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For the past two years, I have been struggling with the question of marketing, how to do it effectively, sustainably and also ethically. This journey has presented me with a philosophical conundrum: is marketing inherently manipulative and deceitful and thus impossible to do ethically?
Much like many other businesses and individuals with a conscience, for a long time I got around this dilemma by resorting to the notion that it did not matter if marketing was manipulative, because it was what I needed to do in order to attract customers to a product or service that ultimately offers them value and enhances their lives. “I am helping people,” was my justification.
All I needed was to learn how to do it effectively and to acquire all the necessary tools in order to understand it fully so that I could choose ethical practices that did not manipulate my audience. As part of this process, I began following and listening to social media gurus and influencers who were sharing their secrets about how to grow an audience.
Inevitably, what started out as practical tips and tricks to enhance your social media content, take better pictures and grow your follower count turned into an endless stream of motivational messaging and positivity porn that left me feeling stranded for meaning. I began to feel pressured to always be motivated and excited, to exude perk in every post and to become a cheerleader for my audience.
As someone who identifies as more of an introvert, the pressure to seem always as optimistic and perky as the coaches I listened to began to wear on me. I became convinced I did not have their endless energy and that something was seriously wrong with me. I felt exhausted from the moment I got up in the morning and began to dread creating online promotional content for my business. I was worried that if my posts were nor drenched with zest or contain a shocking revelation that made me relatable to my audience, my business was doomed to fail.
The clickbaity titles on email newsletters sent by these social media coaches stopped being cute after the 27th time. I grew tired of subject lines that read as if they were about to spill some shocking truth: “I am done.” “I don’t want to do this anymore.” “I have a confession to make.” In these emails, they leveraged…
