Mandy Hornaday: Whether it's Pride Month, an election year, or just another day navigating the complexities of brand marketing, today's marketing leaders are being asked to do more than ever before. Some brands are pulling back, others are doubling down, and many marketers, maybe even you, are caught somewhere in the middle asking, what does it look like to lead with values and protect your role? How do you advocate for authenticity when performative allyship is so rampant? And is silence ever neutral, or does it send a message of its own?
Mandy Hornaday: That's exactly why I invited Katie Martell to join me for this conversation today. Katie is a LinkedIn top voice, keynote speaker, and unapologetic truth teller who's built her career helping brands show up with clarity and conviction, especially when it's uncomfortable. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Adweek, and her latest project, Woke and Weary, is a must watch for any marketer navigating brand values in a polarized world.
Mandy Hornaday: In this episode, Katie and I explore what brand authenticity really means and why so many brands are still getting it wrong, the rising cost of performative allyship, how to lead with values even when leadership is hesitant, and why silence isn't neutral. It's a message your customers, employees, and community will hear. If you're responsible for brand, messaging, or culture, or you're just trying to lead with integrity in a risk adverse environment, this conversation will meet you where you are. And it will give you the language, clarity, and courage to lead through moments that matter. Let's get into it.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Katie, welcome to Growth Activated. I am so excited to have you here today.
Katie Martell: Girl, I was looking at my schedule today and I was like, okay, I have this meeting, that meeting, this thing is due. And then I get to talk to Mandy Hornaday. It is the highlight of my day. It is the highlight of my week. Thank you for having me, for real.
Mandy Hornaday: You are so sweet. I was just thinking, I mean, I always love our conversations. You are so uplifting and inspirational and yet down to earth and tell the truth about things. And so I think this will be a great conversation today. Let's start with, I know you've been coined as the unapologetic marketing truth teller, which I think says so much about you and your background. So how did that come to be? Tell us about your background.
Katie Martell: Oh, my background is in a very strange universe of marketing to other marketers. I've been doing it since 2009. Back when Scott Brinker's Martech landscape only had about a hundred companies on it. I was there when you were able to legibly read the brands. And what's happened ever since is, when you market to marketers, A, it raises the bar on your own marketing. So I've been grateful for that motivation. But B, it really makes you a critic of the space. You kind of have to be by nature, I think. Some of us just kind of look at what we do as marketers and we think, it could be better. And when you're given a platform, like I luckily now have with sites like LinkedIn, it just kind of all came together where about 10 years ago, I started ranting and raving as we all love to do.
Katie Martell: And some stuff actually took hold. It's actually why I have a bot, the scientific term, a boatload of followers now on the internet, on LinkedIn, LinkedIn influencer for days. But it's given me a great chance to kind of continually look at and shine a light on our industry. The impact it has beyond our paychecks, I think, is something we all need to be cognizant of. So it's been a journey of just saying what's on my mind translated to, hey, would you be on this podcast? Hey, would you speak at this conference? Hey, would you write an article about this? And 10 years later, I've gotten to speak all over the world about marketing and specifically our impact beyond our businesses. And I think that's kind of, we don't have a chance to look at that too often, but I'm always happy. And I think it's important that we do.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you are a huge inspiration for me, even just from your influencer perspective, because as you know, I'm trying to market to marketers and that's rather new for me. And so it's been a fun journey learning a lot of things the hard way, but it's so much fun. And you're a great, you're a great role model for that.
Katie Martell: Do you want my number one tip for marketing to other marketers?
Mandy Hornaday: Please.
Katie Martell: I'm going to jump right to the clickbait here. This one tip will surprise you. No, it's be honest, and treat marketers, they say typically in marketing, don't market to yourself, but if we're doing what we're doing here, when we're speaking to folks like us in our role, the best thing you can do is to treat them as you want to be treated, as smart as you are, as multifaceted as you are. Don't treat marketers like they're dumb. Treat them like you would want it. So the content you produce has to be something that would make you go, oh, this is helpful. Oh, this is new. And I think you need to continually raise your own bar. Like the standard for your own marketing must be good enough where other marketers are going to see you, no pressure, Mandy, and say, hey, this is something that I respect.
