The spirit of your business

I recently went to a talk by Erin Donley. As well as running her own marketing consultancy, Marketing Your Truth, Erin is a manager at the New Renaissance Bookshop, and she helps socially responsible businesses promote themselves.

She had a lot of useful ideas, but she mentioned one idea in particular that really spoke to me: Jacke Schroeder's suggestion of working with the spirit of your business. Jacke feels that when a business or organization is conceived, so is its spirit, and we can work with this spirit to grow our business and gain inspiration.

I love this idea. In mainstream web design, we're used to hearing about a business's brand, its marketing identity. For spiritually-minded people, the very mention of words like 'marketing' and 'brand' can make us shudder. They sound so cold, so cynical. How much warmer to think in terms of your business's spirit. 'Brand' is about selling. 'Spirit' is about being. We engage with a spirit respectfully, listening to its point of view, valuing its unique contribution to the world. We understand that it has value beyond the number of sales it can make.

Whether we take the idea metaphysically or metaphorically, considering the spirit of a business also gives us a way to think about all those points that marketing lumps under 'brand' without feeling like we're expected to create the next Coca-Cola. What is the business's personality? What are its unique gifts to the world? Who will it benefit? The answers to these questions provide the information that we web designers need when we create a site for your business.

I'm looking forward to getting to know the spirit of the businesses I work with – and that of my own business.

Jacke Schroeder is speaking at NRB on 26th October: Corporate Shamanism: Healing the World One Business at a Time.
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