Pagan, Occult, and New Age Advertising

As the former employee of a Pagan business that also catered to customers of a New Age and/or Occult bent, I knew that the store I worked at was something special. With a stated goal of providing every customer with an “Authentic Craft Experience,” the products we offered were spiritually minded, and included resources for the beginner just setting his foot to the path, the adept who had been practicing her Craft forever, and everyone in between. With a high level of traffic on a frequently traveled artery, in the largest metro area of the state, attracting customers into the store was an important part of the business. Daily, new customers would tell me they were just passing by, became curious, and so had turned around to find out what the place was about. The signs outside the building, at least, were working. But the most common response I received, “I’ve never even heard of this place,” was more concerning from the perspective of an employee. After all, if potential customers don’t know a business exist, if only a few of them happen upon the physical store by chance alone, then the business is trusting its success to the subjective opinions of the curious willing to execute a dangerous U-Turn along a stretch of road with a mile separating the nearest traffic signals, and luck. If a business doesn’t exist in the mind of a consumer, if the only exposure to a store is passing it by at 40 miles per hour, then the business doesn’t exist.

There were three main sources of income that kept the business afloat, targeted to the Pagan, New Age, and Occult Communities. In store purchases, with inexpensive items such as candles and incense, middle purchase items, such as jewelry and artwork, and larger items, such as statuary and difficult to obtain curios and essential oils. Classes and lectures were held on almost every day of the week, covering a variety of topics important to the customer base. Finally, special events were held that included in-house concerts, rituals, and public fairs. Overall, it was a well-rounded approach to running the business, and the store quickly became known among its regular visitors as a gathering place, a Community Center if you will. Customers tended to be happy with their experiences in the business and their purchases, and many become devoted to the store’s brand. I began detecting a common theme among many of the customers however, one that threatened the livelihood of the store and points directly to the reason why many Pagan Oriented, New Age, and Occult businesses have difficulty growing their income.

A Solitary practitioner of Paganism, the Occult, and New Age beliefs is a person who engages with their belief system on their own, usually because they dislike groups, they’re unable to find a local group, or they have an eclectic set of beliefs that aren’t reflected in local groups (The Solitary Pagan Path). With the wealth of resources now available through publishers like Llewellyn Worldwide (Llewellyn Worldwide), and the easy access of the Internet, studying and practicing forms of Paganism, the Occult, and New Age beliefs has become a solitary pursuit for many people. While a Solitary practitioner may know one, or even a few other individuals who share similar beliefs, many come from homes where ‘traditional’ Abrahamic religions are the norm. This means that Word of Mouth Marketing becomes a problem because a satisfied customer may have no one with whom he or she may share with, or have only a small group of people whom they feel comfortable referring to a business. Fear of familial discord, ostracism at home and at work, and negative judgment, may be additional factors for keeping one’s spiritual practices, and favored New Age, Pagan, and Occult stores, private. There is also the very real fear that if a person’s Pagan/New Age/Occult beliefs are discovered, their jobs could be put in jeopardy, such as the case of English teacher Sheri Eicher in North Carolina (Skelly), or lose their children (Pitzl-Waters). Although discrimination and intolerance is abhorrent, the atmosphere of secretiveness it creates is equally disturbing for the businesses that trust in their customers to carry the store’s marketing message out into the world. Knowing their customers will likely face a host of unpleasant questions if they start bringing in-store marketing material with them wherever they go, and understanding that the growth of a business depends on bringing in more customers, the onus of marketing the business across multiple media channels falls upon the business owner in full; the responsibility of reaching out to potential customers unaware that the store exists shifts from current customers to the business entity itself.

Even though many Pagan oriented, New Age, and Occult practitioners find the idea of proselytization despicable on a personal level (Cunningham), basically equating it with marketing because it too is an attempt to convert a person from one belief to another, i.e. taking a customer from shopping elsewhere (if there is somewhere else) to shopping at the owner’s store, advertising is an effective method of bringing in new, quality customers. With only 4% of businesses reaching their 10 year anniversary (van Dyk), advertising becomes that much more important. It raises a store’s profile out of the shadows of barely-getting-by into the mystique of profitability and business growth. Advertising effectively is a deep process that requires the business owner to understand why customers shop, why advertising works, and how to effectively track advertising.