Katie Martell: It's the cost of doing business with another marketer, that your marketing has to be good enough to get you in the door. We see a lot of BS out there in the marketing to marketing scene, especially now with, I mean, I hate to bring up Scott Brinker's Martech scene again, but my God, there's 15,000 companies now with VC backing trying to get the attention of a CMO, head of marketing, whatever it is. So it's never been harder to reach a marketing audience. What's worked for me, and this is speaking from the perspective of, I used to be a content marketing consultant, a PR consultant, very much in that world of building a brand, a startup. How do we get kind of David versus Goliath? How do we become heard and seen in a world of commoditization? The key is to just be speaking the language of your buyers and say the things that they're thinking, but not saying aloud. I call them exceptional truths. Say the things that they wish you would say. That's the key to standing out, because guess what everyone else is doing? They're using ChatGPT to write a lot of the exact same stuff. You have to be authentic today. And that word is so meaningless these days, but all it means is speaking truth, speaking truth to power in your industry. Talk about the stuff that keeps marketers up at night and do it in a way that is fearless. And you too might have 150,000 followers on social channels. I mean, that feels like an accident, but I love it. Honestly, I appreciate the platform, and it's given me a great chance to shine a light on stuff that we have to talk about as an industry.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Well, and I feel like even as you mentioned, it's so much harder today. I even think about LinkedIn a couple years ago, and I mean, you were clearly an early adopter, because people weren't really thinking about posting on LinkedIn and leveraging it as a social channel in that way. And one of the things I've found through the saturation, I would love your opinion on, is yes, there's a lot of AI stuff out there, but there's a lot of the same point of view that I see coming over and over and over again. And it's almost hard to think about, okay, what is my unique point of view? What can I really add to this conversation that isn't just saying the same thing everyone else is saying? So how have you countered that or broken through that in the past?
Katie Martell: It's like a three-part equation. I'm over here coming up with formulas as if I've got them in my back pocket, but this is kind of just, it's a great question and I'm happy for the chance to reflect on that. So thank you for the question. Firstly, think about meeting your buyers where they really are and not where you think they might be. In other words, talk to real buyers, get a sense of the words they're actually using, not what the industry analysts might be using. The buzzwords matter. The categories matter. But what words are your buyers actually using to describe their world and their pain points and the way that they make decisions? I'd rather use that vocabulary and speak to them like they're people. And I think that's just my nature in general, but also it's important if you're trying to say something different.
Katie Martell: The other piece of it is what do you uniquely bring to market, your unique selling point? What is it about your particular blend? I mean, you might be the company with the best technology, but the absolute worst, I'm sorry to say this, worst go to market. You know what I'm saying? And so you can really get an advantage over that type of company with a smarter, more agile go to market. I think it's about being honest about where you have competencies as a business. I remember working with some founder led companies where their technology, I'm going to be honest, was pretty much the same mousetrap. They weren't even building a new one. The difference was that this particular founder, and I'll leave names out and brands out, but there's some of your favorite Martech brands, the difference is that these founders were willing to really be status quo breaking in how they went to market. They were really willing to challenge. This is the days of the challenger sale and getting sales teams to really push back on how buyers see the world and help them see the world differently. It required at the helm of that, like a founder who was willing, or a spokesperson, it could be someone, maybe the CMO at a larger company, willing to say, this is what we uniquely bring to market, willing to shake things up.
Katie Martell: So I remember working with a founder who was incredibly willing to just put out article after article after article, unafraid of, is this perfect? Is this right? And because of that, you kind of build this loyalty and this following. And again, their technology may have not been drastically that different. Maybe their funding was even less than major competitors. What was different is their point of view. And so if you're out there saying, okay, my space is commoditized, everyone looks and sounds like me, you've got to be willing to look at it like the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Every single thing in that cereal aisle behind the logo and the mascot is pretty much the same sugary crap. It's about specifically being honest about your place in the market and where you can carve out that competitive advantage. I feel like this is obvious advice, but I also am aware that it's so much easier to just kind of do what we're used to and think of it like, well, we have a strong message, it's relevant. That should be enough, right? It's not. You've got to put yourself in the buyer's seat and look at the consideration set through their eyes.
