Today I have the great pleasure of being the host on Day 8 of the Virtual Blog Tour of author Lynn Serafinn whose book The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell launches on Amazon on Tuesday December 13, 2011.
Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC is a certified, award-winning coach and teacher, marketer, social media expert, radio host, speaker and bestselling author. Her eclectic approach to marketing incorporates her vast professional experience in the music industry and the educational sector along with more than two decades of study and practice of the spirituality of India. In her work as a promotional manager she has produced a long list of bestselling mind-body-spirit authors. Passionate about re-establishing our connection with the Earth, she supports the work of the Transition Town network in her hometown of Bedford, England.
Yesterday, Lynn visited Callie Carling about The 7 Graces of Marketing at Positivity Bubbles , where they talked about how to let abundance flow in marketing & life.
Today, I’d like to share with you a recent interview I had with Lynn when I got to ask her some questions on the subject of marketing strategies and messages in this approach for small business owners. I hope you enjoy it.
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Charly Leetham: I work with a number of self-help practitioners and they don’t like to think of themselves as Marketers – because “selling” is considered a dirty word. However, they are not alone – many business owners don’t like the thought of the ‘hard sell’. How does ‘7 Graces’ address this for business owners?
Lynn Serafinn: This very question was actually the starting point of the book, Charly. I was in exactly the same place as you, when I was working as a coach. It seemed all my clients were self-help/holistic practitioners of some kind and they all hated marketing. Even more, they seemed unable to ask for money from potential clients, and many of them struggled to stay in business. I soon realised this was not so very different from the attitudes I had encountered when I was in the music industry, as creatives are also often very predisposed against marketing, which keeps them in a “starving artist” mode for very long time—sometimes forever.
So, originally this book was meant to be a handbook for these kinds of people—sensitive people, creative people, healing people, spiritual people. But after two years of researching and writing, the book ended up being something much, much deeper and bigger than this alone, addressing the wider issue of the impact of marketing and consumerism upon our health, economy and natural environment.
However, there’s still a lot in the book that addresses the small business owner, especially those who “hate” marketing. Apart from the obvious chapter called “Why Nice People HATE Marketing”, there’s another called “How S-E-L-L became a 4-letter Word” that addresses some of the unspoken, manipulative methods of marketing since the early 20th century, and how these things clash with the value system of most holistic professionals. Later in the book, I give some pretty clear examples of the relationship between the rise of modern marketing and the rise of certain diseases and imbalances in our economy and the environment. I go on to show what I call “The 7 Deadly Sins” of marketing, and ultimately “The 7 Graces”, which I hope will serve as a starting point for all business owners to create a new paradigm that is healing rather than destructive. I also address the topic of our relationship with money, and how when our relationship with money is one in which we unconsciously hold it to be a measurement of our self-worth, it can only result in a negative outcome, whether we have money or not.
I believe once these kinds of business owners see, in black and white, the specific elements of marketing that unconsciously rub them the wrong way, they will start to understand why they have struggled so much with it, and also how they can create a new way of doing things that is in tune with how they think and feel. I imagine the holistic community will be the first people to embrace this new paradigm, because they are so hungry for it. But eventually, my dream is that every business on the planet, especially multi-national corporations, will embrace it.
Charly Leetham: What are the 3 Furies of Marketing and how do they apply to small business owners?
Lynn Serafinn: I use that term in a sort of off-handed way in the book to refer to the old-school marketing trinity of “fear, sex and humour”. I call them the 3 Furies because they only ever produce negative results in marketing, yet they are used all the time. When I say negative results, I don’t mean that they don’t make “sales”; they actually do work if you are only interested in “landing the deal”. But viewed holistically, they don’t work for humanity or the planet.
When you use fear in marketing, you create anxiety. I realised how profound this anxiety was when my TV blew up about four years ago; after about six months I suddenly noticed I wasn’t feeling anxiety about money like so many other people were. Without the anxiety I was able to think more creatively, and build my business in a much more constructive way. Also, I noticed my spending went down, which also helped to improve my economic situation. Fear is everywhere in marketing. Once you start looking for it, you’ll see it.
How this applies to small business owners is this: if you are being impacted by fear-based marketing yourself, it is having an impact on your business and your finances. And I guarantee, Charly, an awful lot of small-business owners are not just affected by mainstream marketing, but they are also often sucked in by fear-based marketing of many marketing gurus. There are simply so many so-called marketing and business coaches out there whose messages create feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, resulting in small-business owners overspending on services or products that don’t work for them, and leave them feeling even more inadequate. If someone reading this can relate to what I just said, it’s worth taking a moment to roll back the clock to the moment you were in the process of deciding to purchase something that was hoping to “solve” your business problems, and it ended up only draining your financially. What were the reasons? Think back to the marketing of that product. Were the words manipulating your self-worth by making your feel inadequate? Was anxiety created because of a time limitation? Was there “fear” in the marketing that influenced your decision?
