Marketing With Purpose Kit: Bringing Purpose and Empathy into Marketing

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Tullio Siragusa (0:18)

Welcome back to the Marketing With Purpose, a segment of the Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create an impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Tullio, and in each episode, we sit down with the marketing expert to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together, we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. So let's get started. Today, I'm excited to welcome Caitlin Cano, a marketing leader who's currently enjoying what she calls her Quarter Life Retirement. After more than a decade building brands through culture, creativity, and human connection, Caitlin has worked with Austin's favorites like Amy's Ice Creams and Torchy's Tacos, as well as the city vibrant live music and entertainment scene. Her experience has taught her that great marketing isn't just about getting people to buy something, it's about understanding what matters to them and creating brands they genuinely care about. Caitlin brings together empathy, community, creativity and business strategy to make those connections meaningful. We're going to explore today bringing purpose and empathy into marketing.

I can't wait to hear why the best marketing might have less to do with selling and more to do with truly understanding people.

Caitlin, before we dive in, I'd love to hear why was bringing purpose and empathy into marketing, a topic you chose to explore with us today. What is that more important and relevant today, right now?

Caitlin Cano (1:59)

I think today with AI, we are seeing so many of the same thing over and over again. We're having marketers being told to use AI to increase their productivity, their productivity, but in return, we're getting the same type of content over and over again. From my experience, what I've really learned, and actually, my degree is in psychology in online marketing, so how people interact online and want to interact with businesses. At the end of the day, people love brands. People love something that's going to make them feel good. If it's a taco place and they don't really care for the tacos, but they like the brand, there's still a good chance that they're going to go.

From my experience in event marketing specifically, I have really enjoyed pushing the idea and the thought that we're giving people the best night of their life, the best memory that they're going to have and take to their grandchildren and talk about. It's not just a $35 concert ticket. It's a memory someone's going to have for their entire life. Being able to present it in that way of like, hey, you're going to have an incredible time and you're going to remember this forever, really touches on someone's emotions, rather than on someone's impulse buying. That's where I'm coming from.

Tullio Siragusa (3:24)

Very nice. Now, as marketers, we're often pulled between near-term campaign results and long-term brand building. This is the dance that's always happening.

How do you go about ensuring that your marketing strategy stays aligned with the company's growth goals and its purpose in the marketplace? Where do you find the biggest friction points in making that happen?

Caitlin Cano (3:50)

I think a lot of the biggest friction points just to start off that is always going to be, what is your ROAS? How did you get there and what is it going to be? At the end of the day, your CEO is going to want to see bottom line numbers and making sure that revenue is going up. But it's your job as a marketer to be able to explain the impact of brand awareness and brand loyalty. How that is going to effectively bring money down the line. A lot of that happens with influencer marketing. A lot of that happens with big awareness marketing where we want people to be aware of what is coming, but there's going to be times where that campaign isn't always going to return immediately, but it will return within six weeks. A big campaign that we had for Torchy's and where we came through this with more of an empathetic lens is that we worked with the influencer, Brittany Broski.

And why I wanted to pick Brittany Broski for Torchy's was because if you understand her history and understand what she's into, she's from Texas. She went to Texas A&M, crossed the street from Texas A&M as a Torchy's Tacos. There's a good chance she's made a lot of great memories there. We reached out to her. Within 24 hours, she responded that she was fully in, that this was a perfect partnership for her, because it really dealt with some true emotions with it and with that brand that she had.