Is your brand cyber-bullying your customers?

Self-Efficacy is the new paradigm of content marketing.

A few weeks ago a series of ads appeared all over Vienna to raise awareness of a brand providing medical supplies. The ads showed people with their disabilities “exposed”. There was an elderly man with wet trousers, a business women without her prosthetic arm, among others. All around them you could read their distressed internal voices — “everyone will stare at me”, “hopefully no-one will see”,… The slogan of the campaign: without medical products things will get awkward.

Think about that for a moment!

Imagine being the person depicted in the ad. How does this make you feel?

For me, it triggers the memory of being 8 years old and begging my dad not to make me go on a two-day trip with all of my friends, because I was certain I would wet my bed. For me, it triggers the memory of pretending not to see the hurt of the teenage boy with disabilities I worked with when I was 16, as people stared at him.

Ads such as these are not playing with feelings of slight awkwardness or embarrassment. They are playing with the feeling of shame — a feeling so unspeakable even Game of Thrones (!!!) could only portray it with a thoroughly de-humanised character. (And remember how that worked out for the person calling “shame”?)

Now, I don’t want to call out the marketers behind the campaign, because I know some of them and they’re great people. But even great people can make errors of judgment sometimes. Especially if they’re working in an industry that has them set up to be bullies.

“Self-awareness and self-compassion don’t move the merchandise.”

– Susan David, Emotional Agility

That’s the basic sentiment of marketing: we need to make people feel bad about themselves to then offer a solution. And sure as hell that’s how a lot of marketing works. When we still lived in a world where impersonal mass broadcasting was the only way of doing scalable marketing, there was not much of a choice. Not knowing anything about the people we where talking to forced us into a strategy that works with everyone: putting people down.

Unfortunately, not much has changed. Big Data, Programmatic Advertising, and User Tracking notwithstanding, the messaging of most of today’s digital advertising still works along the principles of the 1980s. Today, however, we are paying the price. Not just are we seeing internet culture turn more and more vicious, we are also seeing the limits of this strategy. Using Ad Blockers, customers are protecting themselves against both annoying and uninspired sales ads, and the implicit cyber bullying of presenting them with completely unattainable ideals. (And — as we have seen — sometimes even more explicit bullying.) And as a millennial myself I can tell you first hand how irritable my generation it is when it comes to marketing messages.

In a world where impersonal mass broadcasting was the only way of doing scalable marketing, putting people down was the only choice.

Meet Content Marketing — by now an old trick in the modern marketer’s strategy toolbox. And yet an old trick with a lot of untapped potential. Because the true potential of content marketing is that it enables marketers (us!) to move from a paradigm of degradation to a paradigm of inspiration — and thus from a paradigm doomed to fail in a world dominated by social media to a paradigm that not just originates from but also thrives in such a world.

Let me give you an example of how they differ, despite looking somehow similar:

I use Canva for most of my personal design work. Their blog designschool.canva.com is on top of my most read list every single month — except for August, where Leadfully took the top spot, simply because I just discovered it. In every post they pick up a design topic and give you both a theoretical backdrop and practical applications of it. They do this to help you be the designer you want to be. At no point, however, did they make me feel like I wasn’t good enough. On the contrary, I always feel amazing, like being able to take on the world, when I read their blog.

To the modern mind, which is used to thinking improvement only comes from not being good enough, this must seem almost unintelligible.

Or take Ben Sasso, a lifestyle photographer in LA. Through his open communication on Instagram and via his blog he teaches photographers around the globe about his way of preparing, directing and editing a shoot. He does it in a way that makes you want to become a better photographer. This his wanting, however, comes from a place of strength and self-worth, not from a place of fear and shame about your own work. To the modern mind, which is used to thinking improvement only comes from not being good enough, this must seem almost unintelligible, but studies show people with a high level of self-worth learn faster, communicate better, are more productive, and adapt better to new situations.

Ben Sasso, Canva, and other great content marketers all do this in one way: As it turns out, the key to great content marketing is fostering a sense of self-efficacy in your audience. A sense of the potential they have. And the certainty that while they might not be perfect, they are equipped to deal with any situation thrown at them and learn from it.

Now, the moment Canva announced Canva for Work, I signed up for it. The moment Ben Sasso announced his Lighroom Preset Pack, I bought it. The moment Peak Design, another great content marketer, announced their backpack kickstarter campaign, I funded it.

As it turns out, we like feeling good about ourselves.

And as it turns out, feeling good about ourselves, feeling self-compassionate, does move the merchandise.

Learn how to help your customers be their best selfs AND move the merchandise by getting a free consultation from UNIQUE unchained, a digital first marketing agency based in Vienna. Just drop me a mail at martin@unique-unchained.at