Slow Marketing: Why It's Every Brand's Ticket to Genuine Connection
Photo by David Monje on Unsplash
Marketing moves fast. It demands quick results, instant wins and rapid growth. It definitely doesn’t dawdle. The idea of slow marketing might sound contradictory but it’s a way for brands to find genuine, deep-rooted connections with their audiences. It’s about being empathetic, calm, and creative to encourage brand communications that add value and help customers fall in love.
Slow marketing, in a nutshell
The slow movement started in the 1980s, initially as a pushback to the fast food industry. Since then it’s prompted other movements including slow marketing, slow parenting and slow fashion.
The idea is that by dropping the pace, there’s more opportunity to personalise the message. It makes it more digestible and easier to distinguish among the noise of fast-paced, in-your-face advertising.
Taking a foot off the marketing accelerator stacks with the shifts in attitude on a societal level. In recent years we’ve seen trends encouraging us to move away from working all hours of the day and instead, embrace ways to disconnect and find an equilibrium between life online and offline.
This approach also aligns with our ethos at The Stitch Writer. We’re more concerned with doing things slowly and really well, with real quality instead of churning out content for the sake of it.
Where to start with slow marketing
It’s all about empathy.
Have you ever felt a pang of sadness when you see someone crying? Do you begin to smile when you hear people laughing? Was there ever a time you sensed your friend needed someone to talk to? These are all forms of empathy, a term we use to understand other people’s feelings as if we were experiencing them ourselves. It’s feeling someone else’s pain, walking in their shoes or seeing through their eyes.
Being empathetic as a brand can have the same effect on your customers, making them feel seen, heard and truly valued.
Knowing customers at this granular, emotional level is key to understanding their behaviours and it can help brands to create an effective marketing strategy that taps into their needs on a deeper level.
What’s the difference between sympathy and empathy?
Empathy is understanding other people’s feelings as if we were experiencing them ourselves. It can also mean projecting our own feeling onto a work of art or another object.
Sympathy is taking part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorry for their misfortune. You can also have sympathy for opinions and tastes.
This RSA Short, voiced by the Queen of Emotional Connection, Dr Brené Brown, illustrates the difference between the two emotions with heart and humour.
Find your gap
It might feel as though you have to sprint in order to keep up with those whippet-fast brands that seem to produce content every hour. Rather than tire yourself out, ease back, catch your breath and focus on making content that will resonate with your audience.
To start, consider how you can add value and do it without sounding like everyone else.
For content to really stick in the minds of your audience, it should do one of three things:
Educate – ask yourself what you wish people knew about your work? Consider the questions your audience always has – how can you help resolve or demystify them?
Entertain – you don’t have to get up and point around an Instagram reel. Instead, consider the ways you can build genuine connections with your audience. How can you speak to them in a way that will conjure delight and stimulate engagement?
Inspire – Ask how you can spark some fresh ideas for your readers? What would stop your audience in their tracks and make them want to pass it on?
And bear in mind Social Media Manager, Claire Jay’s golden rule: “Be patient and enjoy it.”
Once you’ve found your gap, it’s time to…
Create a seamless customer journey
Consider every touch point your reader or customer will encounter as they interact with your brand online. It could be an Instagram post, a product listing, a long-form blog post or an email newsletter. These are all means of communicating with your audience and nurturing them to the point where they actively participate and enjoy being in your world.
Brands that embrace slow marketing
Aura
This funeral care and cremation service helps people to feel understood and confident when they're faced with the loss of a loved one. We created a tone of voice for Aura that sounds human, non-judgemental and confident.
EXAMPLE: Website copy
“Let's focus on what matters and take care of the people you love”
WE LOVE IT FOR: Cutting straight to the chase. Aura wants people to feel understood. We created a tone of voice to help them feel safe, not stifled, and understood without being undermined.
Inkpact
A service that helps brands to be more human by sending customers genuinely handwritten notes.
EXAMPLE: Website copy
Human Connection is the Future for Brand Loyalty.
We increase your first to second purchase rate by sending handwritten notes triggered across your customer journey.
Our clients have happy customers that spend more and leave less.
Emotional connection in the mail = outstanding results.
WE LOVE IT FOR: It takes a lot longer to write a personalised note than it does to ping off an email but Inkpact shows how much value this level of care from a brand can add to the customer’s experience.
Bloom & Wild
B&W, inventor of letterbox flowers, introduced the Thoughtful Marketing movement in 2019 and 170 businesses have since signed up.
EXAMPLE: Email newsletter
WE LOVE IT FOR: Its caring tone and unflowery delivery that translates to genuine thoughtfulness.
The company also has its own Medium page, where it publishes really useful articles on the topic of doing things thoughtfully.
Waitrose
The British supermarket and purveyor of exceedingly good chicken kievs launched a “slow-TV” campaign in February 2020.
EXAMPLE: TV ad (February 2020)
WE LOVE IT FOR: Quiet yet captivating scenes of chickens scratching about in a field, cut to perfectly cooked eggs on toast. The message is happy hens make for good eggs.
Desmond & Dempsey
The pyjama brand that gives luxury loungewear serious edge.
EXAMPLE: Learning to slow down with a startup from D&D’s The Sunday Paper
Our pyjama revolution didn’t come, but perhaps more importantly, we slowed down enough to fall back in love with our business. We would be shunned if the start-up world read this.
Molly Goddard, D&D’s co-founder
WE LOVE IT FOR: The honest take on the magic that can come from taking a proper breather. Even as the co-founder of a start-up.
Master slow marketing for yourself
Creating a slow marketing strategy requires patience. It takes time to understand your audience. You need to find any opportunity for genuine interaction and listen, really listen to what they want. From there, you can hone the tone of your message and develop a really effective way to deliver it.
In case it’s not already clear, we love ‘slow’. We’re here for quality, people and genuine, honest interaction. Let’s have more of that.