Katie Martell: We have a good friend, Mandy, our friend Mark Feldman, who changed my life. When I first started in this space, Mark Feldman, shout out to Mark, was my first boss ever. And he sat me down in a room and he showed me the scene from Mad Men, where you have Don Draper in a room selling cigarettes. He's looking at this cigarette company and he's saying, look, your product is just like everyone else's. And they're looking at him with indignation, like, how dare you say our product is just like everyone else's. It is, it's cigarettes. And so he looks at them and says, how do you make your cigarettes? And they go through this process, yada, yada, yada. It's this, it's that, first we do this, then we do that, and then we toast it in the North Carolina sun. And he's like, right there, it's toasted. And they're like, what do you mean? Everyone's cigarettes are toasted. And Don Draper goes, no, everyone else's cigarettes cause cancer. I think it's Lucky Strike. Lucky Strikes are toasted.
Katie Martell: And they use this campaign to say, look, everyone else is talking about cancer and how doctors recommend this brand over the other. We're the only brand talking about the fact that our stuff is toasted, despite the fact that the rest of them are as well. They carved out an entirely new, not even category, just another new consideration feature for the buyer to think about, that created that differentiation. It's that willingness to go out and talk about something different and change the way a buyer sees something. It's an entry point for the buyer. So shout out to Mark for helping me understand that in that moment, the only thing that separates a brand, whether it's cigarettes or cereal, is in fact how you go and talk about it. And it takes some risks. You know marketers are risk averse by nature. We have to protect our budgets. We have CFOs to answer to, after all. But my God, we've got to create new ways for buyers to see us. And that takes some boldness and courage.
Mandy Hornaday: Oh, absolutely. And I've really enjoyed following a lot of founders on LinkedIn recently. I feel like founder led marketing has become very popular, and I'm in the middle of Dave Gerhardt's book on it.
Katie Martell: Oh, yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: And so it's been really fun. But one of the things, it's a great transition, Katie, because one of the things I know about you is you very much care about brand authenticity. So how do you see those two things tying together in terms of finding a unique point of view, finding a new way to position your product in the market while remaining authentic to what your brand and your company really is and is about? So how does that blend together in your mind?
Katie Martell: When you think about what's authentic, you think about what's actually real. Most marketing is looked at with skepticism, even from other marketers who are responsible for it. All advertising is looked at through a lens of skepticism first. It's advertising. It's meant to sell something. You get an email from a salesperson. You are inherently skeptical of it. You do not want it. You post on LinkedIn about how awful it was. Nobody wants to be sold to. But people do love to buy. And I think that's the difference about authenticity. It's this idea that are we being and speaking truth? Are we being honest about the challenges our buyers face? Are we actually speaking their language? And are we actually speaking in a way that we can match the actions that our words are promising?
Katie Martell: I will always say this until I'm blue in the face. Branding is a promise. Marketing is a promise. Every single thing we put out into the world makes a promise. We have a promise about how we're going to do business with you, a promise about the kind of value you'll get from our product, a promise about what it means to be aligned with our brand. I used to say that nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. You know what I'm saying? You really can do a lot in marketing to draw a lot of attention to a brand. But when you get there, the product, the experience a customer has after the sale, experiencing value, the whole thing, adoption, all of it has to match. Or everything you do in marketing is just wasted. It's like hitting a wall. I know that answered your question, but my idea of authenticity is living up, walking the walk, walking the same walk as you're talking. And in B2B, that means giving an experience to the customer that matches this amazing brand promise that you're setting out. It is so much harder to do in practice, because it requires a CMO to reach way more into the business than I think the history of CMOs has had to. We have to be willing to say we've got to elevate our entire customer experience, buzzword, just post-sale as well. And it has to match what we're promising.