The reason why customers shop has been debated by philosophers, scientists, and consumers since the dawn of commerce. But a business owner needs more than a debate. A business owner needs information they can use to keep their business going strong with a healthy profit margin that ideally increases every year. Understanding why customers shop gives a business owner an advantage, and their marketing strategy can be helped by it greatly. In the article “Why Do People Shop” by Edward Tanner, he mentions a study that was conducted to determine the reason why people shop. The consumer’s motivations were categorized under either Personal Reasons or Social Reasons (Tauber).

Under the category of Personal Reasons, consumers were motivated by the role they play in society. “A person internalizes these behaviors as ‘required’ and is motivated to participate in the expected activities.” They were also motivated to shop as a diversion from the routine of daily life, experiencing it as a form of recreation. Different moods also played a factor, with several subjects in the study reporting that they shopped because they were depressed and felt some satisfaction by spending money on themselves. Consumers were also motivated by the desire to learn about new trends, because many people are interested in staying abreast of the latest trends. Physical activity was also a role, giving customers the chance to exercise. Finally, retail stores provide “many potential sensory benefits for shoppers” and overall sensory experience of a customer, including sight, sound, scent, and tactile experiences, may influence a customer’s shopping decision.

Under the category of Social Reasons, shopping is a good source of social interaction outside of the home. It allows the customer to communicate with others having similar interests, and shopping at a particular store sometimes is motivated by the desire to be with a customer’s peer group or “a reference group to which one aspires to belong.” Also, shopping provides the consumer the ability to be treated as someone special, to be “waited on”, without having to pay for the extra attention. (Tauber)

If a person shops for more reasons than purchasing, then the smart business owner would begin viewing a customer’s entire shopping experience with an equal importance to their purchasing of goods. With a target market facing regular persecution, it behooves the business owner to pay special attention to the reasons why customers shop, and create an entire shopping experience focused on the consumer and his or her motivations, rather than just providing products for purchase. (Tauber)

With this in mind, a business owner might immediately shift his or her business over to advertising services ahead of products, or selling the experience of the shopping excursion. While that’s a step in the right direction because it demonstrates the desire of a store to be customer oriented, business owners still need to make money, and advertising can’t do that if the organization doing the advertising doesn’t understand why advertising works in the first place.

Many people believe that advertising doesn’t work because they think that ads are trying to make them do something immediately (Hollis). If advertising didn’t work though, U.S. companies wouldn’t invest $70 billion in TV advertising alone (McQuivey). But the goal of a good advertisement is not necessarily about persuading an audience. It’s about “The ideas, impressions and positive feelings about the brand” leaving a lasting memory that hopefully predisposes a consumer to see the brand as superior than its competitors (Hollis). The reason that advertising works is because it influences a customer. It doesn’t command them. As the saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make the horse drink.” However, you can influence the horse to drink if you salt the feed first. Advertising works on the same principle, and just like salting a horse’s feed to get it to drink, it takes more than one bite to accomplish the task.

That ‘salt’, a business’ advertising message, ideally should grab the customer’s attention, hold the customer’s interest, arouse desire, and obtain action (Armstrong & Kotler). When putting the ad together, a business owner needs to decide what to say and how to say it; the message content, and the message structure.

Message content relies on: rational appeals, relating to the audience’s self-interest, showing how a product or experience will produce desired benefits; emotional appeals that attract a great deal more attention, creating more belief in the brand, employing either negative or positive emotions to motivate a purchase; and moral appeals, directed to the consumer’s sense of morality. (Armstrong & Kotler)

In deciding the structure of the message, research indicates that an advertiser is better off letting a customer come to his or her own conclusion by asking questions, rather than letting the ad draw the conclusion for them. Presenting the strongest arguments in an ad first gets strong attention, but can leave the audience dissatisfied, because the attention gained at the beginning has been allowed to fizzle out at the end. Finally, a decision has to be reached whether the argument will only mention the product’s strengths, or if it will tout those strengths while also mentioning its shortcomings. (Armstrong & Kotler).

