It is about better marketing

The following is part of my 2006-2007 blog to book project that ultimately became Making Mediation Your Day Job.

In a recent interview, Bernie commented that the developmental crisis this field faces isn’t occurring only because we haven’t marketed well enough.

I think the developmental crisis is more strongly connected to ineffective marketing than Bernie suggests and here’s why:

• Too many mediators are ineffective or hesitant marketers. The field is struggling, in part, because the bulk of its professionals don’t know how to build their individual practices successfully using leading edge approaches.
• Effective marketing by today’s standards isn’t about selling what you have to offer. As Bernie implied, doing more of what hasn’t really worked won’t improve individual success or that of the broader field.The challenge calls for new thinking.
• Marketing today is about being in conversation with your public, really engaging them, and not selling and telling.
• It’s about listening. It’s about a desire to understand what they really want. It’s about staying true to your purpose without being overly committed to the one way you’ve chosen to act on that purpose (offering mediation only, for instance).

Good marketing is a two-way conversation. You already know how to do this, at least intellectually, because good mediators know how to create dialogue.

Your primary business-building task, then, is to learn how to build dialogue with your own public. The approach described in the next chapters will show you how.