Author: Rem Wind

Spiritual Marketing Ick

Something always felt off to me. I’d watch spiritual teachers advertise their courses and run webinar funnels with countdown timers. Only 3 spots left. Doors close in 2 hours. The same scarcity. Cluttered landing pages with theatrical slashed prices. Headlines built to grab attention I’ve come to associate with “marketing.”

That’s when the question started to form: if we teach abundance, why do we sell with scarcity?

I always wanted to start a business. I told myself I would when I had something worth sharing.

Then I found out I was having a kid. I’m American, in love with a UK woman. Citizenship is not simple. Remote work was the only open door. So I walked through it. I always go into the heart, the seat of all knowing. I listened. I trusted. I took it as the push I needed. Otherwise I’d plan forever.

I started with the new marketing books. Seth Godin. Russell Brunson. Alex Hormozi. The books said people buy to relieve pain. Fear of being unsafe. Unloved (Prescription Drugs, Gun ads, Tinder). Or the desire to climb above others in status (think Gucci, Rolex, Porche). They all pointed back to a pyramid drawn by a man named Maslow. A supposed hierarchy of needs. Climb up from the primitive ones to the higher ones.

I didn’t have a high opinion of it.

The question I kept coming back to: what pain does a kid solve when they want a Spider-Man action figure? When they throw a tantrum in the middle of the store for clay-dough? Clearly not everything fits the pain-relief model. What pain do the original Apple campaigns solve? Their ads use Da Vinci, Einstein, the bitten apple. They appeal to creativity. Not pain.

Marketing aimed at lack has always made me feel manipulated. It’s the quickest way to make me want nothing to do with a product. Again — I trust the heart.

So I went deeper. Bernays. Ogilvy. Gary Halbert. The old masters of selling. Every road went back to the pyramid.

The Pyramid That Never Was

Every marketing book shows the same drawing. A pyramid. At the bottom: food, safety, sex. In the middle: love, belonging, status. At the top: self-actualization. The pyramid says: poke people’s wound. Remind them they’re unsafe. Offer them security. They’ll buy. Self actualization is only for those who have moved past the base needs to the top of the pyramid.

But Maslow never drew the pyramid.

Todd Bridgman and his colleagues examined in detail how the pyramid came to be and concluded that “Maslow’s Pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the sixties. From there, it quickly became popular in the emerging field of organization behavior. Bridgman and his colleagues note that the pyramid resonated with the “prevailing (post-war) ideologies of individualism, nationalism and capitalism in America and justified a growing managerialism in bureaucratic (i.e., layered triangular) formats.”

— Scott Barry Kaufman P.H.D., Transcend

Maslow concluded later in life that the needs all run at the same time. They feed each other.

After his heart attack, doctors gave him a few years left. He went on writing despite being on a timer. His self-actualization superseded his immediate health threats. In those last years he got tired of the term self-actualization. He started using a better phrase: becoming fully human.

A Boat, Not a Pyramid

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman picked up Maslow’s work and his later notes giving us a better idea of Maslow’s original vision.

Imagine a sailboat.

The hull keeps you afloat. Safety. Food. Shelter. Belonging. Without it, you sink.

The sail catches the wind. Exploration. Love. Purpose. The pull to become more.

You need both. A boat with no sail just drifts. A sail with no hull just drowns.

The needs aren’t a ladder you climb by stepping on others. They’re a vessel you build, and every part works in tandem. Security without self-actualization is empty. Self-actualization without safety is ungrounded.

When we sell fear without actually solving it, we punch holes in other people’s hulls and sell them buckets. We trap them. We keep them too busy bailing water to ever raise a sail.

Twin Impulses

Children can see who is unfair and they also pay attention to status. The two seem at odds, fairness is to treat others well, status is to rise above them. The fairness piece is wired in early. Researchers showed babies between six and ten months old a simple puppet show. A square helped a ball up a hill. A triangle pushed it back down. When the babies were given both puppets to play with, almost all of them chose the helper. They couldn’t yet speak. They already knew. Selflessness reads as good. Cruelty reads as wrong. Across sixty cultures, the same moral instincts show up: help your group, be fair, return favors, don’t steal.

