Marketing and Management Thoughts

Back in February we wrote about the failure Pepsi company ran into while re-branding their orange juice line, Tropicana. Today there was an unveiling of an updated redesign that is much more faithful to the original design that consumers rebelled so strongly to have back for their Trop50 product.

One of the interesting points that wasn’t mentioned in our previous post was the effect that the current economic situation might have had on this re-branding effort. It was referenced to during a CNN interview back in February and felt its premise relevant to share here.

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Christianity Today posted an article by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson today titled “Jesus is not a Brand“. He basically explains over 8 pages that because the message and hope of Christ is so superior to that of our consumerist culture that we should handle this message in a special way. In more or less terms, he plays the God card and tells us that it’s blasphemy to market Jesus/Church/Christianity (on the middle of page 4).

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson’s Argument

His four main points boil down into (in my summary):

1. The christian life is about Grace and Love not your personal goals, so we can’t sell you something to help you attain your goals.
2. Since consumerism is based on perpetuating discontentment and satisfaction from new purchases, marketing the church follows the same model. This doesn’t reflect the biblical push to find contentment in God alone (IE not needing anything but God for our contentment).
3. Brand Relativism (um, commonly known as Brand Affiliation or Brand Association) leads people to believe that something is better than something else when they are just cars, cities, and computers. The only difference is preference. Thus ‘spiritual shoppers’ think of Christianity as only one option among many.
4. Fragmentation/Niches that are the focus of marketing campaigns are the reason for the distention and lack of unity in the church. Because we market to individual groups in relevant ways (that likely don’t appeal to everyone) we are conforming to the pattern of the world.

His conclusion cutting it down, but never the less in his words.

Consumerism is here to stay. The habits described above—self-creation, discontent, relativism, fragmentation—will become more dominant, not less, in years to come. That’s the way of the globalized economy and ascendant transnational commercial interests. We cannot defeat our situation; we can only seek to live faithfully in it…

But problems begin when we define the church as a whole using a comparison that just describes one of its attributes: i.e., treating the church as a business with a brand to promote. And then, even though there are all sorts of ways the church isn’t like a business, we begin to employ all the tools of commercial enterprise as though we were paying the body of Christ some compliment by treating it like a Fortune 500 company, with a bottom line, investor returns, supply chain, CEOS, market share, and so on. If we treat the gospel like a commodity, can we fault nonbelievers for thinking that the cross is just another logo?

My Response

While I have loads to say about his 8 page article, I will be brief, if anyone wishes me to write more on any point please simply ask in the comments section.

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It is stunning how many brands we interact with on a daily basis. Former ASU under-grad student Tanner Woodford wrote about how he logged all 1,035 brand identities he interacted with during one day the last October.

Incredible how many brands we see, use, experience on a daily basis. The image to the left is from his post where he laid the brands out for a 24 hr clock. Its an intuitive way to display the brands even without the clock arms spinning away on it.

With so many brands being experienced on a daily basis from the commercial segment of society I would contend that as a church as a whole we need to do a better job at:

1. Developing stronger brand identity where needed
2. Exposing that brand broadly in the public arena

Until we make these concerted focal points we should expect people to maintain the priorities that the currently have. The more frequently we as a church interact with the culture (in a positive light) we will only be helping them to make positive decisions on a regular basis.

I have to share one last image of this clock as a more finished product, so beautifully done.

Make sure you check his post out over at fillslashstroke.com