A Need for Ethical Marketing: Chanelle Le Roux and Ninki

Chanelle Le Roux has always been a doer.

Beginning as a teenager in her home of South Africa, she quickly climbed the rungs of her first employer, marketing consultancy Acceleration. Positions across organisations and borders followed; from Buenos Aires, to London, and finally to Adelaide, Australia, where she coached teams at media giant News Corp.

She didn’t cut corners. She didn’t delegate the tough or boring stuff away. She just worked harder than everyone else.

But over the course of almost a decade in large corporates and conglomerates, Chanelle became increasingly jaded by her work. Money was king. Targets were sacrosanct. You did whatever you needed to hit that little number next to the letters ‘KPI’, often to the detriment of paying customers or the organisation as a whole.

It wasn’t particularly honourable. It didn’t make the world a better place. And as one of the well-meaning professionals caught within the corporate marketing web, there didn’t appear to be much Chanelle could do about it. Until she realised there was.

Ninki is born

One fine day in 2017 Chanelle walked into the News Corp offices an employee and out a free woman. Armed with a deep understanding of how large marketing agencies work, and seeing some clear and exploitable gaps in the market, she decided to go it alone.

Popularity wasn’t a specific goal, but it was a desired consequence; 90s chick flicks aside, being popular means that you’re doing something right. And so she chose Ninki, Japanese for popularity, as her company name.

Chanelle’s mix of honesty, humanity and humour, all lacking amongst her biggest competitors, proved a potent cocktail for Adelaide businesses in need of marketing help. Inquiries soon began to come in from interstate, then internationally, a domino of referrals landing her in places as far-flung as Texas and Zambia.

The Ninki proposition

In 2020 Ninki remains a boutique agency – now with a team of two – that provides a full suite of marketing services; predominantly content creation, with side-dishes of strategy and training. Chanelle wants the Ninki team to be seen as people first and professionals second, an attitude that helps deliver the promise of ‘content that builds meaningful connections’.

Good marketing shouldn’t come at the expense of ethics. Chanelle takes a principled stance and wears it on her sleeve, politely declining work that goes against Ninki’s philosophy. This ensures the Ninki team retains humanity and purpose, and that contradictory businesses won’t be working with a marketer who doesn’t truly believe in them.

The Ninki website clearly and confidently states that the team will not work with:

• Any business that appears to operate unethically
• Products or businesses that objectify women
• Products that are harmful to the planet
• Weight-loss products or services
• Alternative healing methods

After a decade of being forced to take every piece of work that came her way, and to sometimes actively chase the objectionable, Chanelle is capitalising on the opportunity to put her efforts into businesses she believes in. Such a principled stance has caused her to be, somewhat ironically, the busiest she’s ever been.

The next steps

But while business is good, Chanelle knows it could be better. To take the step from two workers to a team, from home office to real office, will require both commitment and cash. She has plenty of the former, a little less of the latter.

Money is but one of the hurdles that Chanelle will likely face. From her experience within the bellies of various marketing beasts, she understands that growth brings with it pressure to perform and conform. It’ll be a challenge to retain the things that currently set Ninki apart, but one that this doer is more than capable of handling.

A marketing agency built on ethics – an idea that shouldn’t be particularly wild, but is. And as Ninki’s success had proven, it’s perhaps the shrewdest marketing decision Chanelle’s ever made.