Author: Daljeet Singh

Have you heard about this type of marketing called ‘guerrilla marketing’? In many modern references, they’re using this to refer to a form of attack marketing where you design campaigns that embarrass and drag down your competitors.

Here’s why I think it’s awful and what you should do instead in order to practice marketing ethically.

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Guerrilla marketing is for businesses that suck.

Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and I’m going to talk today about something that might be a little more controversial with marketing circles and talking about why guerrilla marketing is not something you should be doing.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Before I go on about guerrilla marketing let me just make sure that we’ve defined guerrilla marketing correctly. You see, I was listening to this podcast and this guy was going on about this ‘attack marketing’ guerrilla marketing.

What I understood of guerrilla marketing before this podcast was that it would mean marketing yourself in an alternative way. Doing flash mobs, appearing in places where your brand normally wouldn’t be.

And I think this is the real definition of guerrilla marketing.

But, to clarify, this video is not about the real definition of guerrilla marketing, or what I think is the real definition.

We’re Talking About “Attack Marketing” Here

In this podcast I was listening to, this guy was talking about how he was attacking competitors who were in the same space of his clients with the marketing he was creating. He was talking about how his strategies were like really bold and how the CEOs that he was working with had to have real cojones to use these strategies that he was using – marketing strategies that involved completely blasting the competition.

To me, this sat really poorly. I didn’t feel like this was an acceptable way of doing marketing.

Requiring Big Balls Probably Means Bad Business

Excuse my language, but it may take some bigger balls to be a bit of a dick, but I think that what it also indicates is that the business sucks.

If your marketing has to resort to dragging down your competition, then you probably don’t have a very good product.

Because if you had a good enough product you shouldn’t need to bring down the competition. You should be able to show up your competition without talking them down.

This is a Key Ethical Marketing Point

This is really key, I think, to practicing marketing ethically. Step two of the content marketing strategy that that I’ve kind of put together is defining your USP, right? It’s defining your Unique Selling Proposition. And there’s that that Venn diagram of the three circles and one of those circles is “what your competitors do not do well.” It’s kind of the most important circle.

It is important to focus on your competitors. To know what your competitors are doing and know what they’re doing that’s similar to you and know what you’re doing that’s dissimilar to them.

Show Yourself as Better Rather Than Drag Competitors Down

You can then focus on showing yourself to be better than your competitors without actually blasting them. You can talk yourself up. You show how you are better than them and you won’t need to resort to attacking them.

So I hope that video was a little bit enlightening on the ethics of marketing. I want to do way more videos on ethical marketing, but I’d love to know if YOU would like to see more videos on ethical marketing. Or whether you’d like to see more videos on content, on USP, choosing your target – feel free to comment and let me know what kind of videos you’d like to see more of otherwise I hope you are doing really well at the moment and I will see you in another video or in a chat.

In school, you might have been taught that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell upon his head.

But the truth is, he didn’t actually discover gravity… and what he actually did is a good way to understand how we think about marketing ethically!

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Newton did not discover gravity.

Hi, I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and today I’m going to explain why the phrase that Newton discovered gravity is false and why that matters in terms of marketing.

If you haven’t subscribed to my channel yet. please do. it will help me loads on YouTube and you’ll be able to be notified when I release new videos.

The Story of Newton Discovering Gravity

Now what I mean by ‘Newton didn’t discover gravity’ is a little bit of a semantic point. Sir Isaac Newton was a physicist or what they called back then a ‘Natural Philosopher’ when all of the sciences were combined.

The story goes that he was sitting under a tree, the apple fell on his head, and this allowed him to understand the idea of gravity and come up with a way to explain it.

Newton Didn’t Discover Gravity, He Described It

That last sentence I just said – “come up with a way to explain it” – is what I mean by the fact that he didn’t discover gravity.

Gravity was always there – we were all experiencing it. What Newton did was he figured out a way to describe gravity and he managed to describe gravity in a way that other people could understand it.

How Does Newton Describing Gravity Matter in Ethical Marketing?