Katie Martell: I see it all the time, that we as marketing leaders, we're not focusing on the full picture. We're not focusing on post-sale. We're sometimes not even focusing on past the MQL stage in a lot of instances.
Mandy Hornaday: And so it's a great reminder that we need to be thinking about the broader customer experience and what they're experiencing with our brand.
Katie Martell: Peter Drucker said it best, and this is good advice that I will always say. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. That is what marketing is about, knowing the buyer well enough that it just matches. It fits. But a lot of times, you're right, we get so caught up in these top funnel metrics. We get caught up in the vanity metrics. I'm not going to get into the debate about attribution and how to measure the impact of marketing, but when done right, marketing is a direct product related function. Our job as marketers is to create markets. We forget that. Our job is to define who this is for and why. We have to be willing to be leaders. A CMO in a bubble is not effective. You've got to get into the world of your buyers, how they talk, how they live. Period. That's all to say on that.
Mandy Hornaday: And it is easier today, more so now than ever, because I think of even when I was at the startup and I was really close to the product, I was listening to so many Gong calls, I can't even count, to understand the customer insights. And today it's like, wow, you could throw hundreds of customer transcripts into ChatGPT and some AI tools and very quickly synthesize a large amount of information. And so there's really no excuse today. You have to look at it like a competency and not just assume your assumptions are enough.
Katie Martell: The more digital our world gets, I mean our marketing world, the more important it is to keep these really close fingers on the pulse of customers, one-to-one relationships, real authentic relationships. I mean, heck, I do videos now, Mandy, on the internet where I am half AI. I swear to you that a lot of the stuff I do, if it's a voiceover, it could just be AI that we use to generate my voice. It's easier than ever. I know that sounds controversial, but it's easier than ever to fake it, to create this artificial wall between you and buyers. And to your point, it is easier than ever if you have the motivation to really understand what buyers need. I know when I was at the B2B startup with our shared friend Mark Feldman, I just remember having a great conversation with you where you reminded me gently, I need to be the voice of the customer and I need to make sure I'm representing that to the entire leadership team, including product and tech and sales and all of that. It was such a great reminder, because we can get so lost and not put the customer at the heart of everything we're doing.
Katie Martell: Sometimes I see it, and it makes me laugh, because a lot of times we laugh or cry, I'm not sure, but a lot of times we put sales at the heart of what we're doing and we don't put the customer at the heart of what we're doing. And especially the more and more marketing is expected to support sales and be subordinated under sales and a lot of these things that are happening today, I see that happening more and more. Revenue is king, as they say. Revenue keeps the business going. There's a truth to building a business where sales is the lifeblood. If you don't have revenue, you really can't grow your business. But I'm so glad you said what you said about marketing as a function being considered subordinate to sales, when in fact sales is a function of marketing. Sales is a result of great marketing. Sales is the next step after great marketing. It does not happen without good marketing. A salesperson cannot sell without the right positioning, the right messaging. We know this, but I think it's important to say. I think that a lot of digital transformation has made the function and the strategy and the human element of marketing devalued, and rightfully so, you can't measure a lot of this stuff. And so it's hard to go back to the investors who have given you money and are looking for one metric, sales. That is it, that is all they care about. It's really hard to lose that funnel vision and to broaden out a little, look at the macro. Great brands know that marketing is not just a branding play, a lead gen play. It is exactly the positioning of the business that will help it grow.
Katie Martell: But I don't envy CMOs today. I don't envy the work that has to be done. I mean, I know you had a guest on recently that talked about CFO, CMO alignment. It is important whether it's a five person business or a 500,000 person business. You're the steward of the budget they're giving you, but you've got to be willing to push back on metrics and measurement that doesn't serve marketing as a function. Especially if you lead a team, I see that as your biggest responsibility, to be the advocate internally for the value of marketing writ large. And I think right now, a lot of people think marketing is just this PR crisis response department.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, for real.
