What I talk about when I talk about letters
Marketing sucks. Write letters instead.
I have something to confess. I despise marketing.
I don’t care about connecting with my "audience”, my “potential buyers”, or my “I'm-just-looking-thanks-perusers". I don’t care about connecting with them in any way whatsoever.
I don’t know these people. I don’t care to speculate about what other content they might look at or be interested in, what their purchasing habits are, their educational attainment level or what socioeconomic group they are a member of.
I don’t care to think about how I might grab their overloaded attention from all the other aspects of their lives desiring of their desperately fraught eyeballs, brains and wallets. I don't want to be "flooded with leads" or to "convert" people. I don't want to engage in "relentless forward motion".
Photo by Ire Photocreative on Unsplash
None of this language inspires me. It's exhausting and ugly. It doesn’t connect. It is so deeply unattractive, abstract and machine-like for me to consider things in this way.
No matter which way I try to consider "marketing to my audience” (and in seven years of working for myself there have been many engagements with all sorts of programmes, workshops and specialists with all kinds of supposedly unique ways to get this out of me), I can’t grasp “marketing”. I don’t care.
Nothing clicks. My body won’t play ball. I know the steps, but I simply cannot take the action. I refuse to accept I am in “a market”. If it were an actual real-life fruit and veg market or clothes market like when I used to visit Greenwich Market to try on secondhand threads back in the day, I might be on board... As an aside, I often think my response probably has something to do with my brief sixth form passion for Bill Hicks (search his take on marketing in the preferably non-Google browser of your choice if you’re unfamiliar).
But writing a letter... To you and only you. It feels inviting.
A letter evokes the soft scrunch of ultra thin blue Airmail paper pulled from an envelope framed with diagonal red and blue stripes, the handwriting scrawled in blue ink, fingertips running over the bumpy indentations on the reverse as you take in a message meant just for you.
A letter recalls parental agreement to a sleepover at a friend’s house after an already excellent day there, the friend whispering plans for a furtive midnight feast, warm breath as their hands cup your ear. It doesn't matter if you'd rather sleep than eat, the sweetness is in the invitation.
A letter harks back to teenage friendships marked by togetherness from morning till afternoon at school, calls on the landline in the evening, after a day spent jotting notes and comic strips for each other in the classroom, some more detailed than any classwork and completed in less than half the time.
A letter is real.
A letter is relation.
A letter is yours to keep and re-read.
For a lifetime, should you want to.
And for others to read, interpret and re-tell, even after both sender and receiver are long gone.
I find marketing content impossibly hard. I find writing letters joyful, meandering, pleasurable... Letter writing it is then.
Sometimes swimming with the tide is alright, so long as you're grounded enough to know the tide you're following comes from the inside.
Invitations for consideration...
- Where are you pushing in a direction that’s counter to where some part of you really wants to go?
- What small experiment might you concoct in challenging your assumptions in this regard?
- How might you better tune into what works and what doesn’t work for you more broadly?
- When have you previously ploughed ahead when slowing down or changing course felt out of the question and what did you gain? What did it cost you?
- Who sent you the message there’s a right way to do a thing and anything counter is a frivolous flight of fantasy? From which other sources might this idea have been absorbed?
In my continued efforts to decolonise my life and work, I’ve recently left LinkedIn (my last remaining access to the world of social media after leaving Instagram and Facebook back in 2021 – you can read about that here (though my thinking on this has likely deepened over time) and am currently toying with the idea of a 30 day experiment on a brick phone.
If you’re curious to experiment with slowing down and disentangling from reliance on tech you might be interested to join me in taking part in a free experiment run by Leanne Scott – The Summer of Slowing Down - on The Portal (in and of itself, an exciting counter to tech platforms with profit before people as their primary aim).
The Summer of Slowing Down involves fortnightly emailed experiments for six weeks and a community space (off social media) before an invitation to an expanded paid offering. Leanne left social media and gave up her smartphone two years ago and is sharing her experience with others interested to disentangle. If you’re interested, get in touch and I will link you up.
