Today I listened to Simon Sinek’s What Game Theory Teaches Us About War and later in the day I found a way to apply his “Values vs. Interests” concept to a debate I had with a colleague.
Simon illustrates this concept with a story that sounds something like this:
When America goes to war and shoots an enemy, we send in our medics, airlift injured enemy soldiers in our helicopters, and take care of them in our hospitals. We act against our own interests because somewhere in our values it says “because that is what America does”.
This lesson was timely. It gave me a framework to look at a decision we need to make and helped us get clearer on our values and interests as a content team.
The debate
The debate is over the decision to include or delete content in an article we are publishing. This content is the best resource relative to the topic. But sending our audience to this resource could expose them to a competitor’s promotion.
The resource in question is a Facebook group. Some would say the leaders in this group are hostile towards our company. I’m told they censor any comments in the group that talk favorably about our company or products. They go so far as removing members from their group who continually say good things about our products.
We know they have an affiliate relationship with a competitor. This explains why they do this. It’s in their interests to keep their members away from our products. I don’t know why they don’t create an affiliate relationship with our company too and allow the best products to win. But that is a conversation for another time.
My position is: deliver the best value to our audience and include this resource in the article. One of my missions as the Content Director is to get our audience thinking something like this:
Every time I read one of their articles I get the best answers and approaches to my challenges. I trust this company, they help me become better at my job, and feel they care about my success.
My concern is if we delete this resource, we’ll be withholding the best answer from our audience and even worse, we’ll be guilty of the same censorship they’re imposing on us.
What are our/my values
When I first joined this company one of the first things we did was create a Marketing Manifesto. It’s our Content Bill of Rights and outlines what we will and won’t do. This document helps us deliver customer experiences that aligns our company’s interests with our audiences’. We believe there’s an unspoken contract between us and our audience. If we create content experiences they want, they will pay us with a very valuable currency, their attention.
Somewhere in the manifesto we wrote:
We believe marketing is a contract between us and our audience. They pay us in attention and we fulfill the contract with great, trustworthy content. We believe attention from our audience and customers is the highest form of currency.
Underneath this is a strategic principle. I believe attention is the precursor to trust. The more attention we get our audience to pay, the more trust we can build. Organic Attention Retention is my long strategy to earning trust versus us paying for it with gimmicky promotions and discounts.
Unresolved conclusion
At the moment there’s nothing in our manifesto that covers this situation. We are in a grey area and the decision could go either way. Will we act from our values and deliver the greatest content experience possible or will we prudently act in our interests and replace the resource with something else?