WHAT BETTER WAY to jump-start the new year than with a healthy dose of good lovin’? The ‘L’ word is often a hot topic in religious and philosophical circles, on the silver screen and yes, in basketball—ask Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan, stars of the 2000 flick “Love & Basketball.” However, rarely, if at all, is love (the unconditional kind) ever paired with business. Can love and business mix? Apparently they can, says Sharon Price, a marketing guru, who, following the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, traded in a long and fruitful corporate career for a more earnest version she’s coined “love-based marketing”—the idea of “bringing your business to market with love.”
PM: What is love-based marketing?
SP: Love-based marketing is a lot of things, not just one thing. But, if you were to compare it to something, you would say that it is everything but fear-based marketing, which is something that, in my almost 20 years of marketing experience, I became good at and very unthrilled with. Love-based marketing is really an attitude.
A synonym for the word “love” is “appreciation.” If you can appreciate a potential client or a non-client, even if they are telling you no, then you are loving them. Another definition of the word “appreciate” is to raise in value—if you can’t use the word “love” in
business, if that’s not comfortable for you, that’s okay. Use the word
“appreciate” because you can appreciate people, your employees, your
customers, the earth.
PM: How would you define
fear-based marketing?
SP: Fear-based marketing is
everything you see in the media and [in] advertising that says, “You’re not good enough; you’re not smart enough; you’re not pretty enough; buy our products or basically you’re going to have a horrible life and you might die.” The reason companies put things like that [out there], is because it works. People live in fear. And, the
company is living in fear. They’re afraid of their competition—that they’re not going to make their numbers. They’re afraid of all kinds of things. The vice
president of marketing is afraid that he’s going to get fired if the marketing doesn’t work.
So, I looked at that and [decided I didn’t] want to put any more fear into the world. I love myself and my
company and the world too much to keep doing that. The more fear you put out there, the more fear people feel and the more fear they put out there, and it just becomes a vicious
circle. I thought, how can you
integrate the feeling of love into
marketing, or business for that
matter. And I said, first of all, I have to love myself; I have to love people and I want to make the world a better place; I have to love the world. Love-based marketing came from that basic tenet.
PM: When did you first discover this kind of marketing technique? What were your initial feelings about it?
SP: I resisted love-based marketing myself. I didn’t want to be a frou-frou type spiritualist. It’s just not in me. And then, [one day] I walked into a bookstore and sitting in the marketing section, no less, there’s a huge, red book called Lovemarks: the Future Beyond Brands, written by Kevin Roberts, the CEO worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi—pretty much the No. 1 marketing/advertising agency in the world. I thought, “Kevin Roberts from Saatchi & Saatchi has written Lovemarks.” So, I began thinking that love-based marketing is not so much “out there.”
PM: What are some successful
companies that use love-based
marketing?
SP: There are companies out there that do it. They don’t call it love-based marketing, but they do it. The founder of JetBlue actually helped Herb Kelleher start Soutwest Airlines and then they parted amicably. There’s a book out called The Art of Business in the Footsteps of Giants with a list of big companies that employ love-based marketing. Tom Peters—a
business consulting guru for Fortune 100 companies—is a huge proponent of this kind of marketing. So is Michael Gerber who started the E-Myth companies.
PM: How are the skills for love-based marketing obtained or developed?
SP: It’s actually very easy. It’s getting to understand who you are. Love-based marketing starts on the inside. One of my favorite companies is Southwest Airlines. Southwest is still the most successful airline in the world and they’re actually profitable. There’s only one other airline that’s profitable and that’s JetBlue. So, the most successful airline is run by Herb Kelleher, who comes from a place of love. He looked at his own purpose in life first and he got a lot of clarity around his purpose. That’s really the key, finding out what you are here on this earth to do or share. Why are you here?
It’s not easy. It takes a lot of inner work. If you just continually ask yourself “Why am I here?”; “What am I here to do?”; “What am I here to share?”; and “How can I serve?,” you’ll get a lot of clarity on why you’re here.
PM: The reality is, no matter how loving or gracious one is, love doesn’t pay the bills. Is profitability not an important factor in this kind of
marketing?
SP: Oh, no. Absolutely not. You have to be successful in business. You have to make a profit or your business will die and you can’t share your
business with anybody else. We still use media, advertising and publicity, but we come at it from a point of view that if somebody doesn’t want to buy your product, that’s okay. They’re making a
decision for themselves. You can’t force a
decision on somebody, and when you do force a decision on somebody, you manipulate them. Manipulation is a form of forcing someone to make a decision that’s really not good or right for them in that moment.
PM: Are traditional marketing/sales tools ever used in love-based
marketing?
SP: You still use objection
handlers when talking on the phone. If
someone says they can’t afford your product or service, you still say, “Well, this might help you save money here or there.” Then, they may begin to see the usefulness of your service. You didn’t manipulate them, you just helped them make a better decision by giving them more information.
For example, in my earlier days…everywhere I went where I was in a sales position, I was No. 1 in sales. I didn’t know why. This was before I came up with the concept of love-based marketing. I was No. 1 because, after I looked back on it, I never really cared whether they bought my product or not. I did not have an attachment to it, and they bought it because I was able to share information with them without
pushing them or manipulating them, or trying to convince them.
PM: How does one detach him- or herself from the sale?
SP: Meditate a lot. Meditation doesn’t have to be sitting down and humming or sitting in silence. It can be [taking] a walk in the park; it can be coloring in a coloring book; it can be doing the dishes. I trained for a marathon and found walking was a great meditation. At Southwest, they meditate for about 15 minutes every day.
The idea is that you are not attached to the outcome of the sale. You have passion for your product and a connection with it. For example, try and grasp anything and squeeze it really hard. Say it’s a handful of sand and you squeeze that handful of sand really hard, what happens? When you have an attachment to the outcome of the sale, you squeeze so hard that the sale just oozes through your fingers and you don’t make any sales.
PM: How can a salesperson
incorporate love-based marketing into his or her daily routine?
SP: If you are a salesperson and want to increase your sales and think you can do it with love-based marketing, you need to figure out if you’re really living in a mode of scarcity, meaning that you don’t think there [are] enough customers out there for you or you don’t think you’re making enough money or that it’s really hard to pay the bills because you’ve had a really bad quarter. You need to figure out if you’re living from a place of scarcity, and if so, change it. Again, you can do that through just meditating. Brian Tracey has tons of CDs and books out there that [deal] with positive thinking.
