Business Book Review: The Gentle Marketing Revolution

Welcome to another episode of Business Book Reviews on The Indieprenuer! There are so many business books out there…and not all of them are helpful! I’ve become semi-addicted to reading this things, so I figured I’d pass on what I learned.

High Level Summary of The Gentle Marketing Revolution

Worth a Read for Indiepreneurs: Not essential to start

What It Does Well: Helps align your marketing with your values

What It Doesn’t Do: Give in depth steps on marketing

Overall Thoughts

Let’s start with the full name listed on Amazon since that gives a good idea of what author Sarah Santacroce is trying to do: The Gentle Marketing Revolution: A Radical Business Approach to Get New Clients with Integrity and Kindness.

I found Santacroce’s book from one of her podcast interviews From the discussion, I loved what she was trying to do. Most marketing training online is includes a step by step formula designed for maximum manipulation of those rubes on the internet. And it can feel icky. Even as I’m writing this, I can think of a few things that I tried to implement that felt wrong. And, unsurprisingly, I haven’t really made those particular things work.

Santacroce went through a similar process with her LinkedIn training courses. Her Gentle Marketing Revolution is her attempt to say, “Hey, it’s okay to do something different.”

The book’s chapters are designed to help guide the reader to figure out what is actually important to them. Then it tries to help the reader figure out what marketing methods will resonate with the reader’s moral center.

This is a process that every business leader should go through. It’s one that I’ve gone through recently in my own life, which is probably why the book description called to me.

Where I found the book a bit weaker is on the “what next” piece of things. Yes, I get that the point of the Gentle Marketing Revolution is that there can’t be one perfect marketing plan. At the same time, I was hoping for a little more guidance on how to morally get the audience I want.

In other words, we find great advice on “avoiding marketing trend a, b, c.” I wish we got a little more on “maybe try marketing plan x, y, z.”

I understand that Santacroce is figuring this stuff out herself. Just don’t expect all the answers when you open the digital book.

Side Notes

Santacroce has a few tangential ideas that just aren’t for me. These are not part of her main message, but instead part of her own belief system. For most of them, she calls them as #woowooprompt. Even though these aren’t my particular beliefs, I didn’t find most of these spiritual things to be distracting.

The one exception I do have to call out is her couple paragraphs on capitalism. I had a brief love affair with economics earlier in my life. I didn’t end up pursuing it as a career, but it’s still an armchair passion. So when someone says that “the number one goal of capitalism is profit” and that they hope “capitalism will be on its way out anyway,” I hang my head in sadness.

Profit is very much NOT the number one goal of capitalism. Yes, CAPITALISTS can suck, something Adam Smith pointed out way back in 1776. But there’s yet to be a workable alternative that doesn’t involve taking power away from people and centralizing it while hoping those same terrible capitalists (or worse) don’t end up running this newly strengthened government.

Anyway, that’s a topic for another time. And, fortunately, this brief detour into misguided economic theory is blessedly brief.

Key Takeaways

And now we’re on what I found to be key takeaways for The Gentle Marketing Revolution:

What Is Your Real Purpose?

Here is an exercise that not nearly enough people do: what are you actually trying to accomplish here? Okay, so you have your business to make money, but WHY do you want money? What’s your end goal? How much do you actually need to get that.

Santacroce walks through examples and exercises to help business owners think through that before they try to figure out what sort of marketing tactics they should use.

One of my favorite examples of this (not in the book) is the “making partner” example popular in accounting circles. It compared working to make partner like a pie eating contest. You gorge yourself on pie to win this contest, thinking you’ll get a great prize at the end…only to discover that the prize is just more pie.

If you hate eating pie while you’re working your way up, you won’t like it once you’re at the top, either.

For those of you who haven’t figured out your purpose, Santacroce’s worksheets might help. If after going through thse you realize that your career isn’t for you, maybe give Designing Your Life a try.

Focus On Your Strengths

There’s a million ways to market yourself, especially with this interblag doohickey. There will always be new, creative ways that someone will insist is the “one true way” to market yourself. I’m sure some brief internet search would tell me that if I’m not doing Tik Tok dances no one will want my accounting. But doing something you enjoy (especially if you do it well) is going to be much better and more invigorating that doing a bunch of stuff you do very poorly.

And if I did Tik Tok dances, they would be very poor indeed.

Bring You to Your Marketing

If people want to work with some nameless, faceless blobs, there’s plenty of buttoned up businesses that will blandly give you the product you want striped of as much controversy as they can.

If you’re trying to set yourself apart from the big entity, bring a bit of you to the table in your marketing.

This is part of the reason I didn’t mind Santacroce doing her #woowooprompt, even if she would talk about something that I might not particularly like: it turned her into a real person.

Be a real person. Yes, you’ll lose out on some clients. But you probably didn’t want them anyway.

Avoid the Stress for You

Speaking of clients you don’t want…it’s okay to not take them on as clients.

As a start up of if you’re struggling, it’s easy to want to take anything that comes your way. Santacroce argues that if you do that, you’ll spend all your energy on doing things you hate and not have enough energy left over to work on projects that you love.

Avoid the Stress for Your Potential Client

Scarcity and inadequacy marketing are hallmarks of marketing today. Think of how many emails you’ve gotten that try to scare you into GETTING THIS GREAT DEAL RIGHT NOW OR IT IS GONE FOREVER! Or how many search results tell you that if you follow these steps you’d be a millionaire as of last week! Santacroce argues that this marketing style might work in the short term, but it will lead people to enjoy your product less. They feel tricked into purchasing it rather than getting it because they want it.

Especially if what you deliver isn’t what you promise. I mean, seriously, how many millionaires can you really make?

Santacroce suggests making your marketing push based on real scarcity and real benefit, because people who aren’t stressed into buying your product enjoy it more.

Conclusion

Sarah Santacroce says that The Gentle Marketing Revolution is the way of the future. It’s people making real connections and doing business together rather than tricking the next group of suckers to buy from you.

Based on the latest wave of business books and articles, certainly much of the thought leader community believe this to be the case. And I hope that it is.

I’m certainly planning to be more gentle in my business, including my marketing practices. Whether it will succeed, and whether others follow the trend, I guess we’ll have to see.

Other Book Reviews

Never Split the Difference – Negotiating at work and in life

Designing Your Life – Finding that business path for you that doesn’t leave you in tears