Season 02 | Episode 07: Marketing with Dignity

David: Welcome to Practical Accessibility Insights, the podcast that brings you tricks and tips on developing your business brand for inclusion. I’m David Best, and with me is my co-host Sandi Gauder.

Hey Sandi. How are things today?

Sandi: They are good. How are you, David?

David: I’m doing good today. Today we’re doing something a little different.

Over the past year, we interviewed a number of people and one of the things that keeps coming up is developing the business brand. And today we’re gonna just have a, a dialogue. We don’t have any guests today. And I think it’s so important for businesses to develop that brand at scale up time because once you break through the scale up, things tend to change.

I guess what’s constant in our world is change, and if you don’t have a core set of values, you can be distracted very easily and have your values hijacked. So to start things off, Sandi, what is your definition of marketing?

Sandi: Oh, that’s a big question, David, to start off with, but what would I say it is? I would say marketing is telling the world about who you are as an organization, what it is you have to offer, and what makes your product or service different from everybody else’s.

It’s communication. I mean, if I go back many decades to university and Marketing 1 0 1, they always talked about the four P’s, product, price, place, promotion. But I think in practical terms, it’s just about telling the world who you are and what you have to offer. Without getting too, too complicated.

In today’s world, marketing is becoming more about developing trust, credibility, and making sure that people know that you’re a credible business, that you exist, that you’re not some fly by night thing that’s gonna disappear tomorrow.

David: Well, marketing really is, is a messaging opportunity. It’s a one way dialogue, basically. You’re trying to get something out there and you’re trying to get people to be convinced that you have a message that’s important, and usually it’s a product or a service you’re trying to promote.

I see in our society in North America, basically we operate under a system of capitalism, and I tend to see it in two categories. One is predatory capitalism, where we see companies using coercion to gain power over the market and or using deception to gain as much revenue is possible at any cost.

The other category I see in our society is social capitalism, where organizations base their values on persuasion, which is education, educating the consumer and inclusion, where you’re trying to include your customers and making them participants in your organization. So I think the values that a company has will direct them what path they go down, either the predatory or the social type of capitalism.

So capitalism is based on what the company wants to achieve. Obviously they wanna achieve prosperity income, but it’s on how they do that. So Sandi, there’s a couple of quotes that I shared with you. Can I get you to read those quotes?

Sandi: You certainly can. So the first one is from Martin Luther King Jr., a minister and civil rights leader, and also an advocate for social justice. And he said:

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works, and since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”

And the other one is from Milton Friedman, who is one of the grandfathers of economics. He was a noble laureate and he was an advocate of free market capitalism and monetarism. And he said:

“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are. It does not care what their religion is. It only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

Well, those are two very interesting perspectives. Similar but different. And I can’t argue with either one of them.

I think I would, I would agree with, with the essence of both of them to a certain degree.

David: Yeah. I think they’re interesting quotes and when I think about how we try to build our economy within Canada, we try to get organizations to build their philosophy and culture on what we call inclusion and what has sort of taken the shape of the DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion kind of policies that have been adopted.

So to guide our, our conversation, I’ve divided it up into three questions. One is, what is the digital divide in marketing for companies? Second is, what are the marketing barriers to achieve inclusion? And third, the design. How do companies have to come up with strategies that create a brand that they actually want to promote?

So Sandi, how do you see the digital divide in the marketing strategy when it comes to getting that message out?

Sandi: Well, it might actually go back to even what the product or service is that a, a company is offering. The first company that comes to mind is Apple and how they deliver pretty sophisticated digital products.

So they’re trying to reach as many people as possible who may or may not be technically literate with their products. They’re trying to make their products open to everybody, and that includes people with disabilities. I think they’ve also been a very much a leader in trying to overcome that digital divide from the disability perspective, even more so probably in the last five years.

When you look at their marketing, their advertising, the videos they produce to go with these products, they definitely include people with disabilities and sometimes it’s even all about people with disabilities. I think they lead the way in trying to market what we call mainstream products to all sorts of people, regardless of their abilities, disabilities, where they live, and I think they’re even recently now trying to tackle the people who may have limited finances.

You know, they’re introducing products that are more entry level from a, a price point to try to make their products more available to more people.

David: Yeah. As you said earlier, it’s really all about building trust and integrity in the marketplace and to do that, your message has to be very clear and well, the message has to give the the recipient a good feeling about it.

That you’re not trying to bully them into something or you’re not providing misinformation. So I think that we try to get companies to think about social capitalism so that it’s more persuasion. Let’s use our marketing to educate people and let’s use our marketing to get feedback and get them to participate.

