Non-Coercive Marketing: A Manifesto

Non-coercive marketing starts from the assumption that you, as the business owner and/or marketer, are already enough. It acknowledges that while growing businesses can be fun, challenging, and meaningful, it's not a requirement for wholeness or self-esteem. Oftentimes the most courageous, life-affirming choice you can make is to break free from mi

Non-coercive marketing, by contrast, doesn't create emotional pressure, but actively seeks to relieve it. If what you're selling has some kind of time-bound component—live events, cohorts, etc—some pressure is inevitable. But otherwise, non-coercive marketing never puts you in a place where you have to make an emotional snap decision. Instead of of

The goal of non-coercive marketing is to give everyone who enters your world all of the information they might need to make an empowered decision. No hiding. No inflating. No bullshitting. Just truth.

Non-coercive marketing is about radical honesty. It's about being courageous enough to say what's true, even if it's unpopular, unflattering, or dredges up insecurities. It's about leaning into full authenticity and openness, because that's how you stand out, find the others, and build deep relationships in a world where most marketing is inauthent

As non-coercive marketers, we don't agitate insecurities or spin up new ones to make the sale. We strive to see the inherent enoughness of everyone, and speak directly to that part. That's at the core of how we enable empowered decisions—by speaking to people as if they are already enough , and giving them the time and space to start trusting that

Non-coercive marketing, above all else, is rooted in trust. That's the bottom line of this whole philosophy. In nearly every way, traditional marketing operates from a place of distrust, while non-coercive marketing always defaults to trust, even when it's scary.

Every marketing decision you make can be more trusting or less trusting. It can be more coercive or less. And therein lies the key to beginning to shift towards non-coercive marketing, if you feel called to explore this path with me.

That means telling the truth about who you are, where you come from, where you are in your journey, and what matters to you. If you’re not an expert, say so. If your beliefs differ from others in your space, say so. It means telling the truth about the products and services you’ve created, how they work, and why you made them. And it means being ho

Non-coercive marketing is about creating customers who are both aligned and empowered . An aligned customer is someone who is delighted to have done business with you . It's likely they could have purchased something similar elsewhere, but because of their interactions with your marketing, they feel a sense of connection, resonance, or even belongi