What I mean when I use the phrase conscious marketing
Practicing awareness inside capitalism, resisting extraction, shaping culture; justice, equity, and care in how we grow our work.
Naming the Reality: We Can’t Opt Out of Capitalism
Our work, our businesses, and our professional visibility exist inside capitalism. That’s the container. We rely on money to sustain ourselves—in these systems, access to food, water, and housing requires it. And marketing is one of the main ways we move our work into the world. Pretending otherwise creates bypass.
At the same time, capitalism in its dominant form is extractive. It prizes productivity over people, urgency over care, profit over relationship. Traditional marketing strategies echo these values: manipulating pain points, pressuring urgency, promising guarantees, and treating audiences as leads to be captured instead of humans to be in relationship with.
Marketing is inherently tied to selling, yes. And it doesn’t only have to be about the sale.
When I use the phrase conscious marketing, I’m naming this tension. We can’t “opt out.” We can resist replicating the toxic patterns that reduce our worth to productivity and profit. Every act of visibility—how we show up, tell our stories, and invite people into our work—is a choice point, an opportunity to practice new ways of being and growing.
Consciousness as Ongoing Practice
So what do we do with this tension? Conscious Marketing is not a perfected system or template. It’s a living, breathing practice—like any practice. And like anything we practice, what we practice grows stronger.
To me, Conscious Marketing means holding awareness of power dynamics and cultural context each time we show up—whether that’s in an Instagram caption, an email newsletter, or a podcast episode.
It invites us to notice when urgency, manipulation, or extraction creep into our choices—and to pause, reorient, and try again. It reminds us that intention is not the same as impact, and that accountability matters more than polish.
This work isn’t about purity or perfection. It’s about choosing, over and over again, to market in ways that reflect our values, honor our humanity, and resist the dominant traits of capitalism that dehumanize, exploit, and isolate us.
The Tenets of Conscious Marketing
To market consciously is to practice awareness inside a system we cannot escape. It is to acknowledge that our work exists within capitalism, while refusing to replicate its most harmful traits—extraction, manipulation, and dehumanization.
Conscious Marketing is a commitment to return, again and again, to practices that center people over profit, relationships over transactions, and care over urgency. It’s about remembering that marketing is not just a tool for visibility or sales—it’s a tool for shaping culture.
These tenets are not rules. They are reminders, grounding points, and invitations—ways to reorient when we lose our way.
Relationship before transaction. Marketing is about building trust and connection, not just closing a sale. And trust here means trust in expertise: we need to be able to do what we say we can do.
Transparency before manipulation. No false urgency, shame tactics, or inflated promises. Attunement fosters stronger, more lasting relationships than manipulation ever could.
Context before neutrality. We name what’s happening in the world and how power shapes our work. Neutrality is a falsehood that nearly always protects the status quo. Conscious Marketing requires us to locate ourselves and understand our responsibilities given our identities and positionalities.
Service before extraction. We orient our offers toward contribution and collective good, not only profit. When we center the why behind our work—something bigger than money—our work gains traction and meaning.
Accessibility and equity. We design content and offers with inclusion in mind, asking whose needs are centered and whose are overlooked. That includes creating pricing and structures that meet people where they are, not where we wish they’d be.
Accountability with humility. Mistakes are inevitable. What matters is how we repair, take accountability, and keep learning. This will look different for each of us depending on our identities and our proximity to privilege and power.
Sustainability. We reject burnout-driven urgency and cultivate strategies that are human, imperfect, and adaptable. We honor our body-mind needs, and we remember that pivoting our plans is not failure—it’s part of why many of us chose to work for ourselves in the first place.
Culture-making. Every time we show up, we shape culture. Marketing can replicate harm; it can also illuminate possibility. Visibility is never neutral. Especially now, we each have a responsibility to interrupt “business as usual” and to use our platforms not only to sustain ourselves financially, but to move both our work and our culture forward.
Closing Note
To call it Conscious Marketing is to refuse the myth of neutrality, to practice awareness in the midst of systems we cannot escape, and to orient our strategies toward justice, equity, and care. We may not dismantle capitalism with an Instagram post. We can resist its most harmful traits in the way we tell stories, invite people in, and grow our work.