Anti-marketing awareness

Inquire Creative Solutions is not a marketing business. Instead, it's more of an anti-marketing business. Because ICS is uncapitalist and not based on profit-driven urgency, it gets space to cultivate forms of connection, possibility, and awareness that do not need to be mediated by money.

The Fun-nel and Circuit Lengthening

Consider this annotated version of a classic marketing funnel:
\    /<-- Potential customer visits website
 \  / <-- Potential customer identifies a product/service of interest
  \/  <-- Customer decides whether to purchase product/service

Now consider the possibilities of an inverted fun-nel:
  /\  <-- Connection, resonance
 /  \ <-- Greater possibility
/    \<-- Broader impact

The classic funnel operates on a model of connection where flow is increasingly restricted and controlled. By contrast, my hope is that by visiting this website, you have already crossed the narrowest and most restrictive part of the funnel and that my content and offerings help support expansive new possibilities for resonance and impact. Beautifully, that can be grounded in purpose more than money. And the fun-nel can be fun.

In the money-purposed world, marketers often use urgency as a way to develop revenue. A common example is "sales": temporary discounts offered on products or services. The idea is that a time-limited discount will create a sense of urgency and encourage a sale where there might not otherwise be one. In a sales presentation I once received from a meta-consultancy (consultants consulting consultants) I heard that if I didn't schedule a follow-up by the end of the hour, I would lose the opportunity to receive free content that could help me. I asked why there was a timeout for the offer and the salesperson told me they have found that if there isn't a sense of urgency, people won't proceed. I thanked them for the answer and withdrew my presence and energy. Urgently giving or receiving time and money metaphorically "short-circuits" our decision-making processes, so I engage urgent patience as an antidote that helps re-lengthen our circuits.

Home