A “professional troublemaker” who happens to be a 2020 B2C Content Marketer of the Year offers helpful advice on when brands (and the people who work for them) should speak out.
By Kim Moutsos
Has there ever been a year in which marketers felt so compelled to respond to headlines – and so conflicted about whether and how to speak up? 2020 may have been intense, but the pressure on brands to take a stand won’t disappear in 2021.
Self-described “professional troublemaker” Luvvie Ajayi Jones offered useful advice for navigating these impulses in her keynote Speaking Truth to Power at Content Marketing World 2020.
If the thought of taking advice from a troublemaker makes you uncomfortable, that’s OK. One of the lessons Luvvie teaches is to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable” (as she named her popular 2017 TedTalk).
But following Luvvie has the marketing chops to back up her advice. After all, she formulated it while doing the work content marketers do every day.
Hear Luvvie explain her truth-telling formula.
Luvvie started her professional career as a marketing coordinator who wrote a humor and culture blog as a hobby. Over time, she built an audience by consistently delivering straight-talking observations about the world around her.
When laid off from her job in 2010, Luvvie used her marketing background to launch an independent career as a blogger, speaker, and author. Her first book, 2016's I’m Judging You: The Do-Better Manual debuted at the No. 5 spot on The New York Times bestselling list. Her second, Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual, comes out in March.
Like many content marketers, she hosts a podcast (Rants & Randomness). In 2019, She launched a community, LuvvNation, which today has more than 13,000 members. This year, CMI recognized Luvvie, and her co-founders of the #ShareTheMicNow and #KeepSharingThe Mic campaigns, with the B2C Content Marketer of Year award.
Luvvie’s simple rubric for evaluating when to speak up is a great guide for any content leader. And her ideas for coping when your (or your team’s) impulse is to stay silent can help you separate the truths that need to be told from unproductive noise.
How to decide when and whether to speak up
Impulsively blurting out your truth of the moment isn’t always the best option. Nor is entering a conversation as a brand – no matter how well-intentioned – without thinking it through. How to decide whether to say something is a question Luvvie gets asked again and again.
So she developed this decision-making formula, which works for both brand and individual decisions.
Ask these three questions:
If you answer yes to all three, you have a responsibility to speak out, Luvvie says, even though there’s no guarantee the message will be received as you meant it.
That’s the point of her rubric – to save your truth-telling for the moments that matter. And when it matters, Luvvie says, “Your job is to say it in the best way possible. However it lands after that, you can deal with it.”
Telling the truth isn’t easy for anyone
If you think truth-telling is easier for a personal brand than for a corporate (or even nonprofit) brand, Luvvie wants you to know that’s not so.
“I could show up tomorrow and say, ‘You know what, today I'm not going to be a truth-teller,’” she says. “It’s a moment-by-moment decision we make to stand up and elevate and challenge the things that aren’t OK. And the truth is scary even for those of us … who've been practicing for a long time.”
Saying nothing costs something
Nearly every brand marketer, agency, and content creator can name missteps from brands whose attempts to enter a current conversation went wrong: the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad, Starbucks’ Race Together campaign, Burger King’s #FeelYourWay, Gilette’s The Best Men Can Be, DiGiornia’s #WhyIStayed tweet, and the list goes on.
It’s easy to ascribe these missteps to a flawed strategy, lack of audience understanding, or a credibility deficit on the issue. But it’s also a person or several who didn’t tell the truth.
“Every time a company has major backlash over something they did publicly, like when they put out an ad that wasn’t thoughtful at all, (I think), ‘Who was the person who knew that this would not go well but did not speak up,’” Luvvie says.
How to encourage truth-telling on your team
Far from excoriating the people who stayed silent, Luvvie suggests understanding what kept them from speaking out.
In most cases, she says, their reasons fall into one of these categories:
And all these reasons are perfectly valid, Luvvie acknowledges, but that doesn’t make them any less detrimental to the team or brand's outcome.
Luckily, each excuse has an antidote.
Counter the not-my-department mindset
It might feel safer in the moment to not speak up because you think it’s not your responsibility or place, but Luvvie says that’s a false sense of security: “If my neighbor's house was on fire and I say, ‘Well, not my house,’ what happens if the smoke and the fire reach my house right next door? Then who helps me put out my fire? I thought it wasn't my business, but it quickly became my business.”
As for brand missteps, Luvvie asks, “What if that commercial goes nuts, the backlash comes, and the company suffers a financial loss because of it. Now they have to make cuts in your department … maybe even you.”
If you’re a team leader, it’s your responsibility to encourage people to speak up for the good of the team, campaign, or brand as a whole.
Counter the fear of negative consequences
It’s also your responsibility to shoulder the burden of making people feel (and be) safe enough to speak out.
Luvvie says the fear of consequences is especially prevalent among people in marginalized groups. She encourages people in leadership to make sure people with less power can speak up without fear of losing their jobs.
“We can use our power to make sure they have more of a voice, more access, more power to be able to say something,” she says. “The intern who is afraid, ‘If I speak up, I might get fired,’ … should not feel like they need to be the ones to lay themselves on the line. The vice president of the department should put themselves on the line.”
That means, if you are a person who has standing at the company, you have the responsibility to speak up even when afraid of losing something. “If you’re the person who's been at the company for 15 years and has amazing job security, what’s the consequence you're afraid of?” Luvvie asks.
She suggests working through the worst-case scenarios. Will you be embarrassed? Will HR write you up? Or will you be fired and unable to support yourself and the people who depend on you?
If that last worst-case scenario isn’t likely, then what are you afraid of?. “If we're constantly in our best-case scenarios because of the fear of the worst-case scenario, we're not going to have a great world because we are afraid of whatever consequence might come,” she says.
Counter the truth-teller’s day off
As Luvvie says, truth-telling is hard and sometimes scary work. It’s understandable for fatigue to set in. That’s why you need to cultivate more than one truth-teller.
“My hope is that if one truth-teller decides to be quiet that day, another rises up and says, ‘I'm going to take the baton today,’” Luvvie says.
And maybe that truth-teller needs to be you. “We shouldn’t constantly depend on other people to do the jobs we should be doing. We're constantly waiting for Superman or Superwoman when we also have red capes. We’ve got to start using our red capes,” she says. CCO
Kim Moutsos is vice president of editorial at the Content Marketing Institute. In 2021, she'll take the reins as editor-in-chief of CCO. Follow her on Twitter at @KMoutsos or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Who's Next? We don’t yet know who will join us in 2021, but we're sure it’ll be someone spectacular. Content Marketing World registration is now open – take advantage of the lowest rates to bring your whole team.
