I Have Two Marketing Degrees. I Am Choosing to Demarket.
Yes I studied marketing. Yes I know exactly what I am doing. That is precisely why I am not doing it.
Let me get the credentials out of the way first so you understand the full weight of what I am about to say.
Me at my Griffith University graduation
🎓 THE EVIDENCE AGAINST ME
📚 Marketing degree in Australia from Griffith University. Three and half years of learning exactly how to make people buy things they did not know they needed.
💻 Digital marketing postgraduate in Portugal at the Porto Business School. Because apparently one degree in convincing people was not enough and I needed to learn how to do it on the internet too.
I know how funnels work. I know what a conversion rate is. I know the difference between top-of-funnel awareness content and bottom-of-funnel decision content. I know what a call to action is, when to use urgency, how to write a subject line that gets opened, and approximately seventeen ways to make someone feel like they are missing out on something.
I also live in the world. Which means I am constantly on the receiving end of everything I just described. Every app. Every email. Every banner. Every algorithm that has decided it knows what I need before I have finished my first thought of the morning.
And I made a decision. I am not doing that to you.
The era we live in says "this could have been an email." My ideology is: this could have been a more connected two-hour phone call. And nobody has time for that. So let me try to give you the feeling of it anyway.
I am a caller. I want to be upfront about that. In an era where people text, slide into DMs, send voice notes of exactly the right length, or communicate entirely through memes — when I need to talk to someone about something, I pick up my phone and I call. Full call. Voice. Real time. The whole thing.
I am not ashamed of this. I am slightly aware it makes me an anomaly. But I am not ashamed.
That instinct — toward actual connection over optimised communication — is the same one driving the demarketing decision.
📱 WHAT THE NEWSLETTER ACTUALLY IS
One message. Once a month. Like a two-minute voice note from a friend.
No discount codes. No limited time offers. No subject lines designed to manufacture urgency about something that is not actually urgent. Just: something happened, I wanted to tell you, here it is in the kind of language I would use if I were calling you from my kitchen while the kettle boiled. "Can you believe that happened?" "I wish I could have told you sooner." That kind of thing.
The books exist. They are real and they are good and I believe in them completely. If you want to buy them, the links are not hard to find. I am not going to follow you around the internet reminding you about them every forty-eight hours with a slightly different version of the same message.
What I am going to do is write something honest once a month and send it to the people who asked to hear from me. About what is happening with the books, yes. But also about what is happening with the work, the thinking, the things I am figuring out, the moments that made me want to pick up the phone and call someone.
Two marketing degrees. One conscious decision. The decision is: be the kind of writer I would actually want to hear from.
If you want the monthly message, you can subscribe below. No funnel. No welcome sequence of seventeen emails. Just the next thing worth saying, when there is something worth saying. Once a month. Like a friend who actually calls.
Calling rather than converting,
Jessica Gabrielzyk
✦ DEMARKETING · ONE MESSAGE · ONCE A MONTH · LIKE A FRIEND WHO CALLS ✦