The status piece is just as old. Even crickets keep a tally of who’s rising or falling. Ravens listen in on the gossip of nearby flocks and pay closer attention when the gossip is about a fall in another bird’s standing. Status is a real human need. The question isn’t whether we want it. The question is what we have to do to get it. What raises our status often has friction with what is selfless. But what if prestige is the natural result of fairness?

What the Blackfoot Knew

Maslow’s theory emerged after he visited the Northern Blackfoot reserve in Alberta in the summer of 1938. He sat with them. He studied them. They changed how he saw human nature.

In the Blackfoot tribe, prestige didn’t come from holding wealth. It came from giving it away.

The most respected people circulated abundance through the tribe. They threw the biggest feasts. They gave the best gifts. They lifted others up. It wasn’t who won or dominated. To hold wealth and not share it wasn’t even on the map of prestige. The idea didn’t register.

Maslow couldn’t ignore what he found. Eighty to ninety percent of the Blackfoot tested as emotionally secure as the most secure five to ten percent of Americans. Crime was almost gone. Violence amounted to the occasional fistfight between young men who’d been drinking. Financial jealousy and greed weren’t part of daily life. When tension rose between people, humor put it back down before it could build into harm.

The Blackfoot weren’t perfect. People with mental illness got cast out. Roles were fixed. This isn’t tribe good, capitalism bad. Many tribes are as broken as us, or more so. The Blackfoot are one example of a coherent system that worked. One system not built on scarcity. Prestige was reserved for those who generated abundance for the tribe — those whose role created safety and self-actualization for others rather than feeding off of it or undercutting it.

The Clog (Coda)

The systems we’ve built pulls people toward holding. But the system is perpetuated by each of us. A healthy body circulates. Moves nutrients. The cells get fed. The blood returns.

A sick body clogs. Blood pools. Tissue starves. Cells die. That kind of clog is called a heart attack. This is what happens when currency can’t circulate. Wealth piles up at the top. Never flows back down. The cells at the bottom starve. People can’t breathe. Crime rises. Trust drops. Everyone feels it. Even the people sitting on the clog. Because they bought into this idea that prestige means a bigger door and a moat — and they feel all the more disconnected and alone because of it.

The word courage comes from the Latin cor. It means heart.

To circulate when the system rewards holding takes heart. To open instead of close the fist takes heart. Maslow believed people were innately good but compensated in their confusion to try and meet the needs they were deprived of.

Maslow’s heart attack didn’t take him. His heart was in his work.

“Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.” — Robert H. Schuller

In 2010, a virus spread across the globe, infecting an estimated 60 million computers. Governments scrambled. Corporations panicked. Everyday people were watching their computers slow to a crawl, pop-ups multiplying like digital cockroaches. Who was behind it? The antivirus company itself.

McAfee — the brand synonymous with protection — was accused of engineering the very threats it claimed to solve. Infect the world, then sell the cure. It sounds monstrous. But nature got there first. Some species of ants farm aphids (those small sap-sucking insects that look like leaves). Ants farm them the way we farm cattle. They tend to them, herd them, guard them from predators — in exchange for honeydew (the sweet secretion aphids produce, which would be like our milk from cows). It sounds symbiotic, except these ants bite the aphids’ wings off to keep them grounded and dependent. They engineer the conditions to supply the solution.

There are really only two mindsets in business: creating pain or correcting pain. That’s it. And sometimes people create the pain just so they can correct it. Many industries operate this way — especially medicine. If you heal, you don’t need me. I need you to suffer so I can stay in use. Too often the solutions don’t create more health — they create more side effects, which require more treatments, which require more appointments, which require more prescriptions. The business model depends on your problem never fully going away.

There’s a fish that runs the same scam. The cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus). A small neon colored fish that’s shaped like an unassuming bullet. It sets up “cleaning stations” on coral reefs where larger fish come to have parasites removed. A good deal — until researchers discovered they cheat. They prefer to bite into their client’s healthy tissue and nutritious mucus rather than just eating the parasites. This creates small wounds, irritation, and greater susceptibility to infection, which means the client fish needs… more cleaning visits. They generate repeat customers by making the problem worse while appearing to solve it. They even behave more honestly when being watched. When they have a captive audience of one, they cheat more freely.

