Authentic Marketing

CHAPTER 5Search for Truths to Drive Constituency Mapping

In a sense it’s the new Marketing 101, viewed through the lens of your moral purpose. Companies need to know their audiences, and they need to know them well. Today, businesses have multiple constituencies they need to fully understand before mapping out communications strategies for each around their moral mission. In this way, every company should be searching for truths—truths about what their audiences care about, their passions, peeves, and opinions on controversial matters. In short, know what keeps them up at night and what gets them out of bed in the morning. Take their temperature and take it often.

This is critical as companies determine their moral purpose and make decisions about how to react to controversial issues that are relevant to their organization and stakeholders. When it comes to moral purpose—whether it’s impacting climate change, helping to solve world hunger, upgrading education, protecting human rights, helping people in need, or addressing health issues—businesses need to understand how this aligns with the perspectives of their audiences. Even more importantly, when an organization decides to take action on more contested and controversial issues, such as gun control, immigration, LGBT rights, etc., it must have its finger on the pulse of constituents to understand how they’ll react to this stance.

Building Your Data Toolbox

It wasn’t all that long ago that the only ways we could get inside ...