An Embodied & Ecological Marketing Practice that markets being human – with feelings – to human beings.
I’ve experienced major shifts in how I view and practice Marketing since my very start at Microsoft back in 2007.
None had anything to do with what we perhaps assume to be “Marketing”.
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.
They’ve led me to see Marketing as an embodied & ecological practice.
It’s not a connection you often see, but I’ve drawn from the insights of 4E cognitive science, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and Nora Bateson, founder of the International Bateson Institute.
Rather than viewing Marketing as an external process, it views it as an embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, emotional, exapted and ecological practice.
Let me run you through each point below.
Credits to Alexander Beiner & special thanks to Trish Blain.
Embodied
Marketing as an embodied practice assumes it’s inseparable from our experience as a physical body.
How you physically move through life influences your thoughts and how you solve problems.
Your physical movements therefore (in)form how you practice marketing and how it’s perceived.
Embedded
Marketing as an embedded process in the world, views it as inseparable from the environment we’ve adapted to.
When you market online you’re embedded in a new environment, different from your physical offline environment, and you’ll need to adapt accordingly.
Enacted
Marketing as an enacted process entails that everything you do impacts the world around you and creates new realities that in turn constrain or open up possibilities for you.
Bringing awareness to this in your marketing practice, can improve your interaction with the world (and thus your client base).
Extended
Marketing as an extended process moves through and responds to other people, technology, and the environment.
You operate from a deep in your bones knowing and so do those you market to.
Practising marketing from a place of responding to constant movement & interaction with lightness and playfulness allows you to build resilience when triggered to react.
Emotion
Marketing as an emotional practice is nestled in the understanding that all marketing strategies & decision-making are driven by emotion & the unconscious mind.
How to do this ethically forms a key aspect of embodied & ecological marketing.
Exaption
Exaptation is a term from evolutionary biology, describing the process whereby features of an organism acquire functions they weren’t originally adapted for.
One good example is the tongue, which allows us to manipulate food but was exapted to allow us to speak.
Viewing marketing as an exaption process is taking what you’ve learned in let’s say, mindfulness practices, and exapting this into your marketing practice creating a more rich, layered and diverse experience for yourself and others.
Ecology
What would happen is you’d reframe the question “how to market effectively” into “how to market ecologically”?
What would that look like?
Viewing marketing as an invitation into an ecology of communication, challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.
Ready to Experience an Embodied & Ecological Marketing Practice?
Contact?
- Plan a call in my online diary (easiest)
- Or contact me directly on +27 79 256 1595 (a bit of a long shot)
- Or email me on mirjam@mirjamchristinehope.com