Ethical Marketing with Karen Webber

This week (Monday 26th July) we spoke to Karen Webber on the practice of Ethical Marketing. 

Karen runs Goodness Marketing, which helps a range of business owners to rethink and get more confident about doing their marketing. She talked to us about how important it was for her to find The Ethical Move, and how she is now a driving force behind what it stands for. We spoke about the shift in thinking from ‘selling’ to intention-driven marketing, and about open conversations that help others get to a place of passion and generosity through their marketing. 

We talked quite a bit about the “what-not-to-dos” of good and fair marketing, but we also went quite deep quite quickly into how Ethical Marketing serves ourselves as well as our audience and customers… If you can identify your purpose, values and customers, Karen says, you can then use these as themes for your content. This clarity and focus can really help with the obstacle of putting pen to paper.

We talked about the often uncomfortable prospect of using social media for fostering connections and community and that we all have different social media preferences. Karen feels most at home on Instagram, for example, whereas Frances is a LinkedIn superfan but gets lost down rabbit holes on Facebook as does Simon when on Medium. Much like we all have different ice cream preferences (pistachio was a solid chat favourite), we all show up differently – and have very different relationships with social media. 

Ice cream talk aside, we turned to the act of niching as not only a misunderstood marketing strategy but also a self-awareness technique.. niching is as much about holding a mirror up to yourself, understanding your mission, and getting clarity about who you’d like to surround yourself with. We can then focus on the fact that we can serve great value for some, but that we are not for everyone. 

With some audience members commenting on the fear of negative feedback via social media, we talked with Karen about how, whilst direct criticism is in fact rare,  it’s actually about how we are able to put others’ reactions into perspective when we are clear about the people we want to serve, and how we can serve ourselves in turn.

As Seth Godin says, ‘Your business can’t serve everyone and that’s okay’. But it should at least serve yourself.

Niching is an existential realisation that can release you from the burden of trying to please everyone. Ethical marketing gives us a framework of how we can then work in a way that we are proud of.

You can watch the full discussion on Crowdcast and if you’d like to join the next Monday Masterclass session check our full schedule of upcoming conversations.