Marketing Yoga the Yogic Way

You don't have to compromise your values to fill your studio with eager students. Learn to infuse yoga philosophy into your marketing strategies and make room for abundance.

By Dan Charnas

The Old Way

Beryl Bender Birch, an Ashtanga teacher and the author of the book Power Yoga, says that her own teacher, Norman Allen, never marketed himself. "He has no phone," she says. "He doesn't write. He doesn't email." Instead, Allen, who was Pattabhi Jois's first American student, moved to the mountains of Hawaii and lived without electricity or running water.

In that way, Allen represents the classic, Eastern ideal of the yoga master: the teacher whom students must locate and then petition for knowledge. It's a model that runs counter to the way that yoga has unfolded in the West, with teachers seeking, and sometimes competing for, students. In the classic tradition, the kind of marketing that we do nowadays—full-page advertisements, mass mailings, and franchising—would be unthinkable.

Which is not to say that the Western way is illegitimate. Birch launched her own teaching career with fliers and mailings. Over decades, her classes grew from two or three people to crowds of 60 or more. But Birch stresses that her teaching practice wasn't built primarily through clever marketing but from putting in years of solid teaching.

"There's no substitute for experience," says Birch. "[It's about] being in the same place at same time for a long period of time. It's about practice. You have to do it for a long time without a break, with earnestness. If you're a good teacher, people will come."

The Perils of Marketing

But patience is a virtue that many teachers and studios lack. Maty Ezraty launched Yoga Works, perhaps the prototype for the modern yoga franchise. But Ezraty is disturbed by some of the trends she sees in many yoga centers and chains today.

"You go into these corporations, and unfortunately I have to put Yoga Works in there as well, and what they're looking at is a career path for teachers," says Ezraty. "With that comes a danger that what you're attracting is very young people [who] haven't been given the time to ripen. The business people are starting to take over the yoga world because they're looking at a buck."

One troubling development Ezraty calls a "marketing ploy" is studios pushing multiple-year contracts, similar to the practice of the gym and fitness world, to which students are bound. "They don't even care if you're doing the yoga," she says, "They just want the money. So all of the things we came to yoga hoping to get away from are here now in the yoga world."

Greed is only one of the sins of marketing. Hype is another. A while back, Birch came across a website for a yoga studio in Massachusetts. "

The owners of the studio all have on their bios that they've studied with me," Birch says. "And I don't know who these people are! They've probably taken one class at a yoga conference with about 200 other people. And I'm thinking, 'What a load of bullshit.' You need to tell the truth."

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