For Pagan, Occult, and New Age businesses, promoting to a specialized, niche market, tracking a marketing campaign becomes just as important as the marketing campaign itself. Without it, the business could spend a bundle of money without receiving an acceptable return on investment. Media planners use seven navigational metrics before a marketing campaign, and again once the campaign has concluded for analytical purposes, and evaluative metrics which measure all of the actions taken by the members of a business’ target audience in response to the marketing campaign (Roy).

The seven metrics measure what a business did, where and how the marketing budget was spent. They include Reach, which a measurement of the size of the audience predicted to be advertised to. For example, for a magazine with a distribution of 1,000 copies, and the average American household consisting of approximately 3 people (Lofquist, Lugaila, O'Connel & Feliz), the Reach of an advertising campaign in that magazine will be approximately 3,000 people.

Frequency is the average number of times an ad will be shown to an individual or household. If, for example, the magazine were issued four times a month, then the frequency would 4.

GRP, Gross Rating Points, is the product of Reach multiplied by Frequency. Continuing with the example of a magazine ad, if only 10% of the magazine’s subscribers, then the GRP would be 3,000 X 4 = 12,000, and 10% of 12,000 is 1,200.

Target Rating Points, TRP, is the Gross Rating Points multiplied by the ratio of the specifically targeted audience to the total audience.

Impressions equals the number of exposures of an ad to people or households in the business’ audience. Cost per Thousand is the cost to reach 1,000 people or households. Cost per Point is the cost to reach one percent of the audience.

Evaluative metrics are relatively simple in comparison, measuring what a consumer did after being exposed to the business’ ad. Surveying customers is one method of evaluating the ad campaign, but the most accurate way to measure how much the program affected what a consumer did is to perform Classical Tracking, which consists of building tracking mechanisms into the media before the fact. Response cards, telephone numbers, and coupons are examples of Classical Tracking methods.

Advertising works best when the ad promotes a positive customer experience, with a message that stays in their memories long after the fact, and has been constantly evaluated for effectiveness. In order for Occult, Pagan, and New Age shops to continue to grow, the time has come for them to put the promotion of their business back into their hands. The Occult store I once worked at began with the goal of providing an “Authentic Craft Experience.” Now, they are one of the most successful and well known Pagan businesses in the state, and are even becoming internationally recognized.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Kotler &. Principles of Marketing. Ed. Melissa Sabella. 13th. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. E-Book.

Cunningham, Scott. Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. 35th. St. Paul: Llewellyn Worldwide, 1988. Introduction.

Hollis, Nigel. "Why Good Advertising Works (Even When You Think It Doesn't)." 31 August 2011. The Atlantic. Website. <http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-good-advertising-works-even-when-you-think-it-doesnt/244252/>.

Llewellyn Worldwide. Llewelyn: New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit. n.d. <http://www.llewellyn.com/>.

McQuivey, James. "Google TV Is Finally Real, but Does Google Understand What It Has Done?" 10 October 2010. AdAge. Article. <http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/search-ads-disrupt-tv-s-70-billion-ad-market/146329/>.

Pitzl-Waters, Jason. "Religion's Role in Custody Battles." 8 August 2011. Patheos. Blog. <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2011/08/religions-role-in-custody-battles.html>.

Roy, Joe. Marketing Metrics Made Simple. 2013. Website. 2013. <http://www.marketing-metrics-made-simple.com/>.

Skelly, Megan. "Pagan Religious Discrimination in the US Today." 20 03 2000. Rapunzell's Tower. Report. <http://www.rapunzellstower.com/Pagan/discpaper.php>.

Tauber, Edward M. "Why Do People Shop?" Journal of Marketing 36.4 (1972): 46-49. Online Document.

"The Solitary Pagan Path." n.d. The Urban Pagan: Exploring Nature and Magic in the Heart of the City. Web Article. <http://www.theurbanpagan.com/solitary-pagan.html>.

van Dyk, Jurie. Why 9 out of 10 Small Businesses Fail. 12 April 2010. Online Article. <http://creativeoverflow.net/why-9-out-of-10-small-businesses-fail/>.