Mission & Vision
What We Do:
Profitable Businesses, Ethically Grown
We help coaches, healers, and other entrepreneurs create profitable and sustainable businesses through marketing (deeply rooted in Five Fundamentals) that is effective (it works), ethical (it feels genuinely good to all involved) and beautiful (it touches the soul and feeds life).
Why We Do It:
Restoring The Beauty Of The Marketplace
The Short Version:
At Marketing for Hippies, we have set the intention to be a beautiful, long-lasting, persistent and profitable little ‘Ethical Marketing’ tent in a corner of the aesthetically-bereft, global marketplace.
Inside you can gather with other under-served, disillusioned, radical trouble-makers who come for reasonably-priced, hot cups of advice, camaraderie, encouragement, commiseration and poetry.
And, bit by bit, you can learn how to offer up your gifts to your community, grow a profitable business, step out of outdated, coercive, invasive, manipulative sales tactics, and stay human while you offer your gifts to this world that so sorely needs them.
We do all of this with the intention of restoring the beauty of the marketplace in the small corners we inhabit. All willing, this creates ripples we won’t live to see.
The Longer Version:
A Vision We Aspire To
“Being beautiful on the way to the answer is the answer.”
– Martin Prechtel
At Marketing for Hippies, in the midst of all the hype and grandiosity, we envision the marketplace (or at least some small but mighty corners of it) restored to its original beauty and humble, local grandeur as a place where the community comes together, from time to time, to say, “Here’s what I’ve been up to since I saw you last! Come! Look at the squashes I’ve grown. I’m so proud. My wife has made another set of brooms and our daughter has taken to pottery. The pottery’s not so good yet, but will you buy one for a penny to encourage her? How is your family?”
The market place (think of your favourite Farmer’s Market or local craft fair) is a place of conversation and conviviality that connects us. It is a place where we share with and support each other instead of corporations. The sound it makes is that musical hubbub of chatter and laughter. The sound of the seven year olds playing violin and raking in the money and old friends happy to see each other.
It’s the mom and pop shops on Main Street (not the chain store monstrosities on Wall Street). It’s funded by our bucks (instead of us funding Starbucks). It’s knowing the farmers who grow your food and having the money to be able to support them. It is you and I doing our best to practice the modern conundrum of right livelihood and craft meaningful work.
The old people say that, in the center of the old market place, there’s the Tree of Life. If you eat its fruits, you’ll be healthy. And there’s a Well full of the Waters of Life too. If you drink that water, you stay young at heart. Well… the marketplace has fallen into a lot of disrepair over the past centuries and that tree is withered and the well is dry. We believe that, if we tend to that Well and that Tree, we will all be better off. And so, from our little tent in a corner of the market, we are trying to do something about that by helping you to grow your business.
We believe that marketing can be simple and beautiful and so we do our best to provide (and help you put into practice) a simple framework, a principled but practical philosophy, workable systems, effective tools, and good-natured support through our programs and our growing cadre of apprentices.
We believe you can market in ways that are as respectful, consent-based, trauma-informed, beautiful and ethical as they are effective. We help you find others who are deeply critical of the neon-lit, strip-malled realities of modern, mainstream society and who share your values of a more sane and just world.
Like you, we fail a lot but we try to fail beautifully in a way that the world still gets fed by our failing.
We don’t have any grand designs of revolutionizing the marketing industry or saving the world. We’re just trying to proceed beautifully, carrying the bundle of seeds of wisdom with which we’ve been entrusted, and scattering them where and when invited to do so.
Everything we do is steeped in a deep respect for the heritages, deep cultures and traditions of indigenous peoples (including your ancestors too) who planted the seeds of trees in whose shade they knew they would never live to sit. We try to make our work as much an expression of that as the market (itself and echo of something even older and more beautiful) will allow.
“Red Brocade”
by Naomi Shihab Nye
“The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.
Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.
I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.”
Values: How We Do It
We work hard offer up marketing approaches that are rooted in the following three values.
Ethical because it needs to be honest and feel good to everyone.
Effective because it needs to work.
Beautiful because it makes the people who see it want to jump up and live again. This is rooted in the Cultural Lens we bring to this work.
These three values are expressed in our Seven Fundamentals which you can learn more about here.
And we work to shift our corner of the marketplace from the set of values on the left to those on the right.
And, like you, we enjoy it when marketing feels all the things below
Who’s with us?