I have a confession. I keep going back to a soap company that doesn’t deserve me.
Five years ago, I found them online. Rare scents. Natural ingredients. Prices that didn’t insult my intelligence. I placed an order and entered my email address to “confirm my purchase.”
You know what happened next.
Within days, my inbox became a crime scene. Coupons. Flash sales. New product announcements. Free shipping alerts. I pictured their marketing team high-fiving behind a glass wall, shouting “We’ve got a live one!”
The soaps, I should say, were extraordinary. Each bar smelled like a small vacation. But eventually, the noise drowned out the product. Catalog after catalog arrived in my mailbox, dozens of them, and I sent every single one to the landfill.
Finally, I unsubscribed. Clicked the link. Filled out the form. Asked them, with as much politeness as I could muster, to please stop.
They did.
Then, a few weeks ago, my husband asked what I wanted for Mother’s Day. I said a gift certificate to the soap company. Because I’m a glutton for punishment (and lavender-rosemary hand soap). Within two weeks, three catalogs had appeared in my mail.
I take full responsibility. I walked back into the trap. But here’s what kills me: the people who make extraordinary soap should know better.
The kindness deficit
Here’s the emotional truth most marketers won’t say out loud: when you overwhelm people with your message, you’re not being persistent. You’re being rude.
I spent the first part of my career creating exactly this kind of marketing, direct mail, catalogs, promotional brochures. I know how the sausage gets made. And I know there’s a better way.
Let me offer four truths I call The Attention Charter, a framework for marketing that respects the people you serve while still growing your business.
Truth #1: Pull, don’t push
Content that earns attention will always outperform content that demands it.
Rather than blanketing prospects with catalogs and flooding inboxes with sale alerts, content marketing offers something valuable, helpful, or genuinely entertaining. The information is so useful that people choose to receive it. And they stay because the content keeps proving its worth.
Attention given freely is worth ten times attention stolen.
Truth #2: Offer, don’t demand
Effective content marketing doesn’t stomp its foot. It doesn’t whine. It extends a confident hand, the right information, to the right person, at the right moment.
If my soap company had sent me a clever guide to repelling mosquitoes with their lavender bars (complete with a modest coupon), I’d have taped it to my laundry room wall. I’d have remembered them fondly instead of writing this article about them.
(Serve first. Sell second. The sequence matters more than the volume.)
Truth #3: Entertain, don’t annoy
Your content must serve your audience before it can serve your business. One powerful way to do that: meet people wherever they are with something compelling enough that they want to consume it.
Podcasts. Video. Newsletters. Social media. Choose the formats that feel natural to you (because forcing yourself into a format you resent is a recipe for burnout, and your audience can smell resentment from a mile away).
Truth #4: Make it about them, not you
Say this with me:
I will resist the urge to constantly write about me, my offers, my company history, our mission statement, or our exciting new products. I will write about things that serve the person reading.
This is the hardest truth for traditional marketers to absorb. But your customer’s number-one concern isn’t you. It’s them. It has always been them.
If the soap company had sent me creative ways to use their products, scent your pajama drawer, hang a bar in your closet, keep mosquitoes at bay, I’d still be a subscriber. And an occasional offer woven into genuinely useful content? I wouldn’t have flinched.
The earned challenge
Here’s what I want you to do this week: open your last five emails or content pieces. Count how many times you said “I,” “me,” or “we.” Then count how many times you said “you.”
If the first number is bigger than the second, you have work to do. Not because you’re bad at this, because you’re human, and humans like talking about themselves. But the businesses that win are the ones that make their customers the hero of every story they tell.
Be the brand people are grateful to hear from, not the one they’re relieved to unsubscribe from.