Catholic Founders #17 The Moral Importance of Truthful Marketing | Marcellino D'Ambrosio
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Marketing is part of every business. But how can we do it in a way that is fair, true, and humble?
If this is a question you’ve ever thought about, this is a great episode for you.
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In Today’s Podcast:
* How to market as a Ctholic — the things to avoid, and how important it is that marketing is integrated with the heart and culture of the company, before joining
* Core Lesson: Marketing needs to be fully integrated with the company in order to avoid untruthful and misleading marketing.
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About Today’s Guest:
* Marcellino D’Ambrosio is a creative who has an incredible taste for marketing. Together, he and his brother run Sherwood Fellows.
* Sherwood Fellows is a full-service branding and marketing agency that acts as a fractional CMO for companies under $30m in revenue. In addition to the marketing, they are producing a film called Triumph of the Heart - about St. Maximilian Kolbe. (NOTE: You can support the production of this film here. Supporting it actually comes with some cool perks.)
* 🎁 [free giveaway] Brand Strategy Document from Sherwood Fellows
* Triumph of The Heart - Movie
* More about St. Maximilian Kolbe
* Book: Becoming a King
* Book: Shoe Dog
* Inter Mirifica - from Pope Paul VI
* Kruptos Podcast about Jacques Ellul | Kruptos
Key Moments:
* 4:25 Intro to Marcellino and Sherwood Fellows
* 5:50 What it takes to succeed at marketing
* 9:20 Why you need to call out an ‘enemy’ to run a good marketing campaign
* 12:30 Can you have an enemy while still being charitable in your marketing
* 14:00 Why good marketing is actually just truth-telling
* 15:40 How to market within the Church’s guidance (ref: Inter Mirifica) — The moral responsibility to integrate marketing fully into the company and product
* 21:30 The danger of large companies, degrading the value of the human — “The point of scale is removing the human beings.”
* 27:50 Shrinking your margins to support your employees — Short-term vs long-term approaches to business
* 30:10 How entrepreneurship has helped him develop spiritually — A story of a big challenge he’s just gone through — How the same day his daughter was born, he had to start laying people off
* 34:00 How God leverages the challenges of business to bring us closer to Him
* 36:30 The challenges they face working with Catholic-owned businesses
* 38:00 The danger of overspiritualization as a Catholic entrepreneur
* 40:20 Why do top business people throw out their business sense when it comes to Catholic projects
* 42:00 Trying to balance family as a Catholic entrepreneur
* 45:45 Rapid Fire Questions (favorite books, entrepreneurs, saints, & devotions) Prayer Style of Imaginative Prayer (Bob Schuchts)
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Core Lesson:
Marketing needs to be fully integrated with the company in order to avoid untruthful and misleading marketing.
Part of the point of today’s show was to ask the question, how can a Catholic business owner market ethically and in line with the Church’s teachings about truthfulness? Because we all know marketing has been known for its manipulative and misleading statements.
Marcellino did an incredible job showing how marketing will never be unethical if the marketing function is integrated with the company. If the product is truly differentiated, marketing has an easy time. If the product sucks. Marketing will resort to dirty tactics to sell the product.
It’s an interesting parallel to how we want to live our lives — fully integrated, just as Jeff told us on episode #9.
So, in other words, founders! If your marketing team is having a hard time marketing effectively, it might be time for you to adjust the product. In a way, the market will pull your product out of your hands if it’s truly valuable.
God Bless & Happy Building!
~Silas Mähner
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