Katie Martell: We'll just bring out and trot out marketing when we have a real crisis to solve out there. We've said something that the woke buyers don't like, you know what I'm saying? It's this weird, I read about marketing leaders as this afterthought, their response to things, instead of this very strategic, very upfront, very embedded in the strategy of the business type department.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, I would love to, let's transition into that, because I know that you talk a lot about woke marketing, and I think it ties in so well with brand vision and brand authenticity. So what is woke marketing, for our listeners? Teach us what it's about.
Katie Martell: I got you, girl. It's one of those words that, you know, it's gotten a pejorative meaning. But all woke means is it means awake, aware of the issues facing marginalized communities, anyone who's not the dominant culture in the business or in a society. So the idea of being woke is just being aware of things that we previously maybe didn't talk about, didn't think was part of our charter. It's perfectly tied to our conversation about both authenticity and the role of marketing, because what it says is, as a business, you have a set of values and you live those values every day, right? How you do business is reflected. It reflects your values, how you treat customers, how you treat problematic customers, how you treat your employees, how you treat anyone in the community in the fabric of the way in which you do business, the people in the communities around your factories. I mean, this is the impact of our businesses far beyond money. There is a lot that a business touches.
Katie Martell: When you think about woke marketing, woke anything these days, it means marketing and go to market, anything that dares to touch on a social justice issue or the many social movements happening over time. We have a class war happening. We have racial justice as a conversation, LGBTQIA rights under attack. We have this whole DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion acronym that has been demonized, just like woke has, that has come to mean just kind of anything that people don't want to talk about. And I hate to be so broad about it, but it really does mean that these days. When your brand is somewhat authentic, then this conversation changes to be less about who's mad at us today, what should we be saying? When you're an authentic brand who's in touch with how you do business, the values of your organization, the ways that you operate, all woke marketing means is that you've been willing to look at what I'm talking about, the ways in which you do business. Are your meetings inclusive? Is your hiring practice inclusive? How do you treat the women in your business? How do you handle childcare, parental care? It's less about the words woke, DEI, and it's more about the everyday decisions happening at a company that make it a more inclusive place to work at, to buy from. Do you have captions on your videos for people who don't have sound on, or maybe can't, or a screen reader, for example, if your digital property is aligned to an accessibility audience? It's really an interesting set of problems to go solve. It isn't anything controversial, but unfortunately with the culture war that we live in, with the highly politicized environment, business and cultural issues are now intertwined. And with COVID driving a lot of people home and into different careers, you start to see lines being blurred between business and personal stuff that 10, 15 years ago you would never talk about, now becoming part of the charter of a CEO having to talk about this, or a company that does financial services having to suddenly take a stand on that. It's left a lot of people confused, a lot of buyers frustrated, and a lot of social movements lost in the sauce, in the chaos.
Katie Martell: I talk a lot about this to marketers, but also to consumers, because a lot of consumers don't realize what happens behind the scenes. And they see things like in 2020, we saw a lot of Black Lives Matter tweets and George Floyd responses from companies like Adidas and Salesforce. What are you doing talking about racial justice? But here we are, consumer brands and B2B brands. I just read an article this morning that the focus of Black Lives Matter, which was on police brutality, police killings have actually gone up. Five years later, it's actually worse than it was then. I know it's sad. I'm bringing the mood down here, but we talk a lot about what is DEI and our effect on the shareholders. And the real conversation is not actually a business conversation at all. What really is happening here is that these are communities that are being forgotten in our controversy of, is Bud Light's sales going up or down? Is Target's sales going up or down? Who cares? We are losing the plot. We have completely lost the plot on what these social movements have been calling out for. MLK Junior once said, a riot is the language of the unheard. And so when there is a social protest or a social movement, I think our first response as marketers is, ooh, how should we respond to this? How do we react to this? What do we say so that we don't get in trouble? What do we say so we're not canceled? Right? And these are good questions to be asking as a brand steward. But is anyone listening to what the social movements are asking for? Is anyone actually listening to what these voices are calling out for? Because it actually isn't as controversial as it sounds.
