Marketing With Purpose Kit: Bringing Purpose and Empathy into Marketing
Purpose isn’t a buzzword. It’s how you choose to show up.
The best marketing doesn’t just sound good. It understands people, tells stories that matter, and connects the right message with the right person at the right time.
In this week’s Marketing With Purpose Kit from The Bliss Business Podcast, we’re joined by Shannon Clarke, Founder & CEO of The Clarke Collective, for a conversation about bringing purpose and empathy into marketing.
After 16 years in corporate marketing, Shannon left behind the jargon and politics to build a different kind of marketing practice. Through The Clarke Collective, she works with small business owners, service businesses, professional practices, and entrepreneurs to make marketing strategy clearer, more practical, and more human. Her experience includes growing a nonprofit brand, doubling a fundraising campaign goal through emotionally resonant storytelling, and generating a 515% ROI on event marketing by focusing on what customers actually cared about.
🎙️ Hosted by Tullio Siragusa
🎧 Produced by Martha Huerta
🧭 In this episode, we explore:
-
What it really means to bring purpose into your marketing
-
Why empathy can create stronger connections with customers
-
How storytelling can move people to care and take action
-
Why effective marketing starts with understanding what people actually value
If you’re tired of marketing that feels disconnected from the people you’re trying to reach, this conversation offers a more human way forward.
Founder/CEO
Somewhere in the 15th year of my career (likely in a meeting about a meeting), I started to wonder if corporate marketing was a test to see how much jargon a person can take before they frisbee their laptop out the window.
Turns out ... a lot. But everyone has a limit.
My limit came after 16 years of watching corporate heads focus on grammar instead of guiding strategy and execs take credit for other people's work.
I loved the actual work. Building brands, telling stories, watching the right message connect with the right person at exactly the right time. But the credit theft, the buzzword bingo, the idea of "circling back" or putting something in the "parking lot" (what does that even mean)? Not my thing. I wanted out.
So I escaped corporate and started The Clarke Collective, where marketing strategy actually makes sense and "bandwidth" is a four-letter word.
Now I work with small business owners, service businesses, professional practices, and scrappy entrepreneurs building something they care about. Another driver for me? The agencies out there that bank on the fact that you don't know what you don't know. They sell you services you can't evaluate, explain it in a way to keep you nodding along, and count on you being too busy to ask the hard questions. I'm the person who asks them for you.
I've spent my career in the weeds. Helped to grow Animal Friends' brand for over five years. Doubled a nonprofit's fundraising campaign goal by telling stories tha… Read More
