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Last week, I had a conversation with Amanda Milligan at Fractl about cognitive biases.

We talked about the importance of communicators understanding how our biases affect the way we message and communicate with all audiences.

This makes our jobs challenging, of course, because we have to consider ALL perspectives, which isn’t easy to do when we each have our own biases and look at things through different lenses.

Even something as simple as the curse of knowledge can affect how we position things—it’s hard to keep a learner’s mindset when we have an expertise, but it’s necessary if we want to be great at our jobs.

At the same time, we have to consider how certain things, such as holidays or the death of a celebrity, might seem innocuous to some, but could really be hurtful to others.

I was talking to my mom and she said she’d started receiving emails from companies about Mother’s Day.

But they’re not marketing emails (yet). Instead, they are compassion-filled emails asking people if they’d like to unsubscribe from the forthcoming Mother’s Day messages.

Here is the one from Sizzix:

Mother’s Day is just around the corner and we know that it can be a difficult time for a lot of us. That’s why we are giving our customers the option to opt out of receiving emails about it. Please click here and we will make sure we don’t send you any communications about any upcoming Mother’s Day collections or content. Don’t worry, you will still be updated on everything else Sizzix!

While Mother’s Day is not a real holiday (says the woman who fully expects jewelry this year!), there are people who’ve lost their moms, don’t want to be moms, or can’t be moms, and being reminded of that hurt or loss every year is hard.

Other organizations that tend to cater to women have followed in the footsteps of Sizzix. 

Decisions Are Made On Emotion

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio once said:

We are not thinking machines that feel rather, we are feeling machines that think.

Every human decision depends on emotion. Every, single one. 

We already know that humans buy based on emotion. And we already know the importance of building trust, from everything to toothpaste and laundry detergent to car and appliance purchases. Even in B2B, we buy based on emotion because we are human beings. 

If we’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that we need to lead our communications with compassion, while keeping our biases in check.

The organizations that are proactive enough to say, “Hey, listen. Mother’s Day is coming up and we’re going to be marketing around it. If you don’t want those messages, that’s totally cool. Here is an easy way to unsubscribe” are the organizations that understand this on an intimate level. 

And that, my friends, is precisely what we discuss on this week’s Spinsucks podcast episode.

Resources Included

• Sizzix
• Spin Sucks Community

About Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communications firm. She is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and is the founder of Spin Sucks Pro. She is the co-author of Marketing in the Round and co-host of Inside PR. Full bio