Katie Martell: I think about the women's rights movement. I think about Me Too in 2017. The largest protest in the history of the US happened in January of 2017. Women were responding to a well-documented rise in misogyny. And I think within organizations, within companies, there was this really quick response to say, oh, we're aligned with women. Oh, we love women. Oh, we love X, Y, Z, whatever. And there was a lack of listening. There was a lack of actually asking, what is this movement calling for? And it was for accountability for women that are systemically abused at their workplaces, for men that get away with abuse. That's not controversial. They were looking for more inclusivity as far as leadership was concerned. We started to see all these breakdowns of what's your leadership look like, your board, your C-suite, this and that. In other words, addressing your systemic biases. They were asking for equal pay, they were asking for family leave. These are not controversial things. These are not things that are destroying America. These are things that are improving it. We've completely lost the ability to have that nuanced conversation. The word woke instantly polarizes people. And for marketers, they look at it now as this divisive thing that they have to protect themselves against. We don't want to be in the crosshairs of the administration. I understand that fear. And I understand Verizon, for example, is having to pull back DEI because they need this particular purchase. Forgive me for not having the details in front of me, but they need the federal government to approve an acquisition or a purchase. And so they really do need to be giving in to an administration who's saying, we don't agree with these values.
Katie Martell: I think the bravest thing that a marketer can do today is to be willing to look internally and say, of the people that we employ, of the people that we serve, our employees, our customers, all of our stakeholders, that's where we need to start listening. That's where we need to start drawing our inspiration for how do we respond to a world that is polarized. If you listen, if you do the work to ask customers what they want, if you do the work to figure out where your business can authentically stand up, I think you'd be surprised at how progressive every company actually is. Because you really get down to brass tacks. Who doesn't want a workforce that is more diverse, more equitable, more inclusive? Oh, no, I just said DEI, but are those things really controversial? We have to be willing to get over the fear of being canceled and look at what the social movements are asking for. It is not just a business conversation. And if it is, if we go to this point to say, well, diverse businesses create more revenue, we've lost the plot entirely. That is not our job. Bring your humanity back into the job, bring your humanity back into business, and have a backbone. Because history is going to look at this moment and say, what did companies do?
Katie Martell: And the ones that are giving in and saying, oh, you know what, five years ago we sponsored Pride, but this year it's too risky, it's revealing the performative nature of all of these kinds of campaigns. And it's revealing where you actually stand. And that goes back to the trust that we talked about. That's going to kill brand trust. Where is your integrity? Where is your authenticity? Buyers know it. Look at what's happening with Target. Look at the boycotts. People are paying attention to what you do and what you don't do. It isn't controversial to stand up for human rights. It is not controversial to take a stance to say our business should be one that embodies the values of our stakeholders, customers, partners, everyone. Who are you selling to? Who do you want to be? And how do you want to be remembered? Yeah, that's, you know, I'll stop ranting here, but that's what I think about at night when I'm reading HBR articles and Bud Light is doing this, Target's doing that.
Mandy Hornaday: Oh, it's been heartbreaking. It's been so heartbreaking to watch these companies roll back initiatives that we thought were authentic. So I'm curious, Katie, when I hear all of that, the thing that sticks out to me is I would imagine first and foremost it's important for your employees to know your true values, and what you were talking about earlier with equal pay and women in leadership and all of these different stats that are important. Do you even recommend that companies are publicly sharing that and or marketing that? Or is it more so just focus on within, and if people find out great, but you don't need to turn that into a marketing opportunity? What's the line there in terms of being authentic with the external public about what you're doing and investing in versus trying to overmarket something that is inappropriate?
