Surprise! A Gen Z-er Has Something to Say

Technically I’m a Zillennial, not a full-on Gen Z-er. But stick around, that’s hardly the point.

We recently wrote about our ethical standpoints as one of the top business naming services (both in Austin and in the country) and how our, let’s be real, manipulation of information can make a brand sell better.

Then we wrote about our communication values, both with our clients and our colleagues: how results that require empathy must first start at curiosity.

Now, in a similar vein, we’re here to talk about how one of the most key components of building, feeling, and maintaining trust between growth agency and client… is humility. Humility in making mistakes, humility in asking questions, humility in thinking out loud and knowing you will, in the end, be understood. We’re not a judgmental folk here at Rock Candy Media. We cuss in our meetings and think formal greetings/signatures on professional emails is a pointless time-waster. We don’t do facades and we don’t beat around the bush. A lot of people don’t like that.

You’d think this would make it harder to uphold our business– always catching people off guard and coming across as harsh and unfiltered. But, aside from the fact that our clients tell us they love it because it shows we’re being real and raw with them, it actually makes doing business easier. You know why? It very quickly weeds out the exact type of people we don’t want to work with anyways.

Our Time Is Your Money

Hiding things from each other, whether it be full-on lying, withholding the truth, beating around the bush, trying to sound smarter than we are, or simply heavily filtering every word that gets exchanged is no way to do business. It’s no way to get things done, see ROI, or spend time (and our time is your money). We’ve always had this philosophy and, looking back on the culture our CEO has created and the team she’s built at Rock Candy Media in Austin over the last decade, the one red thread running through all that + our clients is that we have a high standard when it comes to humility. Humility, turns out, was the backbone all along.

Our own humility in saying we’re the experts in growth hacking strategies and product naming but you’re the experts in your industry (and nothing can change that) sets the foundation for collaboration. Client humility is hearing straight-up when something they do or an idea they have is wrong or won’t work, and not being hurt by us saying so (and vice versa).

Collaborative humility is how we can tell if we want to work with someone. Maybe that’s actually the step between curiosity and empathy as we said in that earlier blog.

Whatever, we don’t need to number the steps, I guess. We just need to keep following them, because they’re what has gotten us to where we are today as the best performance marketing group in Austin (and a whole bunch of other national accolades). Luckily for us, I think our CEO has secret anti-tunnel-vision glasses that make sure she only hires people that naturally live this way, so no one has to actually pay attention to following those steps, whatever the order might be.

Anyways, that’s our therapy blog for this week as we write and think out loud. Hit us up for an Anti-Template if we sound like your kind of people, or click around to see what else we’ve got to say on marketing matters, 2020 trends, startup graveyards, and more. Gen Z team, out.