Think back to the last time you got a piece of spam in your inbox. How did it make you feel?

You might have laughed at some weird grammar choices. You probably got annoyed that somebody out there was wasting your time. And, if you’re like me, you might have felt…well, bad, in some hard-to-define way. Icky. Put off by a poorly written email that was clearly sent to thousands of people, and has nothing to do with you. 

It shouldn’t matter. After all, spam isn’t personal. It’s not like somebody targeted you specifically to ruin your day. And yet, no matter how hard we might roll our eyes at these garbled, anonymous messages, they still have the power to make us feel awful. So much so that we’ve made spamming illegal, and charge hefty fines to those caught doing it.

That’s a lot of angst over something we claim to shrug off as a minor annoyance. Why do we get so upset over the occasional made-up prince requesting our help with a bank transfer? What’s going on here?

What Spam Really Is

When we hear the word “spam,” we tend to think of its more common forms: badly designed emails selling nutritional supplements; phishing scams that try to trick people out of their money or personal information; random blackmail threats; etc. And while all these kinds of emails do count as spam, the actual definition of the term is a bit more precise than simple “unwanted email.”

Non-profit spam-tracking organization The Spamhaus Project defines spam as “unsolicited bulk email.” According to this definition, an annoying email only technically counts as spam if it is sent:

• Without the prior consent of the recipient, and
• To many people at once, with no attempt to personalize the message for the individual

Spam, in other words, is the practice of sending out marketing messages without regard for the unique qualities of the people receiving them. The spammer de-personalizes people, seeing them not as individuals with their own preferences and goals but as a faceless collection of credit card numbers. The target audience of a spamming campaign is reduced to a tool–just a way for the spammer to get what they want. It only makes sense that the person opening a spam email would feel disappointed. Even used.

If you think that sounds shady, there’s at least one philosopher who’d agree with you.

Immanuel Kant

Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant–who is kind of a big deal–argued that treating other people purely as instruments for achieving our own goals is wrong. As he puts it in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:

“the human being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion; instead he must in all his actions, whether directed to himself or also to other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end.”

To put it another way, Kant believed that it is our duty to treat people as people in their own right, whatever our relationship to them might be. To treat employees, customers, or anyone else in our lives as if they were only here to help us reach our goals is to do wrong by them.

Kant’s conclusion, and the reasoning that led him to it, have had a huge, lasting impact on the field of moral philosophy. And his ideas have a lot to teach us about how we should approach our work as brand strategists today.

Kant on Brand

If Kant is onto something–if we really do have a moral obligation to treat people as ends in themselves–then good brand strategy might be more than just good business. It might simply be the right thing to do.

Branding is, among other things, the process of making an identity–figuring out precisely who will benefit most from a product or service, and how to communicate effectively with them. It’s about getting more precise, more defined, more unique. Committing to meeting customers and prospects on their terms, rather than forcing them to meet us on ours.

Good branding, in other words, is the opposite of spam.

As brand strategists, part of our job is to find and express what makes a brand different. As businesspeople, our duty is to acknowledge and honor the differences between our customers–to see the person holding the wallet, and not just the money inside. 

When we craft brands that show people this courtesy as a matter of course, we’re doing more than setting ourselves up for success. We’re giving our customers a taste of what it’s like to be treated right.