Marketing and Management Thoughts

We wrote about the re-design failure of Tropicana last week and this week the older style packaging should be showing back up on the store shelves. This video is from CNN showing a discussion over the new brand image. There is a fruitful interview with Linda Kaplan Thaler of the Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd.

While your church doesn’t have the market penetration and exposure that a brand like Tropicana does (or the $35 Million to dump into a re branding strategy) it does raise one last question I believe could prove beneficial for the church.

At what point does the church (any church) change their approach of ministry or marketing due to the response of those around them? Would it take five complaints? fifty? hundreds?

(hat nod Visual Culture)

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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I came across this today and thought it was worth posting/sharing with all of you.

Unsure of what that restaurant is? Its a McDonald’s in Tokyo (website) that is one of a small few design to introduce the Japanese to the Quarter Pounder. So often in marketing we hear about branding and image recognition being the important purpose of our brand. That is the reason companies spend so much money on television and magazine advertisements.

I love the minimal design, simply a red line around the black framed windows, one photo, and some nice brushed steel.

(via @nedwright, Core77)

Welcome to a new series that will be rolled out over the next few weeks where we’ll highlight the community building power of technology.

Everyone hopes that the ministry they lead will have an effect on influencing the lives of those they are ministering to. It is at this point that the church holds up the importance of community to bring about these changes. More and more we are learning empirically that intimate friends improve ones health and well being. This then becomes our goal; building communities of intimate friends. (more…)