So, why does this matter to marketing? Why this matters is because he learned how to describe a thing. He put it in words, or in equations, that other people could understand. And this is the core of ethical marketing.

Marketing is about communication. It is about education. It is not about deceiving someone on what your product is. It is about teaching them what your product does, how your product helps them solve a problem.

This is a really fundamental marketing principle but it’s also a fundamental ethical marketing principle. Because once you learn how to describe your product in the best way possible, you’re doing marketing and you’re doing it in an ethical way. You’re helping people solve their problems with your product and service.

I hoped you liked that little snippet of ethical marketing. It’s something I’m really passionate about and if you have any ideas or comments on ethical marketing, feel free to find me on LinkedIn, feel free to find me on any of the social media platforms (in the bar at the top of the page), or use the form below to get in touch – I would love to chat to you about it.

It’s super pervasive to consider ‘growth hacking’ as synonymous with marketing.

However, I care to disagree – and I would go so far as to say that the ‘growth hacking’ approach that results in speedy growth, more often than not, is probably not an ethical marketing approach.

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Growth hacking is unethical.

Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in today I’m going to discuss why I think that the idea around “growth hacking” – which is super pervasive in marketing at the moment – is, controversially, quite unethical.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel please do, it will help me with my YouTube credibility and it will alert you when I release new videos.

Fast Growth Quickly Becomes Unethical

Today I want to talk about something that might be a little bit controversial with a bunch of marketers but I’m feeling more reaffirmed by having met more marketers that actually are operating in this same way that I’m about to talk about.

I just did a workshop, actually, about what is ethical marketing and it’s a very slippery area, it’s difficult to pin down. But I think one of the things that is quite important to me is that fast growth quite quickly and easily becomes unethical.

Why Is Growth Hacking Unethical?

Almost every time there is quick, fast immediate growth some sort of unethical thing is happening.

That might be because you’re stepping on your employees, or it might mean that you’re stepping on your customers, or it might mean that you’re taking advantage of systemic oppression. But there’s some way that fast growth will be almost always be unethical.

Balancing the Doughnut of Ethics

And in the end, you do have to weigh that up against your balance of ethics. I talk about a “Doughnut of Ethics” similar to Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics – I used her model to think about marketing ethics and how there is a tension between the individual and society when we talk about ethics, and that there are a bunch of rather individual metrics that you need to use to measure where on that Doughnut you are.

And when there’s speedy growth it usually means that one of those metrics is out of whack.

So What is More Ethical Than Growth Hacking?

Now, what do you do instead? I attended another workshop from another marketer at Newton Bell, and their marketing agency is built around slow, steady growth. And that is what is going to help you maintain your Doughnut of Ethics.

Make sure that you market in the right way and grow in the right way.

This doesn’t mean no growth – it means growing within the bounds of ethics and within the bounds of our society. And not taking advantage of people.

This means improving your message and improving your user experience. Make sure that your product is actually adding value to people. Make sure the way you’re communicating is not deceptive and is accurately portraying what you’re doing and the value that you are bringing to people.

As soon as you start communicating in a way that’s trying to highlight certain things and hide other things, you’re starting to deceive and you’re starting to become unethical.

I realise that the conversation of ethics is always a little bit controversial so I would seriously hugely welcome anyone to make comments on this. I am open to being wrong ethics is a slippery thing and it and it is a thing that I believe everyone should be open to being wrong about. So please comment below if you have any about this particular topic.

You can also join my Facebook group Marketing for the Many – I’m responding to stuff on there as they come in. I’m also posting interesting insights I find there!

Otherwise please enjoy the other videos on my channel and I’ll see you in another one.

Most of us really hate spam (I’m not sure what to say about anyone who actually likes the stuff – either in the tin or in your inbox!). When you cold email a list that you’ve bought or acquired from some database – it almost always looks like spam.

And yet, people are still sending out these cold emails for one cold, hard reason: they work.

