Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Becky Mollenkamp: Welcome to the Feminist Founders audio series event. This is a bonus for paid subscribers of the Feminist Founders newsletter. So if you're here, thank you so much for your support. I am so excited to bring you some incredible thought leaders who are going to share insights about doing business differently in a way that honors equity and social justice. I hope you learn a lot from this. Let's dig in.
Becky Mollenkamp: Today, I am talking to Andrea Jones of the Mindful Marketing podcast. That’s a new name for her podcast because she has been going through a bit of a transition with her business into a new approach to marketing that feels far more aligned with her values and mine, and hopefully yours too. We’re having a conversation all about that shift she’s been making slowly over time in a way that really feels good for her and that honors how she’s feeling. I think you’re going to feel a lot of camaraderie in the way she’s feeling about marketing and how she’s approaching it. I hope you enjoy the conversation we had. Make sure you go and subscribe to her podcast if you're a podcast listener, and since you're here on a private podcast feed, I imagine you are. I'll link to it in the show notes. It should be easy for you to subscribe since you're already on a podcast player. Take a listen to her show—it’s really wonderful, so polished, and well-produced, much better than this little series is. I hope you enjoy learning from Andrea. She’s a client, and I absolutely adore her. I’m so excited she was willing to participate in this and share some of her brilliance with you.
Becky Mollenkamp: Andrea, thank you for doing this with me. I’m so excited to talk to you about Mindful Marketing because we have a coaching client relationship and a friend relationship, and I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of behind-the-scenes insight into what you’re thinking about with this. I’m really excited to share more about it with people because I know how passionate you are. So I want to start with exactly that—with mindful marketing, with getting some shared language, and getting people onto the same page about what you mean when you talk about mindful marketing. So share with us your definition of that.
Andrea Jones: Thank you so much, Becky, for inviting me and being a part of this. Mindful marketing is something I’ve lived for the past four or five years in my business, only recently starting to define it. So this is a great exercise for me as the first question to go, well, how do I define mindful marketing? I think it falls into four different categories of awareness for me.
The first one is mindful marketing as an individual—so, me, my business. What does that mean, like playing in the space between hard work and hustle and boundaries and ease, creating something that feels good and that aligns with me, my preferences, but also continues to market my business?
The second thing, outside of myself, is the community. Building a business based on relationships is huge for me in mindful marketing. It’s not about just trying to make all the money in the world. To me, community goes beyond buyers; it’s really about contributing to society and the world around you in a meaningful way and providing value outside of just selling stuff.
Inside of that community, we do have buyers, so that’s the third area of awareness—being respectful in the way I’m marketing to potential buyers, allowing them to make their own choices and have their own autonomy without creating false pain points or urgency that’s not really urgent. But also, for me, it’s about marketing in a way that under-promises and over-delivers. When someone buys something from me, I want to have surprise and delight moments that show my marketing wasn’t just a flash in the pan. In fact, my marketing doesn’t fully reflect everything that you get. I want them to be pleasantly surprised when they buy from me. Also, I understand that buyers are my best advocates—they help me build more business. So I spend most of my time marketing to my buyers, continuing that conversation with them, creating assets and resources for them. I like to think of this as internal marketing, not in the sense that I’m trying to sell them more, but helping them use the things they’ve purchased.
The last thing is the greater world and having a mission behind what I’m doing. This is the newest piece for me—supporting social causes. I’ve always done so in my personal life, and now I’m finding a way to use my marketing, my voice, and my privilege to speak on certain issues. I’ve really stayed away from that in my business, but I think there’s a way to have an impact in a larger capacity with marketing and to use it for good. I don’t want my business to be just a thing that makes money for the sake of making money. It’s about how I can support larger causes. I started a scholarship fund this year, and we donate a portion of our proceeds to several causes as well. I’m being more public about some of those things. So to wrap up the first question about what mindful marketing is to me: it starts with me and my business, then expands into my community, my buyers, and the world around me.
Becky Mollenkamp: How is that different than what you were doing in the past? You said this has been how you’ve been showing up with marketing for the last four or five years, but I know you’ve been in business longer than that, and I know this represents a shift for you over time. So when you think about marketing and the way you were doing it and teaching it years ago—and maybe this is also a way of getting at how others are doing it without talking about anyone else specifically—what’s different about mindful marketing? How is it different than traditional, quote-unquote, approaches to marketing?
Andrea Jones: To answer the question of what I was doing before my shift into mindful marketing, we have to go back to the beginning—the origin story of adult Andrea, which started when I was 14 years old. I got a job at Chick-fil-A at 14, worked very hard, and haven’t stopped working hard since then. At one point in college, I had three jobs and was going to college full-time. I always valued hard work. The way I was raised, my socialization was that we work hard. The capitalistic society that I grew up in teaches that the harder you work, the more you get rewarded. So I brought that mentality into my business and marketing. When I started my business in 2014, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V, was a great example of what success looked like because he talked a lot about hard work. Respond to every comment, post every day, multiple times a day to multiple channels, sacrifice your sleep, sacrifice your family life for the value of hard work.