So information is just noise, knowledge is power. So how do you get from just providing information to actually allowing the recipient to gain knowledge so that they have the power to make decisions? Which makes a good feeling. It gives you a good feeling when you are able to make your own decisions.

There’s three principles in doing that. So you wanna go from the delivery of the message to the perception of the message, to understanding the message. So delivery, there’s many different ways of delivering in our world today. In the digital world, we can do that through social media, emails, websites, so many different ways.

Perceiving it is about how do I perceive it? If I get an email that’s in a language I don’t understand obviously I don’t really perceive the message. Or if it’s all pictures on your website, I don’t perceive the message. But if you communicate it in a way that I can perceive it, then I understand the context and the content that you are trying to promote, which then gives me knowledge.

What would you recommend to small businesses when they’re developing their marketing strategy? When it comes to building a brand that helps to deliver, perceive, and understand what they’re trying to market?

Sandi: The first thought that came to mind was to keep it simple. I think we have a tendency to overcomplicate and maybe oversell, and in that process we develop websites that are too fancy for most people, with too many bells and whistles that distract you from actually getting to the message or make the website inaccessible to all sorts of people because they use assistive devices or whatever the case may be.

I think businesses forget that it’s not all of them, but some of them forget that the, the whole point of marketing is to connect with the person on the other side of the screen, the other side of the piece of paper, in the email, whatever it is, you have to connect with them. It’s not about you.

The company represents your values, but what you’re selling is a solution to the prospect or the client. So it’s thinking about them and speaking to them in their language. It’s not overcomplicating things, it’s just being honest, clear, and simple. There’s a reason why we have that KISS acronym, keep it simple silly, because really people are so busy in this day and age.

We live in a world where people are pulled in 50 different directions. They have so many things on their mind, whether it’s what they have to do at work tomorrow, what they have to do with the kids, what’s going on in the greater world.

They don’t have time to wade through all sorts of fluff to get at the essence of your message. And so keeping it simple and clear and concise, I think is the best approach.

David: Right. Absolutely. It’s about building that relationship and if you provide information in such a way that people can perceive it and understand it, you’ve sort of got to the first step.

I think the challenge a lot of small businesses have is they don’t develop their core values at the time of scale up. And as a result, a lot of scale up companies don’t survive beyond five years. And I think that’s because it hasn’t had a chance to develop a culture.

Cultural attitudes is one of the biggest barriers in the area of employment for people with disabilities, and if you develop your values, then your employers, your partners, your service providers, customers know what your values are.

I think probably one of the values that I would recommend is the level of empathy. We hear a lot about empathy these days, and I find that there is a gap between the leadership understanding of accessibility and the management of implementation of accessibility.

Sometimes the level of empathy gets lost in that dueling kind of occupation. Can you think of any other values that they might wanna think about?

Sandi: The first thing that came to mind was hiring practices and how you go about hiring the right people for your organization. You know, we read a book many years ago and uh, the title of it escapes me at the moment, but the kernel that came out of that book was getting the right people on the bus.

Until you have the right people on the bus, there’s no point trying to drive the bus anywhere because you’re all gonna get lost. So the hiring is kind of fundamental. You need to have the people with the right skills. If they don’t have the right skills, it’s the right attitude and the people that are aligned with your core values as an organization.

It’s very difficult to change people’s values as an employee. They either believe in what you believe in or they don’t. You can teach skills. You can’t teach attitude, and so I think that’s where a lot of this falls down. Organizations tend to hire for the skills more than the attitude or the beliefs or the values of the people that they’re bringing on board.

And it might be worth at least giving equal weight to those, if not flipping it, and starting with values first and skills later.

David: Yeah, that makes me think of prosperity. Companies, of course, go into business to make money. That’s one of the benefits of the capitalist system, is that we have the freedom to apply for a job at a company and become an employee, or be an entrepreneur and set up our own company and do the things we wanna do and do it the way we want.

And I think one of the values that we should be looking at when we set up a company is what is our prosperity value? We obviously want to increase revenue, grow the business, make money, but what about the prosperity of those that you work with, your employees, your customers, and your partners? Do they see that there’s benefits in working with you and being a partner with you, is there a element of prosperity that they feel?

Sandi: Yeah, I think that’s one of the trickiest things about running a business is balancing the money-making, the profit generation, with making sure the people that you work with are and who work for you are properly compensated, properly treated, have a good life.

I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. If you are a principled individual. If you don’t have principles and it’s easy to just go for the money and who cares what happens to the people that work for you. And some entrepreneurs are like that and that’s great if that, that’s how they want to live their lives.

But I think when you’re a principled business owner, you have values, you care about people, you care about the people you work with, you care about your community, you care about the environment, you know, care about all those things that, in my humble opinion, make us good people, then it can sometimes be very difficult to balance that with having a profitable business.

