Black History Month 🤝 Sustainable Marketing

Strong Brand Social has been referred to as a “revolutionary brand” more than once, and that’s by design. In the spirit of Black History Month, here’s a look behind the scenes at how our brand has been shaped by the legacy, energy, and lessons of Black history.

First, our entire identity.

We love to expose the social media industrial complex—you know, how the entire internet seems to be telling you to “post more, do more,” and you constantly feel behind? That phenomenon took off in 2021, when Meta and TikTok poured billions of dollars into creators, spawning an entire generation of novice social media marketers who, in turn, became ambassadors for the platforms themselves.

This machine is built to extract—draining time and money from small businesses and creators, driving billions of dollars for tech bros while exhausting you and crushing your profit margins.

And it’s not just a feeling. Marketing departments consistently report the highest burnout rates in any organization. The industry’s obsession with quantity over quality, speed over strategy, and keeping up for the sake of keeping up—it’s not just inefficient, it’s toxic.

So Strong Brand Social was built to resist all of it—and to prove that healthy workplaces, sustainable strategies, and exceptional financial performance can coexist.

The tradition of resisting extractive systems in favor of something better? That’s rooted in Black history.

Resisting Extraction, Prioritizing Sustainability

If you’ve ever connected with our philosophy of rejecting toxic norms in favor of something more sustainable, just, and human-centered, you’re resonating with the work of Ella Baker.

Baker, a behind-the-scenes powerhouse of the Civil Rights Movement, rejected the idea that power should be hoarded at the top. She believed leadership should be decentralized, grassroots-led, and built for the long haul—not just for quick wins.

We take that same approach to marketing.

The strategies we create aren’t just one-and-done fixes—they’re turnkey playbooks that empower entire teams to work in sync, aligned with their brand’s most critical objectives.

And as for social media “norms”? We reject the idea that businesses should burn themselves out in an endless cycle of content creation just to appease an algorithm. Instead, we prioritize sustainable growth—a system that works for you, not just for the platforms profiting off your labor.

Trading Burnout Culture for Rest and Creativity

As CEO of Strong Brand Social, the most critical leadership skill I’ve developed is prioritization. To protect my team and generate the highest-quality work possible, we reject unrealistic workloads and fake urgency. We take Flex Fridays all year long and refuse to buy into the lie that working more means working better.

Thank you, Audre Lorde.

Lorde was the OG of self-preservation, rest, and joy. She told us: rest is an act of political warfare. She called out grind culture before we even had a name for it, arguing that rest, joy, and boundaries weren’t indulgences—they were necessary tools for survival. If my team and I are going to transform the social media marketing industry to be less extractive and more sustainable than how we found it, we need to be in shape for the fight. 

When we resist burnout culture, we’re following a Black feminist tradition that has long understood the power of boundaries, well-being, and refusing to be exploited.

Radical Prioritization

More than just an Instagram quote on MLK Day, Dr. King’s philosophy of radical prioritization shapes everything we do at Strong Brand Social.

We don’t do more just for the sake of doing more.
We focus on what actually matters.
We refuse to get lost in the noise.

We’re obsessed with clarity—for our team and for the brands we work with—because a marketing strategy that prioritizes everything prioritizes nothing.

The Blueprint for a Better Way to Work

Strong Brand Social exists to resist the status quo of social media—to create more ethical, human-centered marketing strategies and redefine what work can look like. As a team, we’re dedicated to shaping new paradigms where people of all identities can pursue growth and prosper.

⚡ We’re not policing each other.
⚡ Our schedules are flexible as fuck.
⚡ We measure happiness, joy, and impact—not just revenue—as markers of success.

This isn’t just a philosophy—it’s embedded in the strategies we teach.

We don’t hoard spaciousness and well-being. We create strategies that help our clients exceed their goals while building real boundaries between their personal lives and their marketing programs so they can achieve increased happiness, more joy, and a sustainable way of working.

None of This Is New—It’s a Legacy We’re Honoring

To some, this might sound radical—but nothing about this is new. Our work continues a legacy that has always been about resisting systems that don’t serve us.

⚡Building solutions that work for more people.
⚡Prioritizing transformation, collective liberation, and sustainability.

We have Black history to thank for our roadmap (and for what it’s worth—so does every anti-establishment, rebellious, revolutionary brand you love).  

 

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