Those who spout “money is the root of all evil” miss something more fundamental. More ancient. More human. Parasitic vs. symbiotic. That’s the real axis. Money is just the bargaining chips. I can cheat you out of a million dollars or a million acorns — I’m a cheat either way. And if I’m creative enough to exploit you, that same creativity could be redirected to heal you. The tools are identical. The orientation is everything. It’s a consciousness problem.

The parasite asks: How do I keep them needing me?

The symbiote asks: How do I keep them growing?

Scarcity thinking treats business like a pie. The more I eat, the less you get. I have to sneak and cheat. But pies don’t grow on trees. A pie doesn’t sustain man. Nature — God — doesn’t make pies. It makes orchards. As Myron Golden puts it in From The Trash Man To The Cash Man: “if I grab an apple and eat it, people with a lack mentality say there are fewer apples now. But five seeds come out. From those five seeds, five apple trees sprout, each producing 300 or more apples a year — all of which contain seeds.” This seems mind-boggling only because we’re talking about exponential growth, and human minds aren’t built to think exponentially.

The famous wheat and chessboard problem makes this visceral: place one grain on the first square of a chessboard, then double it on each of the 64 squares. By the final square, you’ve accumulated 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains — roughly 384 billion tons. That exceeds current global wheat production. A pile that tall would dwarf Mount Everest.

All from one grain that kept doubling.

When you solve one problem honestly, you don’t lose a customer — you create abundance. And here’s why that’s more sustainable: the parasitic model has a ceiling. When you keep people indebted, sick, or dependent, you’re feeding off a host that’s getting weaker. Every extraction diminishes the thing you depend on. You need your customers broken enough to need you, but functional enough to pay you. That’s a razor-thin margin, and it will eventually collapses. Addiction burns out. Debt defaults. Resentment builds. The host dies or leaves — and the parasite dies with it.

Abundance works the opposite way. Growth brings new challenges, and new vistas bring new opportunities to serve. If I show you how to make money, I can show you how to manage it. How to invest it. How to protect it. How to multiply it. And because I helped you before — because you experienced our unity of benefit firsthand — you trust that I have your best interest in mind. There’s no ceiling. Each solution opens the next door. The client who heals comes back stronger, with bigger challenges worth solving — and more resources to solve them. It compounds exponentially. Meanwhile, every service you’ve already built still stands, still bearing fruit, still being recommended by the people it worked for. Money may not grow on trees — but your services grow in an orchard when they bring life.

“Let’s imagine that your business is a living entity. It does in fact have many of the same features that living things do—growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and so on—and it lives in an eco(nomic) system all its own.”

— Mark Joyner: Integration Marketing

Nothing Thrives in Isolation

In a healthy ecosystem, a flower doesn’t bloom for itself. It’s woven into pollinator networks, soil systems, predator-prey relationships. Every organism finds its niche by integrating into existing flows of energy and resources. The system’s strength comes from these interconnections, not from any single organism trying to overtake or dominate another.

Integration Marketing mirrors this exactly. You’re not trying to create demand from scratch or own the entire market. You’re finding the existing flows — customer traffic, buying processes, trusted relationships — and inserting the value you offer into them. You’re becoming part of that system.

Think the difference between a parasite and a symbiont. A parasite extracts without adding value and weakens the host. A symbiotic organism adds value to the host while feeding itself, and both thrive. ‘Good business’ makes everyone win. Integration Marketing at its best is symbiotic — like Microsoft positioning itself as the operating system for IBM’s computers. IBM had the hardware; they needed an OS. Microsoft made themselves indispensable, to the point where you’re far more likely to know the operating system than the computer model running it. And judging by Microsofts value (2.75 trillion at the time of writing this) the relationship survived and scaled.

Weak businesses compete on pure dominance or novelty. Strong ones find their ecological niche — the specific place in an existing network where they’re genuinely useful — and integrate there. That’s why residual profits compound. You’re not fighting the current. You’re riding it.

How Flowers Solved the Distribution Problem

Early plants reproduced through spores — just throwing genetic material into the wind and hoping for the best. Terrible success rate, horrible business model, zero control.

Flowers were more business savvy, they said: What if instead of broadcasting randomly, we attracted a specific intermediary to do the distribution for us?