Just because a marketing technique works (well, sells in the short term – it’s arguable whether that’s marketing that ‘works’) doesn’t mean it’s something that necessarily should be done – especially if part of the fabric of your business is ethical business practice and ethical marketing strategies.

But it’s hard to just throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially when you actually kinda need the profit to keep your business alive, right?

There is a way that you can still use the cold emailing strategy without spamming a whole lot of people who absolutely don’t want to hear from you…

Doing something that’s changing the world and would you like to have a chat with me about it? Click here and fill out the form!

Don’t like videos? Here’s the text version:

Is it possible to ethically email a cold list? In today’s video I’m going to discuss whether you can email a list of email addresses that you’ve bought in an ethical way.

If you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel already please do! It’ll give me a bit of YouTube cred and it’ll give you notifications whenever I release a new video.

Should I Do Cold Email Marketing?

The reason that I want to talk today about cold email marketing is that this actually came up in discussions with one of my clients.

The client offers a product for schools and they came up with a new product that would be really helpful to schools right now.  And they were giving this away for free. They were giving it away free in the forums they’re in, to their email list that they already have.

But they were like, “We want to reach out to more schools we want to give them this stuff because it will help right now.” And it was a very time sensitive product.

They came to me asked, “How do we reach more schools?” and more specifically asked me, “Should we buy an email list?”

Will Cold Emailing Make Me Look Like I’m Spamming People?

They were a bit hesitant about buying a list, “We don’t want to look spammy and we don’t want to be THOSE people who are spamming others.”

This is completely understandable and we definitely do not want to spam.

I will repeat, we do not want to spam!

But there is a way to send out an email to a list in a way that’s not spammy and remains within your ethical boundaries.

2 Factors To Make Cold Emailing More Ethical

When you’re trying to email a cold list there are two factors that you need to keep in mind if you want to stay within this ethical boundary or at least the ethical boundary that I would like to keep within.

The first factor is that you need to make sure that your list is your target person. If your list is not your target person then you’re going to look like spam.

The second item is that you need to make sure that whatever you are sending them in the first email is adding value. Is adding a lot of value. Is adding like maximum value you could possibly give this person.

These two things are kind of a little bit interlinked.

In this particular situation, it was super easy. You know, the list was definitely the target person: you could get the list of the head teachers of the school or you could get the list of just the general emails for schools. And the email that they were sending them – high-value. It was a free resource that they could fully use right now. All they had to do was enter the email address to download it.

For them it was super easy, but I can see how this gets a little bit more complicated.

What Happens When You Can’t Get A List Of Your Target Person to Cold Email?

One situation where it might get a bit more complicated is where you can buy the list but some of them are not quite your target person. You might be a bit like, “Uh I don’t want to look like spam to them.”

And you are absolutely right to hesitate. Do not… DO NOT email a list where some of those people are not your target person. Especially if that email is not going to add any value to them.

If your resource, your product that you are releasing in that first email is not relevant to even some people in the list, change the email.

If you can’t make sure that the list is exactly the target person, then you need to make sure that your first email adds value to every single person who actually is on that list.

The fact is when you buy an email list it will have some sort of category. You’ll have bought something according to an industry or a location or something that you can use to craft a product or some sort of message or item that you send out to be relevant to everyone in that list.

And if you can’t do that then abandon this strategy.

What Happens When You Cold Email With No Value?

If you do email people when it’s not relevant to them, you are probably going to damage your reputation. I mean, you’ll get some sales. You will. You will end up reach the people that you want to reach as well – but you will also look like a spammer to the others.

This isn’t just some like, “We don’t want to look bad” reputational issue. If your emails get reported as spam, it becomes more difficult for you to send emails to others. The email providers will punish you for it.

This isn’t just about staying within ethical boundaries. It’s staying within the boundaries that will keep your marketing strategy able to continue into the future.

That’s a little bit on like the ethics of cold email marketing. Obviously, it’s a much bigger topic.

If you are thinking about doing cold email marketing if you have some questions about it feel free to put it in the comments below feel free to email me or the place you can probably reach me easiest is on my on the Facebook group, Marketing for the Many.