So I started teaching marketing that way—post every day, post to every channel, show up for every comment, give, give, give. While I had ways to simplify that, like posting the same thing to multiple channels, ultimately, the way I taught marketing, the way I approached marketing, was from that hustle, do the most, live, breathe, eat, sleep, marketing-every-day mentality. And it’s just not sustainable for human beings, and it wasn’t sustainable for a lot of the small business owners and entrepreneurs I was working with at the time.
Becky Mollenkamp: When you talk about doing marketing differently, breaking free from the Gary Vee model that I think so many of us know and that’s so commonly preached out there—it makes us all feel like we’ve got to do it all, be all the places all the time. When we think about breaking free from that, it sounds so good. I think most people would hear that and feel like, “Ah, the mindful piece sounds so nice.” And at the same time, I can hear people thinking, “That sounds great, but does it work? Can I actually still grow a business and make sales if I’m not all the places all the time?” Those fears come up, and I am certain you know those fears, you hear them, and you probably have had them or still have them yourself. So I’m wondering if you can be a little vulnerable and real—tell us about your own fears of making these sorts of shifts. What has come up for you along the way, and what do you hear from other people? I’m sure you can relate to that “can this work” feeling, and I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Andrea Jones: Oh gosh, yes. All of the fraudy feelings come up all the time, especially because I’m in marketing and it’s what I do. I feel like people—maybe I’m projecting—but I feel like people hold marketers to a different standard. It’s like, “Oh, if you’re in marketing, you should be doing this, you should be doing that.” So I feel this all the time. It’s just not sexy to talk about mindful marketing, and I know I’m up against that because everyone wants the crash-diet version of growing a business, right? It’s like, “Make $30,000 in 30 days, and here’s my secret how.” As humans, we gravitate toward that instead of the vitamin or the exercise regimen of, “Hey, how about we just walk for 30 minutes a day and enjoy nature around us and move our bodies.” That doesn’t sound as sexy because it may take you three years of moving your body to start to feel better again.
I personally struggle with this because it feels like I should be doing more. I should be on YouTube. I should post to Instagram every day. I should have a strategy for threads. I look at my account sometimes and think, “This could be so much better if I had more time, more money, a better camera.” I struggle with this a lot. I also add on top of it, “Oh, this is my job, so I should be excelling in every single area.” So yeah, you’re right—it’s hard to face that. Also, part of this mission of mindful marketing is being an example of what’s possible. One of the things that calms those thoughts in my brain is that all of the good things that have happened to me through social media have come through relationships I’ve made. Whether it be a passing relationship, just a comment on a post, or a deeper relationship with my longtime business bestie—we started off as Instagram DMs and have been meeting regularly for over six years, masterminding about our businesses.
All of those things make up what the internet, marketing, and social media could be. It’s all about relationships, so that calms my brain a little bit, but I still struggle so much with the visible output of what we “should” be doing on social media, and I’m using air quotes because it’s what everyone sees, and I feel like I judge myself, and I know other people do too.
Becky Mollenkamp: You’re still very much in the process of making this shift, of releasing all of the Gary Vee stuff and moving to this mindful marketing approach that actually feels really aligned for you and the way you want to show up. Of course, in that transition period, you’re going to be wrestling with “shoulds,” and I think we all know they really never go away. I’m wondering, what helps you with managing those feelings—the imposter syndrome, the shoulds? What helps you navigate those and allows you to continue moving forward with shifting to this mindful marketing approach? I’m sure others who are interested in making that same kind of shift are dealing with the same feelings, and I think your experience in navigating those could be really valuable.
Andrea Jones: This is such a good question, and I wish I had a neatly packaged answer for this, but I think there are a few things that play into learning to sit in the discomfort of imposter syndrome. Honestly, for me, it’s been about getting a lot of support over the years—leaning on my community, therapy, coaching, and whatever other tools I use, like meditation, to learn how to be uncomfortable and then be OK with being uncomfortable. There was a long time, as I was growing into adulthood, where I would avoid those uncomfortable feelings as much as I could. I think that’s just human nature, right? We don’t want to be uncomfortable, but there’s incredible discomfort in not doing the things I know could make me more money—like deploying marketing tactics, like fake scarcity or income claims.
There are so many things you could do as a marketer to be like, “Yeah, I’m the best, and I make the most money, and if you want to make money like me, buy my thing.” There are so many things I could do like that, and I know it works, and I know I could make more money, but I have to sit in the discomfort of being honest and transparent and standing in my integrity as much as I can. That may mean I won’t make as much money, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable. But on the flip side, it feels really good to be able to show up for my community in that way. That’s one of the things that helps.
