FLEB Marketing Tactic #4 Predatory Payment Plans
Day 4 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB).⠀
If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀
If you’re an entrepreneur, download this free 10-day class to help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀
- Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
- Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended.⠀
WHAT NOT TO DO⠀
Problematic FLEB Tactic #4:⠀
⠀
It is NORMAL and ROUTINE for Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brands and their students to charge an extra 25%, 30%, or more as a finance fee for payment plans.⠀
If my bank or credit card offered me those rates, I’d walk. To me, charging that amount of interest is exploitative and predatory.⠀
There’s nothing empowering about a 30% finance fee for the people least able to afford your rates.⠀
In fact, it’s the opposite of empowerment. ⠀
Turning finance fees into a profit center & additional revenue stream in your business is textbook financial injustice.⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Culture Making Business Practice #4:⠀
First, please read my 2 blog posts on Payment Plans because I go into way more detail, with more nuance.⠀
And then try this:⠀
1) If you are undercapitalized and need more people to pay in full, in advance, then tell them that directly on the sales page. You’d be surprised at how many people will strive to pay in full, if they can, just so they can ever further support a community member they are literally investing in!⠀
2) If you have actual hard costs associated with maintaining your payment plans, yes recoup those costs! Here are 2 ways to do that:⠀
- Charge a finance fee based on your actual numbers (not a made-up number that creates more profit on the backs of those least able to pay) ⠀
OR⠀
- Calculate costs, build it into your overhead, and spread it across ALL your prices⠀
What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)
and why is it a problem?
Female
- Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
- Reinforces gender dualist/binary
Lifestyle
- Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women
Empowerment
- Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
- Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)
Brand
- Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
- Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character