Sex is another huge tool used in marketing. And by sex, I don’t just mean the use of sexy models to sell cosmetics, etc. I’m talking about the way marketing uses our sexual and gender identity to manipulate behaviour. If you think this is sheer paranoia, you’ll have to read the section in the book where I talk about the history of cigarette advertising. The manipulation of female gender roles has been a recurring theme in the tobacco industry, and the result is that lung cancer is now the biggest killer in women (at least in the US), whereas it was so rare 100 years ago it wasn’t even in the medical journals.
Lastly is humour. This one is a more subtle thing for many people to understand, because they don’t necessarily see what’s wrong with using humour in marketing. What’s wrong with it is that it frequently makes us predisposed towards a product solely on the merits of how the marketing made us feel (i.e., good), rather than on the merits of the product itself. I talk in detail about this in my chapter on “The Deadly Sin of Distraction”.
Charly Leetham: Scarcity is considered to be a cornerstone to the effectiveness of the marketing message – how does this apply with the ‘7 Graces’?
Lynn Serafinn: You are so right, Charly. Scarcity is considered to be a cornerstone of effective marketing. And the problem with it is that it “works” at a local, short-term level, but at a macroscopic, holistic level it is creating devastating effects on our world. I can’t go into detail on this, because the chapter on the “Deadly Sin of Scarcity” is one of the biggest sections of the book, but I’ll summarise it here. We humans are hardwired to respond to Scarcity, even at a biological level. Marketers know this, and they utilise the “idea” of Scarcity to create dissatisfaction so we will spend money.
If you read books on economic theory, Scarcity is actually a fundamental principle. But at its core, Scarcity is a mindset. It is the belief there is never enough, and that there is no way everyone’s needs can be met. However, when you look carefully at the way marketing is working in our society, marketing is actually creating those needs. So much of what we regard as vital to our existence today was not even in the human vocabulary 100 years ago. Marketing has created those desires, and then manipulates our belief in the attainability of those desires. It does this through false needs, false shortages, planned obsolescence, perceived obsolescence, limited offers and other strategies. All of these Scarcity strategies create fear, anxiety, overspending, debt, and environmental waste.
Of course, the antidote is “Abundance”, which is one of the “7 Graces” in the book. I don’t use this term in a light and fluffy way, like so many pop philosophy books out there. I show in the book how Abundance is our natural state—when we live in rhythm to the natural flow of the planet. We as marketers and business owners simply MUST return to this rhythm if we are to stop the negative impact of marketing, and start to restore humanity and our world to its natural, abundant state of being.
Thanks for letting me speak on these topics today, Charly. These were great questions. I really do hope the answers I provided sparked some insight for your readers, and that they check the book out if they want to take these ideas further. I welcome them to reach out to me via my 7 Graces of Marketing dot com website. This “movement” I’m wanting to create is all about dialogue. I can’t create or preach the solutions for the world; we as one humanity need to come together and create the solutions collectively and collaboratively.
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I hope you enjoyed this interview with Lynn Serafinn and that you’ll check out her book The 7 Graces of Marketing: how to heal humanity and the planet by changing the way we sell at The 7 Graces of Marketing Pre-Launch
Here’s why:
The 7 Graces of Marketing Telesummit
A FREE 7-Part Online Happening!
December 6th-9th, 2011
Register at 7 Graces of Marketing: Free Telesummit
When you visit the page at the link above and request a “launch reminder”, you will automatically receive a FREE pass to Lynn’s 7-Part online happening “The 7 Graces of Marketing Telesummit” with an illustrious panel of 24 bestselling authors and world-renowned speakers and media experts on society, business and marketing coming together to discuss how we can bring ethics and values back our business and marketing practices, and restore balance to our health, our economy and our natural environment.
Here’s the spectacular list of guests speakers for the event:
Dr. Joe Vitale * Greg S. Reid * Dr. Eric Pearl * Dan Hollings * Pamela Slim * Liz Goodgold * Allison Maslan * Suzanne Falter*Barnes * Tad Hargrave * Misa Hopkins * Richard S. Gallagher * Ward Vandorpe * Barbara Altemus * Andrea Conway * Renee Baribeau * Renee Duran * Michael Drew * Chris Arnold * Jeffrey Van Dyk * Tanya Paluso * Kate Osborne * Shelagh Jones * Paula Tarrant * Lynn Serafinn
You can listen to the telesummit online in the comfort of your own home, and even ask questions during the broadcast.
If you are reading this after Dec 9th, 2011 you can still access the playback for a limited time when you register at 7 Graces of Marketing
This telesummit is a completely free
“no purchase necessary” gift from Lynn
FREE GIFTS
When you buy Lynn’s book on Tuesday December 13, 2011, you can ALSO receive the MP3 download of all 10 hours of this historic telesummit, plus a complete library of beautiful personal development gifts from authors, speakers, coaches and other enlightened professionals from around the globe.
To claim your FREE pass to the 7 Graces of Marketing Telesummit
and read about the free gifts, go to: 7 Graces of Marketing: Pre-Launch
Thanks for reading! As usual, please feel free to share your comments and thoughts below. I love reading your feedback.
AND… be sure to follow Lynn tomorrow when the next stop on the Virtual Blog Tour is Mary McGuire, who will be interviewing Lynn about the new horizon on marketing. To visit that “stop” on the tour, go to Agents2Change: 7 Grances of Marketing – Virtual Blog Tour
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