Love markets, hate marketing
Why does marketing a small business feel so horrible?
The official Digital Nomad Girls newsletter just found a new home on Substack! Sign up for an honest glimpse of what it’s really like to work location independently - beyond the passport stamps and “passive” income.
I love going to markets.
Flea markets, food markets, book markets, Christmas markets. Whenever I visit my hometown, Munich, the very first thing I do is hit the Viktualienmarkt to sample all my favourite treats. (Fresh pickles rule!)
Basically, markets rock! And I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t love a good market.
In Frome, where I now live, we have a monthly market called The Frome Independent. It’s always on the first Sunday of the month, and let me tell you, market day is a big deal here.
Local independent shops spruce up their windows, the bakery bakes special market day treats (cruffin, anyone?), and people come from all around the region.
The locals even tend to dress up in their “Sunday finest”. There’s a real buzz in the air.
I’ve honed my own little market day ritual over the years:
🔮 Browse the vintage and bric-a-brac stalls in the morning before it gets too busy.
🧀 Enjoy Mac ‘n Cheese from Alpmac for lunch, followed by a lovely mocktail to wash it all down.
🍭 Then a little ice lolly or pastry snack while checking out the earrings, crafts and food stalls.
👋 I love saying hi to my favourite sellers, discovering new stalls and bumping into friends around town.
Ahhh, market day.
Isn’t it odd then, considering my almost obsession with markets, that it took me almost a decade of running my own small business to finally connect the word “market” with the concept of “marketing”?
I literally Googled it to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.
“The term, marketing, is a derivation of the Latin word mercatus, meaning marketplace or merchant.”
It first popped up in the 16th century and referred to “the process of buying and selling at a market.”
Huh...
So why does marketing a small (online) business feel so different to setting up a cosy stall at a lovely market?
When I talk to my business friends, members and coachees about marketing, here’s what usually comes up:
It feels icky or gross or pushy
It’s weird to toot my own horn and talk about myself all the time
I don’t want to bother people
It feels like I’m showing off
It feels like we’re selling ourselves, not just our work
Even as I write this piece, I’ve been struggling to decide which direction to take it as there’s this little voice inside that says, “This is a marketing opportunity, you should be selling something right now.”
And that’s the issue.
We are expected to “always be marketing”.
In the olden days, that was a dedicated time and day for it, once a week or month, you’d bring your stuff to the market, the other days were spent making, not selling.
But the big difference is that we now have the internet and social media.
We no longer market to a small community of people we’ve known our whole lives, but to the whole wide world.
Add to that all the pressure of clicks, funnels, fake urgency and scarcity, trip wires, algorithms, and AI...and oooph, it feels a million miles away from my cosy local Sunday market.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I would love to live in a world where marketing a small business feels more like strapping my little wooden stall to a cart, take it over to next village to share my lovely wares with the lovely townsfolk. Wouldn’t you?
One online space that has been feeling much more cosy lately is right here, on Substack. It feels a lot like the “old internet”: long-form writing, people commenting on each other’s posts, lots of collaboration and support.
One of the reasons I’m moving the DNG newsletter over here is that we can chat with each other in the comments, and I’d love to know:
How would you like the future of marketing to be different? (and most importantly, what is your favourite market or market stall?)
If you liked this, you might also like that:
Hello,
Love your thoughts and words and think Substack is a great move.
Its funny in raising awareness of my new (1 year old) business ive been going to local festivals and women's expos, disability expos and older adult events to try and connect with people. It allows for connections and conversations and instant feedback in a way that is hard to replicate.
You know what also came to mind when I read this Jenny, it’s that we used to buy things on markets because we *needed* them. Now, everyone wants to sell stuff we don’t need; and the stuff we need is sold by quiet people who find marketing in today’s digital landscape daunting and icky (I’m definitely generalizing and simplifying for the sake of the argument here, but you get my point). Plus, markets met another need, which was to contribute to our sense of belonging and being part of a community. Marketing today has removed all of that…