David: Yeah, absolutely. So studies show the benefits of implementing accessibility into your core values as you start up the business and start growing are numerous. One of the ones that comes to mind is risk. We know that there is legal obligations to meet the needs of your customers and employees.

In Ontario, we have the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. And so the risk there is you wanna make sure that you are complying with the standards. I think another benefit that I understand is innovation. When you give people the opportunity to express themselves, that become fully included in a full participation within the organization they become more creative, more innovative, and more enthusiastic about what the job is all about.

I guess the third one that I would think about is the trust that you mentioned. Going forward, people are becoming smarter because we have the Internet, we have so much information at our fingertips and we really need to build that loyalty.

And more and more customers are gravitating toward organizations that they feel they can trust.

Sandi: Absolutely, and I think in an a weird way, AI is going to accelerate that because you have to be able to decipher or determine what’s real and what’s not. What’s been generated by AI and what is actual fact and truth. And it’s gonna become a skill if we’re gonna teach young people anything, it’s gonna be that skill of how to figure out what’s real and what isn’t, what’s truth from fiction.

The world is so big now, we can reach people halfway around the globe in a split second, but you, you don’t have that personal interaction that we used to have in the olden days, you know. You used to do business with somebody who was standing right in front of you. And now we do business with people we’ve never met, often don’t even interact with Live via Zoom. It’s all email.

I mean, we’ve had clients that we’ve never met and actually never even talked to on the phone, but you have to create a relationship with people by email, which can be quite challenging. I think it’s gonna become even more and more challenging because of AI, and

I think the best way to get people to trust you, once they’ve decided to work with you is to deliver what you say you’re going to deliver. If you say you’re gonna get something done by Friday, you get it done by Friday. If you say it’s gonna cost this much, that’s what it costs and that is part of trust. The minute you break that trust, you’re toast, you’re never gonna win that customer back.

And we know how much it costs to actually get a customer in the first place. You wanna hold onto them for dear life and trust is a big part of that.

David: That’s a good segue into the third part of our discussion, which is marketing design. And I think as you build loyalty with customers, you have to understand how you’re communicating with them.

There’s a number of ways we communicate as people with, you know, with each other. So the first one that is the most obvious is face-to-face communications. That’s usually the most effective, is when you can actually sit down and have a face-to-face conversation with somebody. That requires an understanding of the person you’re talking to because not only are you talking, but you should be listening to what they say.

And so you should be understanding not only maybe their, their cultural values but the limitations they may have. So if the person has a disability, having a face-to-face conversation should allow you to build that relationship so that you understand their body language, their facial expressions, their words they use.

And I think a lot of times, I’ve experienced in the business world, management has a high level of discomfort when it comes to interacting with people with disabilities because they tend to feel the words they use might be wrong or they might offend me or something. So face-to-face is one.

Written communications is another one that I think is important that we develop our strategy around. And of course, in the digital world, written communications it’s important that you use plain language, use language that people understand.

The third one is visual communications, which tends to be the most popular. We are a very visual society, and if you design the world around the visual aspect of a human, then you’re cutting out a lot of people ’cause not everybody depends entirely on the visual communications.

The other one is verbal communication. Verbal communications of course you can have over the telephone or in person. Verbal communications depends on our ability to express ourself, and I think goes back to the first one we talked about face-to-face, where you need to have empathy.

So Sandi, looking at those different aspects of communications, what would you recommend that companies consider when they’re thinking about building a marketing strategy to sell a product or service?

Sandi: It’s a difficult question to answer, so in my mind that means it kind of relates to how difficult it can often be to put some of this theory into practice.

The first thing that sprung to my mind, and I’m gonna reference another book that was quite impactful in our early days in the business, and it was called Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. It was about, you know, how you build a website to make it easy for users to navigate, to find the information. And it’s all those things like plain language, using proper heading structure for somebody who might be using assistive technology.

I would take that whole concept up right to the top of the marketing. And don’t make me think, and I touched on that earlier in this conversation. We think that the fancier we are, the more impressive we are. When I think in reality, the clearer and simpler we make our marketing, the more effective it’s going to be.

We don’t need to bombard people with too much information. We don’t need to impress them with fancy gizmos. They just want the information. If I’m going to buy a car. Don’t tell me about what’s under the hood. I don’t care. Is it gonna get me to from point A to point B? Does it fit within my budget? Does it have all the safety features? You know, that’s all I really need to know. And if you start spewing technical mumbo jumbo at me, you lost me, and I’m quite possibly gonna go to a different dealership and find somebody who’s gonna speak to me the way I need to be spoken to.

And I guess that’s what it comes down to is understanding who your market is, understanding the language that they use, whether it’s English as a first language, maybe your audience is a lot of new Canadians and English might not be their first language. So do you need to communicate differently?

