Marketing That Builds Trust. Not Just Traffic.
In a world overrun by noise and scale, I help entrepreneurs build marketing that creates long term customers. Marketing shaped by care, values, and who you are as a person.
Hey, I’m Jiun…
I started my marketing journey through a little online business I set up over 10 years ago that sold kids toys online.
I always wanted to have my own business, and that was my first kick at the can. I learned the same way every entrepreneur does, by doing and realizing I knew nothing at all.
I had to learn how to code and create my own website, how to handle the logistics and storage of all this inventory I bought and shipped, but most importantly, I had to learn what the hell marketing was.
Marketing felt very foreign, an ecosystem that existed within the business world that was as complex as running the business itself. Yet it felt so important because it promised to bring in clients.
So I learned from everywhere I could. I bought books, took online courses, watched YouTube videos.
Every time I learned something, I’d try it, fail, and go learn something new again.
I noticed I was spending more time learning and doing marketing than actually running my business.
Something about it pulled me in.
But throughout it all, I always felt like there was something missing. Something didn’t feel right, even after I started getting results from my efforts.
I transitioned my day job towards marketing, climbed up the proverbial corporate ladder, and spent years honing what I knew until I found out why it didn’t feel right.
Why most businesses hate dealing with their marketing, why most entrepreneurs feel stuck.
The Psychology of Marketing
The reason, I believe, is that we are taught about marketing in ways that are too much like math (with rules and formulas) and not enough like psychology (with emotions and nuance).
And this concept is fascinating to me because it makes everyone misunderstand the real point of marketing.
If I were to ask most business owners what marketing is, they would probably think of something like this:
An ad that sells.
And they wouldn’t be wrong, because that’s what I learned when I first got started in marketing too. That’s what most people online teach you.
But over the years, I gravitated toward a different kind of marketing because I kept seeing the same flaws in what we were taught, over and over.
You’re on social media because everyone else is. You post because you’re supposed to. You follow templates you randomly find online that you don’t fully understand.
When I ask these entrepreneurs how many long term clients they’ve gotten from their marketing, they would usually say “not many.“
Instead, and if you’re anything like me, you grew mostly through referrals.
By doing good work and caring about your clients. You grew by building relationships, earning trust until those people told others about you.
Believe it or not, that’s the real point of marketing: building relationships.
Because all those numbers you see on your marketing reports and analytics are actual people.
We’re not dealing with math. We’re dealing with psychology.
We have grown so accustomed to selling through marketing channels that we now consider it one and the same.
But marketing is not sales.
In any large corporation, marketing and sales are different departments, often on different floors, because they do fundamentally different work.
Sales closes the deal.
Marketing builds the conditions that make the deal possible. It’s what comes before the sale.
Marketing is about building relationships that can culminate in a sale.
It’s the trust you create before anyone’s ready to buy. It’s why someone picks up the phone when you call, opens your email when you send it, actually reads what you write.
We do marketing every day in person. You just don’t recognize it as marketing because it doesn’t look like the stuff everyone tells you to do online.
One of the greatest marketers of our time, Seth Godin, author of many best selling books, defines marketing this way:
“I do not define marketing as hype, advertising, narcissistic short-term thinking which is what a lot of people think of when you do marketing or when you are marketed to. I define marketing as anything you do that changes the culture for the better.”
I find marketing to be the underappreciated soft skill of building relationships with the right people. The ones that will appreciate you and end up buying from you at some point.
Most entrepreneurs dislike their digital marketing because they don’t get to do what they’re naturally good at in person.
Nobody is teaching you how to translate who you are and what makes you special online.
Once I realized this, I left my last corporate marketing job in 2018 to create Lobo Media Marketing. A business built to change the perception of what marketing currently is to what it’s supposed to be.
Human Marketing for Creators with Soul
There are many ways to approach marketing, and none of them are inherently wrong.
But if you’re looking for the latest tricks and hacks, if you’re okay with growth at all costs, even if it means manipulating people, then what I offer isn’t for you.
This is for people like me, creators with soul.
For people who care about their reputation, their clients, their wellbeing, and the impact they make.
People that are fed up with feeling like their marketing is a necessary evil, a tough pill to swallow and get it over with.
We are creators because we build things of value, solve meaningful problems, and bring craft to our work.
We have soul because we refuse to compromise our values for growth. We aren’t looking to have the biggest business, we are looking to have enough to live the life we want. We are happy to stay smaller and profitable than treat people like transactions.
This marketing is for people who want to grow without losing themselves. Who want marketing that feels like them.
I call it Human Marketing.
We’re entering an age where AI can handle almost everything efficiently.
It can write copy. Analyze data. Execute at scale. Do all the technical marketing work faster and cheaper than any human.
But AI can’t build relationships for you.
It can’t create the trust that makes people want to work with YOU specifically. It can’t be human in any way that matters.
As automation takes over the efficiency work, what’s left is what machines can’t do.
Relationship-building. Trust-earning. Showing up as real people.
I help businesses like yours play a different marketing game entirely. One where your humanity is the advantage, an extension of who you are.
I teach and design strategies for business owners that want to create better, more human marketing, in an online world increasingly built by algorithms and AI.
If this resonates with you, I’ve written a manifesto, a call to arms for creators like us who want to attract and grow audiences that matter.
Welcome to our little integrity corner of the internet.
Human Marketing Manifesto: Growth for Creators with Soul
