Mindful Marketing: when enough is enough
Practicing Mindful Marketing means that as marketeers and humans we take responsibility for the way in which we promote products and services. That we think about values and purpose, not just profit and growth and we pause and breathe before we react.
For decades, marketing has not had the best reputation and has (in many cases) become a murky cesspool of cheap incentives, urging customers to buy more of what they don’t need. Breakthroughs in understanding psychological behaviour have seen a rise in manipulative emotional tactics used by the old-school press and ‘new wave’ social media moguls alike; it is the playground of real-life Don Drapers and Mad Men the world over.
There’s a shame that can come with being a marketeer, and the roots live in the feeling that you’re selling or pushing people towards items that they don’t really need. Or worse, you’re contributing to making people feel bad about themselves to get them to buy more stuff. If they just buy this car or get this app they will be better, smarter, happier. There’s a mainstream marketing agenda that encourages people to feel inadequate and feel bad about themselves, instead of celebrating life, appreciating what we have or encouraging self-worth.
This is especially sad because working in marketing can be an amazing career path. It’s an interesting interdisciplinary role where you get to look at psychology, you get to tell stories, you get to work with data and insight. All these things are amazing, but when you work in a place that encourages you to apply that to systems that have unethical or pushy intentions, it’s a really sad, soul-destroying way to work.
Here at Doppler, we know a lot of marketers and we are marketeers! Speaking to them and from our own experiences, it feels like this is a feeling that a lot of us share. To begin with, it’s all very exciting and then over time, you begin to question if what you’re doing is necessary, if people really need this stuff. Do we need to push for more, more, more when maybe, enough is… enough?
Balancing the doughnut
Yes, you read that right, balancing the doughnut! Kate Raworth termed this idea of doughnut economics and it’s about how humanity’s greatest challenge in the 21st century is to meet the needs of everyone within the means of the planet. This means that everyone has access to life’s essentials, such as food, housing, a political voice etc, whilst not putting extra pressure on the Earth’s resources. It’s a powerful approach to balancing our needs and resources, Kate Raworth gives an interesting Ted Talk all about this which you can watch here.
The idea of the doughnut is essentially based on nature and how if we base our economics on how to be more sustainable with our needs and wants, then we’ll end up with a much healthier, more stable, and more equal world. It challenges this idea of endless, unstable, and unsustainable growth and instead, it’s about balance.
This balancing of the doughnut is where mindful marketing comes in, it’s about making sure that we’re re-using, reducing, and recycling, to create a circular way of being. As opposed to perpetually chasing the next big thing.
What is Mindful Marketing?
According to Mindful Marketing: A Key Antecedent for Positive Marketing Outcomes (Sheth & Sisodia, 2006), mindful marketing is:
A customer-centric approach that considers both sellers’ and buyers’ interests at the same time and that seeks ways to create win-win strategies by thoughtfully aligning marketing functions with consumers’ interests in mind, and avoid being involved in wasteful, unethical, and selfish marketing practices.
Using empathy, mindful marketing seeks to gain a clearer, more intuitive understanding of the customer and consumer. By being empathetic, brands recognise their customer’s needs and identify how to provide increased value based on that, as opposed to pressing on pain points.
Mindfulness is ‘the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something’ and by putting this together with marketing, it requires us to look for solutions that best serve the customer, as opposed to what best serves ourselves.
Whilst this is the approach we take to marketing here at Doppler, we have been grappling and reflecting on our careers and the space in the world for them. Of course, we could refuse to work with anyone that doesn’t have completely people-before-profit goals or intentions. We could only work with charities, CICs and non-profits to feel like we were making a difference and using our marketing knowledge for progress. But that leaves all that icky feeling marketing practice out there in the world, unchecked and unchallenged.
How can we market more mindfully?
We think there’s two ways that we can engage in more mindful marketing. In one way, there’s how we choose to be ourselves, choosing to engage in meditation for creativity, practising mindfulness and choosing different methods to help us to move through the world and engage it with curiosity and playfulness.
The other is challenging unsustainable growth in your marketing, thinking about the longer term and what your roadmap looks like. Plus, looking at how your goals and objectives line up with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It’s looking internally at your processes and being honest that alright, to do things in a way that has a greater good, is probably going to cost more. There’s going to be an initial tussle between how you’ve always done something vs how you need to refine that to be less self-serving and balance the doughnut.
Maybe there’s something in us that is always going to crave more. Maybe humans have an insatiable hunger for more, more stuff, more money, more love, more, more, more. But maybe if we all try to be mindful, we might collectively find our satisfaction in enough. Globally, coming together to have enough.
Marketing post-pandemic
In the aftermath of a global pandemic, the challenges that businesses are facing are unprecedented. And marketing plays an essential part in connecting with your potential customers and growing your business. However, trying to grow your business from a place of fear can lead to us skipping over mindfulness and straight into those icky, pushy marketing processes instead.
But, what if in these times of heightened pressure and uncertainty, we chose to be a bit more thoughtful and empathic with our advertising? If we chose to step back from pushy selling and actually engage with mindful marketing?
So, how do we actually do it?
But how do you practise mindful marketing and actually do it?! We hear you cry. Well, mindful marketing looks like:
humanising your business
building loyalty
attracting customers through empathy and awareness
focusing on sharing your values and purpose over products and services
When put into practise, mindful marketing can really make you stand out to your customers and actually give you all the opportunities to use the cool marketing skills that you’ve acquired through your career like storytelling, data insights and modelling but this way you’re looking for what the customer wants from you (sharing values, providing education and learning), rather than what you want the customer to do for you (buy stuff).
Be intentional instead of habitual
Mindfulness requires us to be intentional about what we’re doing, really considering our decisions. So, if you’re used to approaching marketing from more, more, more, this could be a tough mindset to shift but to be more mindful, we need to move away from reactive marketing that’s based on growth and instability and towards a more intentional use of our skills.
Use empathy
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to get an idea of their perspective, build your awareness of how they feel and what they care about. By being authentic and more empathic to your customer’s needs and shared values, you’ll actually be able to better position yourself to offer even more value to your potential customers.
Start small
You don’t have to overthrow your marketing strategy today, just start by considering what it means to be more mindful. Here are a few simple ways to begin incorporating mindful marketing into your strategy:
pause to reflect before you plan
ask yourself if you’re being too objective
put yourself in your customer’s shoes and find out what you can do to solve their problem
let go of your ego and what you think is best for your customer and instead work out what is actually best for them
Doppler For Brands
Using everything that we feel about mindful marketing is how we approach the marketing and consultancy branch of Doppler, aka Doppler For Brands. We work with a whole range of businesses in different ways in a very mindful and empathetic way to help them to connect with their audiences and to grow their businesses. If you’d like to know more about Doppler For Brands and how it works, drop us an email at: hello@dopplereffect.org.
We don’t have all the answers, and we know it’s a lot to try and change the world but we love the quote be the change that you want to see in the world. Plus, we truly believe that that mindful marketing can help you grow as a marketeer, it can help your business to grow and increase your customer loyalty. You can still reach your business goals whilst being mindful.
If nothing else, we hope that we’ve given you a place to start reflecting from and to take some time to mindfully consider what you’re doing now and how you’d like to operate instead.