Katie Martell: I think the line is drawn of, again, what we've been talking about, is it real or not. These days, unfortunately, the market has shifted. So again, 15 years ago, I would have said, don't say a word unless you're actually living the values. In fact, I'll say that today. Don't say a word unless you're actually living the values. But now, silence is actually complicity. Do you know what I'm saying? It's this weird catch-22 for a lot of brands where saying nothing used to be a very safe thing to do. We would never talk about abortion, right? This is one of those topics that was absolutely do not talk about, but now when you have women's lives at risk in certain states and employers being looked at to say, do you cover basic healthcare for women that now includes things like abortion? It's now becoming something you do have to have something to say about. So the question is no longer, can you sit it out? It's why would you, when you have an opportunity to demonstrate to the world what you believe, what you're about. And again, if your organization is one that does not support women and does not believe in healthcare or equal rights or any of that, then it becomes a risk, right, to draw attention to it, to shine a light on it, or worse, to try to dance around it with an influencer campaign about it, or to donate money to a charity about it and do nothing. I mean, these are the days where people like me, unfortunately, will call you out, and we know this. It's now the new normal to have this age of sunlight where you have buyers on social calling out a brand. So there is no hiding. There is only the decision you now make as a CMO to say, what do buyers want from us? What does the majority of the world want from us?
Katie Martell: You know, it used to be in 2015, I'm sorry if I'm jumping around here, but in 2015 the federal recognition of gay marriage was recognized. I got engaged that year and I got married a year after, because prior to that I couldn't get married. And I don't take those rights for granted. We're now 10 years, 2025, we're 10 years after that. The reason gay marriage became the law of the land is because over time public perception has shifted thanks to the work of decades of activists, right? And where we are today is in a world where the shift of the culture war has gone into transgender individuals and not so much about gay marriage. Remember how up in arms people were about gay marriage and how it was going to ruin the institution of marriage? Guess what? I've been gay married for 10 years. Is anyone's institution ruined? No. And it shows you the fly by night nature, the ways in which these culture wars are created based on a kind of a scapegoat. Who was the scapegoat this year? It's transgender individuals who are systemically under attack. I mean, one in five hate crimes in the country right now are anti-LGBTQ. There are actually like over a thousand hate groups in the U.S. trying to villainize a community that is less than 1% of the population. So if you're a business and you're sitting here going, what do we do about the trans issue? The question is not how do you protect your brand value? It's what do you actually want for your transgender employees, your transgender customers, your colleagues, the stakeholders. It is not about the brand. It has to start at that human level, because these are social movements. And if you are really concerned about your brand equity in this moment, you have to be worried about trust. You have to be worried about saying one thing, doing another.
Katie Martell: So we're talking about social movements. We're talking about people who need our, meaning brands, meaning people with platforms, meaning people with a voice, we need support. We need people to be out there saying that trans people deserve to exist safely with protection. So do every single other person of the minority of the month. A business that stands up for those rights is not controversial. It might be woke, but I don't know, in 10 years we're going to look back and think anyone who was woke was simply human, was simply right, was simply just right. I know we need to keep our jobs, but I also think right now we need to live with ourselves. And I do believe that everyone listening to your podcast, Mandy, because I know you, has integrity. So when you're faced with this decision, Pride Month is coming up. I don't know when this is going to drop, but happy Pride, everybody. Pride is a protest. We see corporate sponsors pulling out of Pride because it's become a very different environment than it was 10 years ago when gay marriage was passed. It's a very different environment. But right now, having that rainbow logo means much more and much different things than it did 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I would have been like, oh, take that rainbow off. Having the courage in 2025 to go and say to the world, support human rights, unfortunately, is a radical, brave, courageous act. But it's critical that we do, because if we are silent, then who wins? Who are we actually signaling? We are not victims of a culture war. We are actually the people who are architects of the future. We are marketers. We should be more courageous in how we respond, because we have more power than we think. And I will stop ranting there.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, you have me all fired up. But you know, I have a lot of companies in the staffing space that I work with. And so many of them had so much pride in all of the diverse talent that they placed. And being a diversity staffing supplier was a really big thing that actually got you into a lot of programs. And now companies are in this in between where they're in a lot of federal programs. And so they don't know whether they should peel that back as a part of their branding to stay in those programs if they're at risk, or whether they stay true to it and potentially go under if that's a large percentage of their revenue. And so what would you say to the B2B marketing leaders and the CMOs who are in positions like that, that might personally deeply care, but then they also need to balance keeping their job and keeping their business alive? How should they show up today in a way that's positive?
