who we are.

After over 10 years of working in digital marketing, I found myself disillusioned by an industry I once found fascinating and exciting. Both companies and nonprofits seemed to prioritize metrics over meaningful engagement, focusing more on meeting targets than on the quality of their interactions and the value they delivered. Seeing this gave me a grim outlook on marketing, and send me looking in a new direction.

I returned to academia to get a fresh perspective, driven by the conviction that marketing can be a powerful agent for positive change when practiced ethically.

My mission is to show that success doesn’t come from being the loudest, or making the most noise, but from creating genuine value.

I am committed to showing how the way we use technology and marketing significantly impacts our mental, physical, and financial health, and that our own success depends on how we impact the well-being of our communities and our planet. I firmly believe that marketing is a powerful tool that can be used to create better outcomes or to deepen the problems in our society. I truly think it is possible to harness this tool to abide by the old adage of doing well by doing good.

Teaching language and literature in Scotland and Germany, I found that I naturally gravitated towards topics such as media literacy, the social psychology of fashion and the inner workings of marketing & advertising.

With no voice of their own and no obvious ethical marketing codex, teenagers were so vulnerable to the images thrown at them — with consequences ranging from eating disorders to blackmail, from shoplifting to depression.

In 2012, I started and led the global copy team at LEGO Customer Service. I’ll forever be grateful for the opportunity to work as part of a team with a strong ethical stance and a conviction that we need to do the right thing. It was a great honour being able to pour that spirit and mindset into tone of voice guides, copywriting and advisor training. And success proved us right: some LEGO customer service emails went viral.

I then spent a few years at a London-based consultancy, writing for over 70 iconic brands — some of which promoted values that I don’t share.

It was really during that time that I could no longer ignore the fact that people and planet will soon go to **** if we don’t get our act together.

• If we want to make sustainability the norm, we need sustainable communication.
• If we want people to take more responsibility, we need responsible communication.
• If we want to break down the barriers that keep us from working together, we need communication that connects — not divides.

That’s why I started my own consultancy – and why I joined The Ethical Move in 2018. Together with Holger, I created the German guide EthischesMarketing.jetzt.

Next stop: winning SMEs and corporations for the movement. Let’s go!

Co-owner of From Scratch Communications (with Sabine)

Together with Sabine, I created the German guide EthischesMarketing.jetzt.

Hands-on

For more than 16 years, I delivered transformation through my work with innovative global SaaS companies.

My experience includes Professional Services, Product Management, Strategic Partnerships, Customer Success and Strategic Sales Leadership.

During that time, I helped some of the smartest brands to launch groundbreaking products, collaborate remotely, deliver valuable online video content to demanding audiences and increase the maturity of digital product design teams.

Creating Functional Integrity

With this experience, I identify critical areas of change for companies — and design effective interventions to create results. Because successful brand strategy and communication with integrity require more than impeccable content and design.  They require strategic clarity and interdisciplinary teamwork across Marketing, Product and Sales.

Tools

Important methods of my work are strength-based leadership and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, for which I am a certified facilitator.

As a researcher and teacher working at a business school, I have been investigating marketing practices in the attention economy for over a decade. Social media, digital platforms, and content selection algorithms have changed these practices drastically, not least in the news industry.

In democratic societies, mass media are needed for checks and balances – they are supposed to act as the Fourth Estate. However, media companies are more than ever pressured to generate clicks with content that is optimized according to audience engagement metrics, which often compromises journalistic standards.

The societal costs of marketing practices that rely on clickbait, sensationalism, or fake news are enormous. If headlines are designed to stir up emotions rather than inform, people cannot make their best decision at the ballot box or hold elected representatives accountable. They may lose trust in the media or the state, which opens room for radical or populist forces, all of which undermines democracy.

Finding better ways to finance good journalism and help news media reclaim their role as the Fourth Estate requires collaborative efforts by academics and practitioners. That’s why I joined The Ethical Move.

At 18 I was confronted with inequality in the most literal sense. I lived in a rich, gated community in La Paz (Bolivia) – separated from the slum a few hundred meters down the road by a piece of wood and an armed guard. Almost every night, people would die from mudslides because the houses of the rich were crammed onto the hill above.

Returning from Bolivia, my life was never the same. After a decade and a half of research into all possible avenues of relief work, I conceded that ‘relief’ would not come from a fix: a new well, a new school or a new community centre in an impoverished nation.

The only thing to do to create lasting change, is to look for the source of the inequality and break the system that creates the need for relief.

Unsurprisingly, the source is us – and our insatiable hunger for more. Try as we might to fight the urge …we were born addicted. Raised to want. Because being satisfied with what is right in front of us doesn’t generate profit.

And greener pastures are so easy to conjure. A dash of envy and a bit of urgency is all it takes to create a willing subject ready to eat out of our hands. If we listen to the chatter online; the better we are at hacking the minds of your people, the better we are at doing business.

But we lose sight of what is infinitely more important than profit: integrity, trust, creativity, relationships, community, our health, and the health of others. We forget that there is fallout to our insatiability – and we desperately need to remember for us to build an equal society.

I created The Ethical Move because I truly believe we can break the cycle by changing the way we sell. Even if not in my lifetime.