This last week, I have had triple the normal number of emails as companies and vendors fall over themselves to send me their statements on things like race, gender and other issues. Is it just me as an ex- marketing exec that thinks these emails super crass?

In essence, these emails and their bland statements are nothing more than branding masquerading as empathy. At their worst, they are virtue signaling – meaningless. I suspect that these will back fire in some instances as brand is about my experience of a company and if it tells me it is one thing and yet behaves like another …… branding gone wrong.

Corporations that want to help with these social issues should just do and do so silently and anonymously starting inside their own organizations. They don’t need to fill my inbox with spam that in reality is nothing more than branding. And what marketing person really thinks that leveraging a tragedy is a good branding opportunity??

Rant over.