Marketing is often accused of creating needs, of fooling people. What about content?

When asked what Toast does, I regularly explain the notion of branded content, its impact on the relationship between an organization and its consumers, the value that content can bring to these consumers, etc.

It also happens regularly that this same person with whom I am discussing the subject shares with me the time when they watched video content, or read an article, to discover at the end that the content was actually produced by a brand that wanted to sell them something.

It is in this context that I found Niraj Dawar’s article “The Morality of Marketing” very interesting, published on the Branding Strategy Insider website.

He describes some of the issues that marketing (in the broad sense) faces in the context of its power to influence individuals.

To what extent does it create needs that did not exist? To what extent can one influence a person to take an action, to buy something that is not morally “correct”?

And the same question is as relevant with regard to content.

Do we always produce content that brings real value to the person who will view/read/hear it? Does this content really take into account the different options on the market or does it only focus on what would be beneficial to the brand behind it?

All these questions are not new. But they deserve to be asked… and asked again.

One of the quotes really caught my attention in the article:

“The morality of marketing resides not so much in the tactics of influence, as in the goals of those tactics.”

Where does your brand stand in this discussion? Take a few minutes to think about it and explore approaches you could take to bring even more value to your audience.

If you would like to explore the potential of your brand in terms of content a little more, contact us and let us know about your current projects and we could help you in your efforts to implement a new dimension to your content strategy.