Slow Marketing

I don’t know if I coined this term when I wrote this article back in 2012 but I know I’ve seen it used since. I even had a client from Brazil name her business after it.

The phrase ‘Slow Marketing’ came to me in Vancouver after I’d done a workshop. You’ve likely heard about the Slow Food movement and Carl Honore’s book In Praise of Slow.

And, for some reason, I’d never considered how that might apply to marketing.

But, over that weekend, I was sharing how marketing is like baseball and that we can’t ‘skip bases’ in building our relationships with people. First there needs to be clarity, then trust, then some excitement . . . and then a commitment. It can take time to build relationships with our clients. Some things can’t be rushed.

And one woman expressed her thanks, ‘I’d never considered that before.’ Something about knowing that it was okay to go slow felt confirming of her best instincts and affirming that she hadn’t failed just because she’d not gotten immediate results.

Most marketing we see is so fast.

Lynn Serafinn wrote a beautiful book called The Seven Graces of Marketing where she contrasts the common place sins of marketing with the potential graces of marketing. One of the sins she talks about is scarcity. And so much marketing is based on creating a sense of scarcity, ‘act now…