Reframing your marketing attitudes

Do you know enough about that marketing technique to hate it? Are you sure?

You might think you hate marketing, but what you hate might be the visibility.

You might think you loathe sales techniques, but what you really can’t stand is manipulative tactics employed by some sales people.

You may pooh-pooh social media, but what you’re really rejecting is attention seeking behaviour.

Sometimes, the hatred we express for marketing is something else in disguise.

Stop conflating the two.

Image: is that marketing hatred justified?

Tackle it in a two-pronged way

If visibility is a problem…

Understand why you have a difficult relationship with visibility.

Investigate marketing techniques that allow for a less visible approach, like the creativity of guerrilla marketing, blogging, industry curation via newsletters, etc

If manipulation in sales is jarring…

Pinpoint why manipulation creates issues for you on a ethical, social, psychological, historical, cultural, etc, level

Choose sales techniques that help use this understanding as a strength, such as values-based selling, transparency in your marketing, targeting companies that share your ethics and values, etc

If the ‘look at me’ approach to social media leaves you cold…

Choose to focus on purpose-driven, meaningful, values-driven expression instead. Recognise that you don’t have to share every day or every thought - and define what is an intentional usage of social media for you based on community building, creativity, connection, fun etc.

Set the focus on the clients and communities you inhabit through raising others up, talking about industry and client issues instead of self-promotion, develop conversations that matter on your profiles, use different platforms for different things (not just copy and paste the same content from one to the other), create challenges that explore ideas, etc

Questions to ask yourself:

1. What is it about this marketing technique that makes me feel uncomfortable?

2. Does that discomfort find it’s origins in my experiences of school, work, culture, gender, inclusion and exclusion, beliefs, wealth and poverty, class, etc?

3. When I dig into that discomfort, what do I find?

4. How experienced am I with using this technique? Do I know enough to pass judgement or am I dismissing it based on preconception or a limited experience?

5. Have I used it enough to know how it works from a general perspective or am I focussing on a narrow usage of the technique?

Exercise to try:

Write a PROS and CONS list for the techniques you don’t like.

It might help shift your perspective and/or give new insights into how to leverage that marketing technique effectively.

And if you find you don’t know the PROS of the marketing technique that well, perhaps further investigation is required!