Chance has been faithfully assisting since grad school.

Hi! I’m Carrie Wiita.

I graduated from California State University Northridge with an M.S. in Counseling, Option in Marriage and Family Therapy. During my program, I wrote my master’s thesis on the intersection of marketing and psychotherapy (Interpersonal Branding: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Enhancing Psychotherapy Services Through Marketing).

I had a few careers before deciding I wanted to become a therapist. I’d worked in marketing, sales, customer service, and non-profit data administration, but mostly (for 30ish years) I was a professional actor.

In every field I found myself, marketing was a way of life - it was simply the way someone with something to sell interfaced with the marketplace.

Until I arrived in Therapyland.

Here, marketing is something shameful, obscene, icky, yet weirdly necessary and even enviable. It is simultaneously a loathsome indulgence, a mystifying dark art, a baffling calculus, a humiliating striptease, and a breathlessly-promised just-out-of-reach Golden Ticket to “a thriving private practice!!!”

With curiosity, I began to explore the marketing advice being peddled to therapists while I was still in my first year of grad school. I recognized a lot of it as warmed-over e-commerce, side-hustle, and personal-branding rhetoric, much of it from the mid-2000s.

I was surprised that this was the best advice for therapists, with their nuanced relationship with customers and the intangibility of what they had to offer.

So, as any good grad student might, I turned to the literature! What did Therapyland have to say about how therapists should market themselves in the 21st century?

A whole lotta nuthin, that’s what.

I discovered that the marketing of therapy services (and its impact on clients and treatment itself) is a wholly unexamined area of scholarship.

Turns out, the “therapist marketing experts” have built an entire cottage industry on anecdotal evidence about what works to build a private practice and have not paused for one moment to consider the impact of marketing on the clients we have committed to serve or the sustainability of a professional career built on get-rich-quick advice.

So that’s when I turned to other fields for help: psychological science about human behavior, consumer science about what buyers need and want, behavioral economics about what happens during a service exchange, marketing science about what strategies are working right now. There’s even marketing research on the psychotherapeutic conversation itself! That’s right, MARKETERS are researching us. To steal our secret methods for inspiring behavior change, so they can inspire behavior change in the direction of buy now, buy more, buy faster.

Well. Turnabout, I figure, is fair play.

It’s time to use all this research to help us get better at therapy.

The American Psychological Association defines evidence-based practice as “the integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context of patient characteristics, culture and preferences.”

I have integrated research about what works in therapy with research about what works in service marketing. I combine that knowledge with my lived experience as a both a therapist and a performer in the context of my clients - therapists crafting their own Interpersonal Brand.

I practice evidence-based therapist marketing.

And that’s what you can expect to get from me.

That, and lots of pictures of my dogs. 🐾