I confess, since re-establishing my "home base" in Utah, I've grown more or less removed from the happenings and gossip in the yoga industry. Salt Lake City is insulated from the ranting (and ravings) regarding celebrity yoga teachers, proclamations of hypocrisy and scandals. Of course, looking deeper inside the micro-community in the immediate geography, you can uncover some gossip-worthy topics here and there.
The buffer between this community and the rest of industry, including its hyper-centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York (amongst others), has been in my mind, both fortunate and unfortunate. I like thinking that the community is getting along superbly.
I started this blog last week and find its my responsibility to not only consider what's going on in my little "Ethereal Room" but what's going on in the general marketplace. Consequently, I subscribed to several noteworthy blogs and alerts for yoga-specific keywords.
Fortunately and or unfortunately, this action blasted me back immediate earshot of non-constructive criticisms of fellow yogis and their recommended approaches. For instance, one of the Yoga Journal blogs today post included a survey regarding Tara Stiles, author of Slim Calm Sexy Yoga ("Tara Stiles: Yoga Friend or Foe?"). Critics abound!
My thoughts:
The industry is growing every year. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, yoga is practiced by approximately 14% of United States citizens. Plainly, this is a lot of people!
Now, I may espouse similar traits with a good fraction of this population, but I wouldn't venture to say that all yogis and yoginis are carbon copies and prefer the same cup o' tea. Hence the rise of multiple and differing demands within the marketplace, which in turn leads to fragmentation in the industry. Fragmentation has led to different schools of yoga, different yoga companies, including manufacturers of mats, props, apparel and associated products, a plethora of retreat centers and forms of entertainment. Is this a bad thing?
In order to educate the marketplace regarding a specific (and different) solution (a.k.a., products and/or services), the merchants need to position themselves. Positioning is generally communicated to the marketplace in a classic fashion (i.e., think the four P's of marketing: product/service, place, price, promotion). But there's also deeper form of positioning (branding) which tells the consumer the company's values, mission, etc. Oftentimes, in this pursuit of differentiation, the communications are a little more extreme. For example, I don't think that toesox is advising through their print ads that practitioners should visit their yoga studios in the buff ... it's more of a commentary on the importance of tools that help one's practice. Let's face it: traditional apparel like that sold by lululemon and athleta is probably not going to change one's practice substantially. In addition, despite the fairly obvious name "toesox", the company is sufficiently communicating the product that they are selling. The company maintains that the ads are "artsy" - but I just think it's a good example of a brand communicating to its customer base. Is it wrong to attempt to be truthful and accurate to your target market?
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