FLEB Marketing Tactic #6 Relentless Positivity and Conflict Avoidance
Day 6 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⠀
FLEB Tactic #6:
Relentless Positivity & Conflict-Avoidance⠀
Nothing will get you kicked out of an online space led by a FLEB than expressing personal pain about social injustice. ⠀
Why? ⠀
Because the more closely a FLEB embodies the status quo, the more reach & revenue she’ll have. ⠀
Things that threaten the status quo – pain, anger, social analysis, conflict, OUR LIVED EXPERIENCES – threaten her brand.⠀
🚫 Angry women are a threat to patriarchy, that’s why we’re conditioned to be relentlessly positive⠀
🚫 Addressing conflict openly and honestly is a threat to white supremacy culture (see Okun and Jones), which is why white women in particular are conditioned to avoid open conflict⠀
That’s why these things have no place in the comments and online spaces led by FLEBs.⠀
Because they’re not culture-making leaders. They’re status quo business owners, ONLY⠀
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀
Feminist Business Practice #6:⠀
🔥TAKE RESPONSIBILITY⠀
🔥BUILD YOUR ANALYSIS⠀
Decide if you are a business owner only, or if you are also a leader.⠀
If you’re both, then it’s ESSENTIAL that you build your social analysis so you can steward brave, transformative, equitable spaces.⠀
Social media profiles & FB groups are not simply marketing devices. They are profound leadership responsibilities.
People don’t arrive in your comments/groups as blank slates. That means there’s no place in your business that’s a bubble outside of society and nobody in your groups untouched by oppression & bias⠀
If you are a culture-making leader then you WILL need the analysis & skills to navigate inequity in your business, no matter what your business is about.
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
