Let me tell you something about the human behind this site.
By showing my humanity.
Hello, I'm Mirjam.
I’m the human behind this site.
I’m a Dutchie in Cape Town who’s lived abroad for over half of my life.
Running small to medium sized businesses from my mid-twenties.
With a big ❤️ for marketing, writing and singing.
I care deeply about bringing your full humanity to marketing.
If marketing feels off connect with me in a way that feels good to you – I’d love to meet you.
Weirdly Hard
Marketing as a human is simple yet weirdly hard at the same time
It’s not something that is ever done or complete.
Nor something that is achieved.
But it is something you can navigate and get better at.
I care deeply about bringing your full humanity to marketing, so you no longer have to “sell”, but rather attract those people that need your help at that moment.
I help visionary founders, CEO’s & owners bring their deeper calling to life through marketing.
Not the formulaic, mechanistic, sleazy, authenticity-obsessed type.
But improv style, with lots of awe and air to play and experiment.
I’ll show you how to market being human – with feelings – to human beings.
It’s the path to:
- Create offers that are truly needed vs assumed to be wanted.
- Make money and offer deep transformative experiences.
- Open up new opportunities that weren’t there before.
- Reach more people and have more impact.
- Experience more meaning in your life.
I didn’t start out viewing marketing this way.
My perception shifted gradually, over time, in the most surprising way.
Let me tell you how.
My Story
I love singing…
…and yet I didn’t sing for 20 years.
One day, not so long ago, I started singing again. Not just in the shower or on my way to work. Weekly 1:1 singing classes. Plus, I joined an improv singing group.
It’s impossible to single out one event that explains how I got there.
There are many reasons, entangled and in constant motion.
I could sense some, but not others.
Some made sense, others didn’t.
What Followed: The Tiniest Shift.
It wasn’t a grandiose “Aha moment”. Rather a very gradual process of becoming aware of something that I had been completely unaware of.
Something that made me transition from singing as a performance or something I was actively doing into being present, in the moment, in fact an un-doing and not-doing.
Something that I felt so deeply throughout my body. A way of expressing myself that made me wonder how I had ever been able to express or make sense of anything before.
Yet at the same time, I struggled to make sense of it.
I felt confused, overwhelmed yet excited all at once.
Singing shifted into a sensory experience.
An embodied or lived experience*.
I started noticing things that I hadn’t paid attention to before.
A seeing of things unseen.
It shifted how I looked at my relationships, how I parent, how I love, how I see myself (“where is the edge of me”?).
It also made me look at my work, and marketing specifically, in a new light.
Why is marketing often seen as:
- Heavy, time-consuming and uncomfortable?
- Disconnected and separate from the rest of a business?
- Unnatural and pushy?
It dawned on me that more often than not, we perform or actively do marketing that’s informed by corporate marketing culture.
Just as I had been performing singing.
An active doing that led to a not-doing for 20 years.
I asked myself, what does marketing feel like to me?
How does marketing relate to me?
What does marketing look like to me?
The answer that popped up: human.
*Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. Hampton Press, New Jersey, USA.
This Insight Was Built On Previous Experience:
I started off as a consultant for Microsoft, then navigated a growing business from my mid-twenties. Under the wing of two amazing humans, Chris Dils and Ansgar Holtmann, I got to try everything. From sales, customer service, marketing, supply chain to finance. They guided me, slowed me down when needed and created the conditions where I, and my colleagues, thrived.
I continued to work with them for over a decade before taking the leap as a freelance Marketer and Copywriter, in 2018. My work ranged from launching new products, optimizing websites and trying to make sense of the why, what and how of fit-for-customer content. My clients were predominantly in eCommerce and startups.
I noticed that marketing is mostly separate from the rest of the business.
At times an afterthought.
Other times a hyper focus.
Lots of doing with little actual sense-making.
It left me confused, overwhelmed and excited all at once.
My go-to tools – planning, strategy and data – created a false sense of security and clarity in an increasingly complex, challenging and uncertain world.
Bringing your full humanity to marketing enables you to make sense of where you are now, in the present. It avoids focusing on a desired future that leaves you to bridge the gap.
Plus, by embracing the confusion, messiness, overwhelm and excitement, you create space and movement for things to emerge for yourself and your business.
I Could Never Do This Without
Want to know more about the fellow humans that enable me to show up like myself everyday? Meet them here.