We recently sent out an email on the topic “No your email doesn’t find me well”. (It was a cracker of a read, and you should definitely subscribe here so you too can be blessed with our fortnightly insightful and slightly unhinged email topics to help you forge ahead with your business.)
To say it opened a can of brain worms (NOT THE RFK JR KIND!!!!!) would be an understatement. So we felt the need to share with with you here.
Right now, all of our inboxes are chocka with “I hope you are well/hope you had a great holiday break” and every business social post feels like it is just motivational “Let’s go 2026” trash masking dead opossum behaviour underneath.
When everyone and their dog in the marketing world has been screaming ‘authenticity’ is the way forward for months now, these messages feel flatter than flat and super disingenuous. Do you actually care if I am well or how my holiday was? Unless we are really close, probably not. Does ‘make 2026 the best’ feel realistic when the news is telling us that the world is a giant dumpster fire right now? Also NO.
Do we think authenticity is still the right lane for businesses? ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY. But none of that stuff is it. Neither is leaning on feel-good things like rainbow-washing or ‘be your best you’ or your weight loss journey right now. As a queer run brand, with both of us needing weight loss, and one of us on a serious diet, sure we COULD. And we could claim it is authentic, but that is not the sort of content that the world needs right now. We are pretty confident that our potential clients do not give a single shit about our rainbow or weight loss stories when they are busy watching the world burn around them.
So what in the great googly-moogly do they want from us then? When we live on a small island, and feel helpless to make any change or provide real support to our friends and family abroad taking the brunt of the fires burning, it also leaves us feeling like we need to keep our heads down so more important voices can be in the limelight. On a global stage, that is true. But locally? What we need are ways to keep feeling connected with each other when we feel increasingly disconnected from everything else out of our control.
How are you going to do that then? Get a whole lot more intentional in the messages you put out in the world, yes even in your emails (maybe especially in your emails). Instead of ‘I hope you are well’ which feels fake and merely filler that took .2 seconds to trot out as a means to get to what YOU want to talk about…take the 5 minutes to instead look up something that might be relevant/insightful/meaningful to the person you are emailing. Are there stats on their industry or area of work they might not know about? Or something you’ve heard in your circles they could benefit from? Lead with saying something that is actually meant to connect with them and start a dialogue, not just as a way to segue to your own wants.
They can’t control what is happening in the world at large any more than you can, but you can both have impact in whatever you are working on, or dreaming up. So step into it. That is where your authenticity begins. And will probably inspire some solid content for you too.