Marketing. Ugh. Not my favourite thing. In fact, I had made the decision long ago that I would never step foot into the world of selling. Yet, here I am, working (somewhat reluctantly) on all the techy stuff behind the scenes of a store. How did I get here????
Well, entrepreneurism is the answer I guess. I don't want to work for the man. I'm too stubborn, too much of a control freak about where I put my efforts. If I'm going to work day in and day out (holding on to the belief that I won't have to work quite that much, actually), I want it to be in a manner that suits me, and my beliefs, not someone else's. I'm unique, an individual, and I have a lot to give.
I could go into detail about how I decided upon a business that incorporated art, a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA), Permaculture and healing but I'm not sure if I've framed that for myself. So, that's as far as I go right now for a sneak preview.
My subject au jour, is marketing. For some time now, I have been getting Seth Godin's blog posts sent to my email (and here, I show my ignorance in the techy stuff.... is this an RSS feed? If so I need to figure out if I'm already offering it here, for this blog, and how I did it so I can do it again for my web site which is in production). Seth Godin both amazes me and dumfounds me. I'm dumfounded because I have been denying marketing for EVER, and yet I gobble the stuff up daily. He continues to amaze me (often 2X a day) in his blog posts as to how I end up agreeing wholeheartedly with everything he's saying despite the fact that he's all about marketing.
Marketing has become a bit of a bad word in my world, as you can see. My father was a great business man. Before retiring, he owned a decent-sized business. He came home nightly and regaled us with stories around the dinner table of how he dealt with unhappy customers, stories about employees, and about salesmen trying to sell him things he didn't want. There were funny stories about people who tried to hoodwink him (yes I said hoodwink, look it up), and stories about lazy staff, and stories about theft, and unions, and the lady in accounting who remembered everyone's birthday. My Dad was (and still is) my hero.
He managed people with respect to the fact that they were people, not staff. I gleaned much of my moral compass from these stories. To me, THIS is what marketing should be. It should be about respect, and kindness, mixed with a lot of psychology because we need to know how humans tick in order to figure out why they're being such jackasses or evasive, or unwilling, or indifferent. Marketing should not be about what has made it a bad word: trickery, thievery, finding the blind spot, bate and switch, condescension and a 100 other snake oil salesman pitches.
Seth Godin and my Dad get this. I want to. I really really want to. I want to look at a person and know that somehow I will reach the person in them. I don't want to sell to people who can't afford it, nor do I want to sell to those who don't need it. I want to break thru the barrier that the snake oil salesmen have put up between myself and the guy or gal who NEED art or Permaculture or organic gardening or healing.
Leduc Art class