Katie Martell: I hope this isn't controversial, but I think that their hands are tied. Our current administration is making it impossible to do what you're describing, or to ignore what's happening. I hear you. If your organization is based on federal funding and reliant on any kind of federal funds, like I said with Verizon, things like that, there are companies where the standard is you will pull back from your public facing so as not to piss off this administration. But I hope that these leaders go home at night and sit with that and sit with the history, knowing that history repeats itself, of prior situations in which there was a marginalized community scapegoated and therefore blamed for all the troubles of the world and culture wars. And maybe ask themselves, what did companies and people do in this moment? I think activism can show up in many ways. And if you can't show up as an activist at work, fine. But I hope when you go home at night, you are deeply uncomfortable to a point where you now funnel your talents elsewhere. I hope you look at other ways to leverage your talents and your resources and your platform. You can volunteer. You can do a lot. Every single one of us can do a lot. The worst thing I think people can do if they're aware of the tensions right now is nothing at all. We need to be willing to judge what we're seeing and say, that's not right. And I know that in business it's hard to do any kind of real activism, but we, at an individual level, can do a lot. If you're a marketer, you have a lot of skills in communication, in persuasion, that can be really useful in this world. Do something, anything. Pick a minority of the month that needs help and do something. I imagine if like 10 of the people who were listening to this, just 10, took action now because they heard me ranting about this, that's how sea change happens. Activism looks like a lot of different things, and it doesn't have to look like these big sweeping job losing moves. Keep your jobs, but also see where you can convince some people internally that it is a good move to act in the best interests of your buyers. Again, frame the conversation in one that is grounded in our stakeholders, our buyers, our customers, our employees, what they need, what they want, what they're saying.
Mandy Hornaday: I know the last time we had a great talk like this was back in 2020 and a lot of brands felt like they needed to respond and weren't sure how to respond. It was probably the crescendo of responding to social injustice. And now I feel the pendulum has swung the other way. So I always appreciate your conviction and your voice. You're super inspiring. So you've inspired me. I'm sure you've inspired others.
Katie Martell: I hope, like you said, the pendulum is swinging, and what it's doing is revealing how many people were using social movements as just a PR tactic. And that's okay. I was calling it out because it's what I do. But I think now it's been exposed at a level that everyone is now aware of. So when people are shocked by the sudden pullback in DEI or whatever the movements are, those of us who haven't stopped paying attention are not shocked. This is actually what we've always been saying, that most companies use the minority of the month as a PR ploy. And what we have been calling for, what the movements have been calling for, is real action internally, looking at your business practices, how you go to market, everything through a lens of, is this just, is this equitable, is this the kind of world we want to see? Not controversial, not dangerous. If we can get to calm, nuanced conversations, we'll see progress. But until then, we're going to see highly charged emotional things like we even heard from me today. This is where business has become personal and no one has the answers, but thank you for letting me give my take on it. And I really hope we get a chance to talk again, because this is ever changing.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Well, Katie, thank you so much for all of your wisdom that you shared today. If people want to learn more, I know you come speak to marketing teams and help them navigate some of this and look at their brand authenticity. So where can they find you? I know you're a big LinkedIn influencer, so I assume.
Katie Martell: Oh yes, influencer all day. No, do find me on LinkedIn. I do post some fun stuff. I have a new, it's basically a talk. It's called Woke and Weary. I gave it the day after the 2024 election and it's been turned into a film, basically. Just a film about the lecture. But if you are someone who wants to learn about how we got here, it's a really great look at the last 10 years, and actually goes back to the 50s and looks at how companies have always used women's rights and other social movements to sell things. So a little history lesson, a little context for where we are. So that's on my website, katie-martell.com, and we'll link to it in the show notes here, I'm sure, Mandy.
Mandy Hornaday: You will, yep. But check that out.
Katie Martell: And if I can come to your organization and rant with PowerPoint slides that are highly engaging, I would love the opportunity.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Well, Katie, thanks so much again. We will talk soon.
Katie Martell: You're a legend, Mandy Hornaday. You're amazing. Thank you so, so much.
Mandy Hornaday: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
