[Trigger Warning: This post talks about death.]
On the 13th of Jan, 2025, I lost my best friend forever.
Meet Ginger.
I spent the majority of my life with her. I loved her most of everything I ever loved.
She was home.
Death teaches you more about life than life ever does.
Her death wasn't sudden. I was expecting it since she had been sick. Three days before she passed away, our vet had prepared us of what's about to come.
Pro tip: If you have a dog, there's a new medicine that's a preventive tick fever tablet. Check with your vet if you can give it to your pet once every month. Tick fever can relapse and it's often hard to keep recovering.
Ginger was 13 years, 2 months old when she passed away peacefully. She wanted to be petted until the very last minute and we did round the clock shifts to make sure someone kept petting her every single minute.
Even though she put up a tough fight, her body gave up at the end.
This is the probably the closest I've been to experiencing death. As I get older, I'll start to lose more loved ones. And every date will be reminder of a good day or a worse one.
The reason I write this post is to share a few things:
How marketing shifts when you have this context
Some examples
To honor Ginger
After the disastrous event, I didn't really care about anything. I cancelled all my calls. Told a few people about what happened but honestly, nothing really mattered.
So, how would I handle this with empathy if I was on the other side?
I remember working for a company a few years ago. The founder had a distressing relationship with her parents.
Canva sent an email prior to Father's Day to let her opt out of what's about to come. She really appreciated receiving this email and shared with the entire team.
It looks like Etsy also does the same:
The default CTA is to opt-out. And it's not a tiny hyperlink. It's a proper button.
I find Etsy's email better than Canva's because it's more targeted to Mother's Day vs isolating the customer from every special occasion.
At another company, the founder fell sick. He wasn't able to work even a single hour a week. He didn't care that his payments to subscriptions failed. Recovery was most important. When the Customer Support rep emailed the founder, all he got was crickets. And kept wondering whether his email copy was good? Or whether the offer was good?
There are a lot of times that things aren't in our control.
People are suffering through losses. And they just don't care.
Just having this context is probably going to make me a better communicator:
People can lose their family (parents, partner, children, pets, siblings)
The age range is important. Elder people must've had more suffering than younger ones, on average.
Problems vary. Maybe it's a breakup. Maybe it's someone passing away. Maybe it's their own health. Maybe they lost their home (check Palisades fire).
You can't even control the trigger moments. I wake up if I hear the sound of a dog barking. I'll wake up if it's even a whimper. There are just so many trigger moments that it's impossible to control.
We don't need to walk on thin ice nor do we want to feel sorry for people. This is what life is.
But, what we can do is be different.
Having a bit of empathy will immediately force you to make some tweaks. Will you send a price increase email with 2 weeks notice?
Also, regret minimization is a real thing. I used to hold back on certain decisions but I might not going forward. Life is short as is and I don't have as much time as I think I do. So, I'm not going to spend my life wondering about decisions that don't matter much.
The older people get, the faster they make decisions.
Ginger was the greatest dog I could've ever asked for. She was and will always be my best friend. No one can ever replace her.
But I'll never get another dog. I know my heart will never be able to go through this pain again.
So if marketers feature dogs in their ad campaigns, it might drive my attention but I'm not sure if it'll make me feel the way they intend to.
That's all, thanks for reading!
If you've got more examples, please share them in the comment section below.
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