of trusted colleagues and stakeholders helps us make the shift from arrogance, or even offensiveness, to kindness.
  8. Own what you produce: Even as part of an extended team of peers, stakeholders, customers, the more you connect with the products and services you promote, and the more you take ownership of the work you do, the more you can imbue them with your own deepest commitments to the world at large, including kindness. When I speak about ownership, I mean the feeling of finding and committing to what matters most, rather than keeping things to yourself. That feeling keeps you from slipping into alienation, where you begin to make compromises because “it’s ‘just’ my job,” or “it’s ‘just’ the client.” Alienation, in turn, leads through inauthenticity even as far as to lies and ethical lapses. When you remain mindful that “I am doing this” and “I am saying this,” even though it’s on behalf of something else, you escape that negative loop and enter a positive loop of kindness instead.
  9. Promote sane consumption: As marcomm professionals, we don’t do our work in isolation. We operate against a background of constant consumerism, where brands push people to seek “bigger, better, and more.” Marketers can go a long way by triggering acquisitiveness and status anxiety, but that long way is the wrong way. “The overall effect of advertising is to stimulate the craving for consumption,” as Erich Fromm describes it in his masterful To Have or To Be (essential reading for kind marketers with a philosophical bent). In a world of limited natural resources and in the face of a distressed environment, we can focus our messaging on giving people choices to actualize themselves and increase their well-being, rather than buying and wasting more. For example, in the case of an educational product, rather than focusing on the anxieties of potential students, we focused on unlocking potential and on long-term life outcomes, with much better results than a fear-and-doubt based consumerism.
  10. Improve the world: Finally, without inflating the importance of marketing or communication in the grand scheme of things, we still must realize that what we do pervades almost everything in the modern world. Researchers place the number of brand exposures we experience each day in the thousands (including not just commercial but ambient messaging in the streets, on store shelves, online, etc.). By acting as kindness practitioners, by reflecting that kindness in the content of the collateral we put into this mix of constant brand exposures, and by actively fostering the connection between what we promote and our customers’ richer, more deeply engaged and compassionate lives, we can change the underlying tone of this branded economic environment. We can do this with the images we choose, the attributes we highlight, the channels we select, and the stories we tell or ask others to tell about our brands. While our work still focuses on the immediate choice of our product or service within the marketplace, it can also focus on the broader choice of how people consume and how they choose to be in the world, and that focus becomes the ultimate kindness we have to offer to those whose attention we call upon.

7 Ways To Be Kind To Yourself and Get Unstuck

I’m late. I thought I would write a new piece on kindness in the workplace last month, and then this month, but until now, nothing. I found myself writing “kindness post” on my daily to-do list, each morning rewriting it, rewriting it, starring and circling it, but still, nothing. I needed a way to get unstuck.

Over time, the disappointment became louder than anything else I might have felt about the piece, the elusive piece, whose theme I kept failing to catch when looking at my values and experiences. Even though I moved it to my next day’s list again and again, the prospect that I ever could, or would, get it done receded. The tide of motivation went out, exposing all the dead fish and debris of dread and failing to meet my own expectations. I even questioned my resolve to keep up this project.

Today, however, is different. As I looked at my day ahead, at my desk, sunrise coloring the sky behind me, I realized that I couldn’t write because I wasn’t being kind to myself. I had fallen into the self-compassion trap. I had stopped giving myself credit for all the hard work I do for my clients, for my dedication to my partner, for the time I spend caring for my two cats, for making myself available to friends. Every time I thought about writing the now dreaded “kindness post,” I let the fact that I hadn’t yet written it become the focal point, eclipsing any thought or passion for the topic of kindness itself.

By some sudden grace (yes, I believe in it, even with no apparatus of faith behind it), forgiveness came. I forgave myself for not writing, I acknowledged the task for what it was, and I felt not obligation but gratitude for all the relationships and all the beings that had received my time in the interim. I allowed kindness to return, not as an imperative, but as a gift, a gift whose benefits I, too, share. That was the answer to help me get unstuck. By letting self-kindness in, I saw the very topic I needed to write about was kindness to oneself.

I hope my long preface sets the stage for the rest of this post, with 7 specific ways you can break through motivation blocks to help you get unstuck by being kind to yourself.

1. Take inventory.
When you have something undone hanging over your head, you can lose sight of all of the positive, constructive ways in which you spend your time. Make a list of ten valuable things you have done recently and recognize yourself for what it took to do them. Even the smallest things you do depend on your skills, your authentic self, and the ties you have in this world. You can easily take them for granted.

2. Take action.
While you may not be ready to pull out of the procrastination-guilt loop quite yet, you can help break up the logjam by doing kind things for others and by directing kind intentions to them. Offer to help a colleague, do something unexpected for your friends or family, or help a stranger. I don’t have a scientific explanation for why, but it does somehow clear your energy and open you to the task that’s haunting you.

3. Take a break.
You won’t get very far sitting and staring at a screen, or paper, or a workspace. If you stay stuck in a working context, you may find your level of anxiety increasing, to the extent that you lower the chances you will find a way to start or resume work. Instead, just walk away. Read something unrelated, or even take a literal walk to change your surroundings and allow serendipity to take over and motivate you.

4. Take a shower.
There’s a reason why the idea that your best ideas come to you in the shower has become a sort of cliche. A shower is a place to relax, take time to do something for yourself, and let yourself be both distracted an purposeful at the same time. In fact, numerous studies on brain chemistry and brain activity tie our mental state when showering to increased creativity and increased likelihood of mental breakthroughs.

5. Take a picture.
You can overcome obstacles to motivation by making efforts to be creative in another medium. Even if you don’t believe that you need creativity to get your looming tasks done, the act of creativity can help you look at your motivation differently and find ways to overcome it. You can use the camera on your phone to capture an unexpected angle in your office, in your home, or somewhere in your daily perspective. Look closely at it and open yourself up to seeing the world, and your responsibilities, from a new angle.

6. Take solace.
You’re not the first person to get stuck, and you won’t be the last. This is not the first time you’ve gotten stuck, and it won’t be the last. You can reflect on times when you have gotten stuck, and unstuck, in the past. Tell yourself the story of how it happened and how you eventually broke through. Ask people you trust and respect to tell you a story about a time when it happened to them. You’ll find those stories can heal, and overcome.

7. Take care.
You may find that you start to beat yourself up over an uncompleted task. It’s entirely natural, and often gets worse the more committed you are or the more accountable you feel. You can, however, forgive yourself for not doing something that you needed or expected to do. Just remember that you are more than your responsibilities. If you let yourself off the hook for this, chances are, you’ll stop writhing and start writing, or doing, or working, whatever it is that’s blocking you.

Apply these 7 techniques, or your own variants of them. You’ll make great progress, clear the way, and find that they help you get unstuck.