Another thing that helps with this transition into mindful marketing—which is painfully slow for me, but it needs to be, right? It’s not something I can wake up tomorrow and have all the ducks in a row, all the stars aligned—but one thing that helps in this process is community. Having conversations like these, finding people who have the same belief systems about marketing and business, and joining those communities, but also stepping outside of my bubble. I was in this online business, internet marketing bubble for ten years as I was building my business, and really stepping outside of that. There’s a local crochet and knitting shop that I love to go to that just feels welcoming and warm, and it’s another community I can be a part of. Showing up for my kids and their little friends—those pockets of community where there are things outside of myself, that allow me to get outside of my head and the loop of “Who am I? This imposter?” and just contributing in other ways—that has really helped me navigate this whole process of being a mindful marketer. But it’s not clean, neat, or tidy. I struggle with those imposter syndrome feelings daily. As you know, since you’re my coach, you probably know more than anyone. I’m sending you little voicemails like, “Oh my gosh, what am I doing? How am I doing this? Who am I?” So it’s a daily practice to not get caught up in those fraudy feelings, but knowing that it’s a practice, knowing that it’s going to be uncomfortable, and then stepping outside of my head and doing something else really helps with perspective.
Becky Mollenkamp: I personally love that there’s not a neat and tidy answer because I don’t think it would be mindful if it were. I think that your modeling shows that mindful marketing reflects being more mindful in all the ways, and that’s good. That means it will be slower, more thoughtful, and that there will be challenges that you have to navigate, right? And then you approach those mindfully. So thank you for sharing that. I think that was really helpful, even if you don’t feel like it was a tidy answer. I think it’s really helpful for people to hear.
I want to shift and finish this interview with a few questions—or maybe one, we’ll see how this goes. Maybe you have one really long answer or maybe it’ll be a couple of questions. But I want to shift and move us toward the practical piece of this. What advice do you have for folks who are saying, “Oh, I am so caught up in the Gary Vee model,” or “I am so sick of the Gary Vee model”? For people who don’t know Gary Vaynerchuk, you can look him up, but it’s all the things you’ve talked about—the scarcity, the urgency, the manipulation, all the things we’ve been taught are necessary for successful marketing. I think the people listening to this don’t like it, they don’t like what it’s done to them, and they don’t want to do it. It’s like, well, then what do I do? So for those people who are with you and say, “Yeah, I’m interested in mindful marketing, I want to make this kind of shift,” where do they start? What are some high-level tips you can give people as they go down this journey too?
Andrea Jones: This is such a good question, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about frameworks and how to define my approach to mindful marketing. There are so many things that go into this. Some running threads are leading with your values—I think that’s super important. Taking a moment to understand what those are, especially when it comes to those big PR moments, like Black Lives Matter. So many businesses stumbled because they didn’t take the time to define their values. That’s super helpful.
Also, think about preferences, especially for my small business owners, which is mostly who I work with. A lot of the marketing falls on us. When I think about mindful marketing, it has to start with our preferences. I mean that by communication preferences. For example, I’m a talker—I like to talk. So I tend to do things that require talking, that are in a more natural state for me, like a podcast or a live video, training, or coaching. That’s typically where I thrive. I tend to do unscripted videos like that.
Then, having a creation channel and a content distribution channel. For content creation, I like talking, so I tend to do podcasts—that’s my main content creation channel. Distribution is how I share the podcast. I share it on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and that’s how I make people aware of the podcast. The podcast itself is my creation channel—that’s your hub, where everything lives. That’s how I share my perspective, my thoughts, and I bring on guests to share their perspectives and thoughts. This is very much a work in progress for me, but these are the things I think about when I think about tactically deploying mindful marketing and how I teach it or share it with my community and the people around me.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you for all of that. Honestly, I think we could go in a lot of directions and probably talk about this for a long time, but that’s what your podcast is for—people can go listen and learn along with you as you make more and more of this shift in your business, see what it looks like, and learn for their own business. So I don’t think we need to do a ton of teaching here because I think you’re doing all of that anyway. I just want to end things by asking you two things. First, what do you want people to be left with? What is a last journaling prompt, thought exercise, question, or even a tip that you want to leave people with so they feel ready to make the shift for themselves? And second, where can people find you and learn more about you and your work?
Andrea Jones: If I could leave with a thought, it would be that in marketing, there are a lot of “shoulds.” I feel like we “should” on ourselves a lot, and it comes from naturally following a lot of people telling us what we should be doing. So I’m always questioning the shoulds. Should I really be doing this? What impact will it really have on my business? Is it something I want to participate in? All of those are great questions I want to ask myself. I think that’s a great one to ask yourself too, even listening back to some of the things I’ve said here. Is this something you should be doing? Well, I think only you know—you are the only person who can determine that. Sometimes just trying it out, seeing how it feels, and going from there is the best approach.
The best way to connect with me further would be on my podcast, the Mindful Marketing podcast. If you’re listening to this, you’ll probably like that. That’s where I talk to other amazing people about their marketing strategies and how they’re approaching them mindfully. And if you like social media, I’m on social media at @onlinedrea.
Becky Mollenkamp: I hope everyone enjoyed that conversation with Andrea. I know I did. Every time I get to talk to her, I really love it. There was so much great information about approaching marketing in a new way that honors who you are and how you want to be in the world and letting that be OK, even if it’s not what it’s “supposed” to be. So thank you so much again for being a paid subscriber. You are the best. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ll be back in your earholes with another new interview on Monday.