This President’s day, I learned that at the time of his death, George Washington’s Mount Vernon farm had over 300 enslaved persons.
Not slaves. Enslaved persons. That little difference–the politically correct difference–makes all the difference. And that difference matters not just for so-called snowflakes but also for marketers. Marketers can’t live in their own world; they must live in the worlds of their customers.
While it may seem counter-intuitive that Lin-Manuel Miranda chose to portray the life of one of America’s most patrician Founding Fathers via hip-hop, it shouldn’t. This descendant of a Scottish laird had words. Lots of words.
He wrote poetry as a young boy clerking for a merchant in his native Caribbean. He wrote his first political tracts as a student at King’s College before the Revolution and the institution’s name-change to Columbia. He wrote dispatches after dispatches as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. Most significantly, he helped write the United States Constitution and, most importantly for us marketers, the first great piece of content marketing in the new republic, the Federalist Papers.
While the Federalist Papers represent content marketing at its best, other Hamilton publications show content marketing at its worst. These extremes serve as good guideposts for modern content marketers.