They evolved color, scent, nectar. They literally advertised to pollinators (bees, moths, butterflies). In exchange, insects got food. Plants got precision reproduction. The flower didn’t try to spread its own pollen across the landscape alone. It integrated itself into an existing need — the insect’s hunger — and made the insect want to carry its genetic material. A flower’s fragrance is carried by wind, the scent reaches the bees, and the bees come seeking. The flower didn’t conquer the wind. It partnered with it.

And here’s why this arrangement has lasted for roughly 130 million years: it solved a real problem so elegantly that the relationship became unbreakable.

Pollinators evolved to depend on flowers. Flowers evolved to depend on pollinators.

Now you can’t separate them. The flower became essential to an existing flow of life — not optional, not decorative, but load-bearing.

That’s exactly what Integration Marketing is. Find a real need or existing traffic stream. Make yourself so useful, so integrated into it, that you become part of the ecosystem rather than a parasite trying to extract value. You stay alive because you’re solving someone else’s problem while solving yours and it becomes passive income.

From Spray-and-Pray to Precision Targeting

With spores in the wind, you’re firing a shotgun blindly. Ninety-nine percent of your genetic material lands in the ocean, on rocks, in deserts — places where it can’t grow. You need to produce massive quantities just to get a tiny hit rate.

With a pollinator, you’re using a delivery system. A bee doesn’t go to random places. It goes where other flowers are, where plants can actually root and grow. You’re targeting your reproduction to fertile ground instead of wasting energy everywhere.

Precision matters for quality too. If you throw pollen randomly, you might pollinate your own plant — inbreeding, weak offspring. With a bee traveling from flower to flower, you get cross-pollination: genetic diversity, stronger plants. In marketing terms, you’re not just reaching more people. You’re reaching the right people in the right context, which produces stronger outcomes than sheer volume ever could.

That’s why the plant choose which insects it attracts through color and scent. You want the right pollinator for your flower type, not just any bug. That selectivity, compounded over time, means better reproduction outcomes. The plant went from “spray and pray” to “attract a partner who actively helps you reach the right spots.”

‘Branding’ Is Your Color Palette

Different insects literally see different colors. That’s the key.

Bees see ultraviolet — wavelengths (colors we can’t even perceive). A flower that’s bright red to us is basically invisible to a bee. But a flower with ultraviolet patterns? That lights up like a neon sign. Butterflies see reds and oranges. Hummingbirds are drawn to bright red. Night-pollinating moths are attracted to pale-white.

Through evolution, flowers literally tuned their color palette to match the sensory preferences of the partners they needed. A flower that wanted bee pollination evolved blue and purple. One that wanted butterflies evolved orange and yellow. Each flower was saying: I’m advertising specifically to you.

Your business does the same thing whether you realize it or not. Your language, your aesthetic, your offer structure, the platforms you show up on — all of it is your color palette. The question is whether you’ve tuned it intentionally for the partners and customers you actually want, or whether you’re just blooming and hoping the right pollinator happens to fly by.

Nature figured this out 130 million years ago. The playbook hasn’t changed. Find the existing flow. Make yourself useful inside it. Tune your signal for the audience you need. And let the ecosystem carry you.

Coda: Picking the Right Spot in the Ecosystem

The metaphor is nice, but when you’re actually choosing where to integrate, you need to think clearly about a few concrete things.

1. Does the audience fit to serve my needs?

Deep integration is parasitic at worst if the partner can’t support you mutually. The pollinators work because they frequent places flowers can grow and diversify in, the specific disadvantage to the ‘spray and pray’ approach. You need to ask: does this integration actually serve me too? The tighter the match, the less work you have to do.

2. How badly does the customer need this?

Some services are nice to have. Some are essential. And some relieve active, immediate pain. The more your offer sits on the “I need this to survive” end of the spectrum rather than the “oh that’s nice” end, the less convincing you have to do, the pain has convinced them. How much easier do you make it for the bee and butterfly to survive? Keep in mind creative expression is a core need too it just is a slower death, depression, isolation, low self-worth literally ‘kill’ the body.

3. Why not anyone else?

If you’re the only source — or the most elegant solution — then how optimal you are does the work for you. The customer can’t just say “I’ll grab that somewhere else.” You are 1 of 1.

Putting It All Together

When you’re evaluating where to place yourself in an ecosystem, you’re really asking five questions:

1. How well does the partner’s audience match mine?
2. Is it urgent to live/thrive?
3. How irreplaceable is what I’m offering?