Are you using imagery? You talked about visual communication. Are you using images that represent a broad swath of society? Male and female, young and old, abled, disabled, different colors. The more you represent your target audience in your communications, the better chances you have to connect with them ’cause they’re gonna say, oh, I see that. I see that image that looks like me, so they must be talking to me. Some of this stuff is so subtle.

David: And I think that brings us back to the beginning where I talked about core values because everybody communicates differently. We all have opinions, we all have attitude, we all have biases.

And I think establishing that core value of communications is so important because when you produce a marketing campaign, you’re sending out a message about your company, a brand. And the next step is engaging people. And I find, probably not intentionally, but I find a lot of companies kind of overdo it.

And you get the salespeople that are really helpful, they’re really intelligent, and you get into the service or the product, and then you find you can’t get support. The communication has all of a sudden changed. You know, you’re talking to an AI bot or you’re talking to people that can’t answer your questions because they don’t even know what a screen reader is.

As you said, communicating at the level that the people that you’re wanting to build that relationship with you need to know what language to use, what information to give them. You don’t wanna overwhelm them with information they don’t want.

As a small business owner, Sandi, have you had any kind of interactions with your customers when it comes to written communications, like emails and websites, and what values they might express?

Sandi: I’m not sure how to answer that question. I do know that email can be very tricky. We often read tone into email that may or may not be there. I mean, there are tricks like, you know, uppercase means you’re yelling at me, then you’re not happy and I don’t like that. And so you can immediately get your back up because you’re misinterpreting this written communication.

And I often hear my partner’s voice in my head saying, just pick up the phone and talk to them. Talking to somebody on the phone rather than on email, can change the conversation and clarify the conversation. And sometimes you find out that you were totally misreading everything.

Written communication is probably the most challenging thing to do, and maybe that’s why we use, you know, we think about marketing that usually has a lot of visuals attached to it, whether it’s a website or social media or whatever. And I think maybe the point of the visuals is to kind of help with the tone and help explain what it is you’re trying to communicate and how you’re trying to communicate it.

David: You mentioned that shouting at people through using all uppercase letters or bold letters. I think it’s so important for businesses to understand that there are digital communication standards that are developed by the W3C, Worldwide Web Consortium, and that’s the WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Not only are you shouting at people when you use all uppercase letters, but for some devices like screen readers, they can’t necessarily read that text in a proper format. Compound words will just run together and the screen reader will announce it as some sort of garble that you don’t understand unless you use the camel case where you capitalize the first letter of the word as you string ’em together, then the screen reader understands that these are separate words strung together, and they can pronounce it properly. Written communications can be a challenge if you don’t format it properly.

Sandi: You know, we’ve been in this business of digital accessibility for many, many years, and whenever I speak about the guidelines, it’s there for a reason, but it’s, it has all these other advantages. It’s not just going to help people with disabilities, and yes, we need to be doing that, but there’s advantages to everybody.

It takes less time to scroll through a webpage when we’re using playing language. Websites get picked up on search engines better for using proper heading structure and meaningful link text. I mean, there’s all these things that these WCAG guidelines do for people who need it, that also have other side effects and helps everybody.

So why wouldn’t you do it? Like why wouldn’t you make your life easier and the life of your prospects and customers easier just by using them? So it’s always been baffling to me why it’s a struggle to get businesses to buy into adhering to the guidelines.

To me, it’s just always just makes sense. It’s like, why wouldn’t you?

David: Thank you, Sandi, for joining me on this conversation of marketing with integrity, because I think it’s a, an area that gets left to chance and a lot of small businesses end up struggling because they don’t establish those core values at the startup.

We usually end the podcast off by asking our guests one tip they would like to leave with our listeners. I think the tip I would leave for our listeners at the end of this podcast is when you’re developing your marketing strategy, think about persuasion and inclusion. Think about how does our marketing message educate people? How does it encourage participation?

Do you have any tips that you’d like to leave with our listeners?

Sandi: I would also add, keep things simple. Just don’t overcomplicate your message. Once you know who it is you want to talk to and how you want to communicate with them, just keep it simple. Don’t make me think.

David: You know, I think that is something that is a real challenge these days because when you, you look at the way people communicate, you’re lucky if you get 10 seconds of their attention.

Sandi: Exactly. And that’s why you have to keep it simple. That’s exactly right. You’ve nailed it. That is the ultimate essence of everything is, you’ve got 10 seconds if you’re lucky to get your point across. So don’t make it complicated.

David: Okay. Well thank you Sandi, so much for joining me.

Sandi: It’s been fun.

It’s been great. So thank you.

David: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast.

Are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.