Are you a Marketer who is driven by Personality or Character?

In his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, Stephen Covey talks about the difference between Personality Ethics and Character Ethics.

Personality Ethics consists of your attitude, personality, communication, skills and so on. The Personality Ethics, Stephen Covey says, are secondary.

Character Ethics include things like humility, temperament, our deepest intentions and so on. The Character Ethics, Stephen Covey says, is at the core.

Personality is more about how we say and do things. Character is more about what we are.

The argument is simple - Work on the character… because that lies at the core. Personality is something that can be built.

Character is the foundation of the building. Personality is the aesthetics.

Okay, so now let's talk about Marketers.

Most of the Marketers I see focus a lot on the Personality Ethics. They want to be seen as smart communicators and people with charismatic personalities. Also, a lot of their focus is on developing skills, say, for example, getting better at Google ads or becoming exceptionally skilled at Email Marketing.

But what about the Character Ethics?

Even before we start with getting better at Google ads, we need to get really good at caring about the people we want to serve.

Even before we develop the skills for Email Marketing, we really need to care about the change that we want to bring about in our target market.

Marketing always starts with the customers and the way we want to make their lives better. Email or Social Media is just a tool to achieve this.

Marketers need to begin a project with care.