A little experiment in marketing or rather telemarketing.
Before the summer holiday Molly and I had a brilliant idea. Mette who previously worked in the corporate world remembers back when life was stressful. Now as a yoga studio owner she would of course like to reach out to others that have not found the relaxing effects of yoga. A newer class she has recently started is Yoga Nidra.
Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation that helps one relax so much that after a 20 minute session you feel as though you have slept 8 hours and your stress levels decrease, you are more productive the rest of your day and you feel fantastic.
Who would not love to offer their employees this chance to recharge? Especially if they didn’t have to leave the work place? The idea was that Molly and I would contact potential business, come out to them and set up a trial service that would suit the business and employees.
So after gathering information on local businesses in Hellerup, we had a list potential “clients” we would contact. The phone calls were like this:
Me:
“Hi, this is Dawn and I am calling from Hot Yoga Hellerup. Can I talk to someone from your HR department?”
Them:
Then some talking back and forth, but not really ever getting the word in about Yoga Nidra and reducing stress. Some said we already similar services, send me an email instead, we don’t have the resources for this, but the most common responds was. “We are too busy at the moment to consider anything right now, please contact us later – like in the fall”.
This of course was frustrating and also demotivating. The only thing I could do was laugh at this ironic situation, we are offering something that we feel will reduce their stress and they use their stress as an excuse not to hear.
After a few calls I asked the receptionist to be forwarded to their HR department or someone that is in charge of the employees wellness and she brighten up and said, oh please I do hope that you can figure out something, it is much needed here.
This reminds me about health communication and what we have learned in our GNH studies. An ongoing issue with being a GNH’er is how we deliver our health promoting messages to the public so that they will stop up and hear us?
An obvious situation is to not just go in cold and drop it, somehow you have to warm up to them. Perhaps reach out to the ones that have some interest. A bottom up approach, rather than top down (yeah that is a reoccurring theme) works best.
For example the receptionist, perhaps we could approach her with a prospect and then she goes to the HR department with a request and then interest from the HR department would blossom from there.
Anyhow, the marketing exercise was interesting to try. Back to the drawing board with that type of marketing.













