Year: 2021

The Value of Stillness

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One of the frequently asked questions I bring to God is this: What do You want me to do? I try to listen, look for signs, seek counsel, read books, pray. What do You want me to do with my life? It’s a legitimate question, a good one even, but is it always the right one? Sometimes, in our desire to follow God, we get lost in our walk. We feel the need to keep going, keep doing and keep asking that we miss the point of the journey. And that is simply, to be with Him. We can be so immersed in trying to please Him that we forget how to be with Him. To sit still enveloped in His love. Not doing, not deserving, not fretting, just resting, trusting, being loved like only He can love us. If you’re like me, this is not easy. Striving is my default mode. I have to accomplish things in a day, even if it’s as trivial as sending an email, or as huge as delivering a …

4 Things You Need to Sell Change

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It was so tempting to put a clickbait title like “4 Secrets to Selling Change” on this piece but nothing’s really a secret anymore, and readers would know that two paragraphs down. People have become smarter consumers in the past two decades. As a marketer, commercial or social, it is crucial to recognize and understand this. Whether you are selling a product or behavior, your market will know–and know quickly–if you’re giving them a load of crap. With social media, consumers or in the case of social marketing, the target audience, are no longer just the market–they have become the marketers as well (French, 2011). This evolution of roles must be carefully considered when planning the 4Ps for social marketing. Now what do you need when developing a social marketing mix? Authenticity (product). While fake luxury items may have a market in surprising segments of the global population, fake social products don’t. Some people may pay some money for class A bags, but most people will most likely not bother changing their behavior for a …

Social Marketing: What it is NOT

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I betray my age with this but reading through the first module of Social Marketing: Changing Behaviors for Good by Nancy Lee and Philip Kotler reminded me of a popular series of TV ads in the 1980s. The commercials were about mothers shopping for soap to address their teenagers’ pimple infection, and just as they are about to pick up a beauty brand, their konsensya appears, telling them that Safeguard is the best protection against the skin germs that cause pimples. This is, of course, commercial marketing at its finest—something that skeptics like me have come to easily identify and doubt. And so to learn that marketing has historically been used for purposes nobler than to build the wealth of the already-wealthy is a revelation and a relief.   Social marketing, I believe, puts the conscience in marketing. To shift from marketing for profit to marketing for public gain is a kind of poetic redemption for those of us who at one time or another have served corporate interests over common good (no judgment here, …