A Few Christmas Thoughts On Marketing
Would you trust a Christian?
How about a Puritan?
A Quaker then?
On cold winter mornings before I head out, I love a bowl of hot steaming porridge oats, with a dash of maple syrup.
With this in my belly, I am ready for anything the day may throw at me…well, at least until the mid-morning coffee break.
Look at the image of the Quaker man on the box. He’s adorable, trustworthy, decent, a law-abiding citizen. His smile is certainly reassuring. Admiring his rosy cheeks? Well, he could be Santa Claus.
His face says it all. Buy my products and you’ll feel as good as I look!
I was in my local supermarket recently, when my keen eye spotted a bargain. I saw an offer on the shelves that was just too good to miss. A double-size box of my favourite porridge oats, with twice the usual contents, for a knock-down, give-away price of 30% below normal cost. My hand flashed out quicker than lightning. The big box was in my cart. The next day, ready for breakfast, I broke into my double-sized box of….what? I was shocked, then embarrassed at being so gullible. I trusted the Quaker man to deliver on his promise. What I got was, yes, a double-sized box, but inside it was 60% air! The actual contents came up to the level (take a look at the first picture) of the top of the wooden post.
As we head towards to the Christmas season when billions of dollars change hands, maybe we should all take a step back and reflect upon the potential of marketing and its ability to persuade us to buy products that patently don’t live up to the advertising.
Just for the sheer sake of it, I did a trawl through Bible Gateway to check if the following words and phrases ever appeared in the Bible.
Marketing, Selling, Sales Strategy, Search Engine,
Keywords, Customer Centric, Optimization.
You guessed it. None of them have a place in the Good Book. As writers, of course, we need marketing to get our message out there and reach communities, whether they be local or global. But we need to be discerning and careful to avoid the trap of believing and buying into the same secular trickery that sells anything to everyone. We should not be inveigled by the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Not be seduced to sell our sacred message by secular means.I have often pondered this: What would I say, if God said these words to me?
”Fred, your book is great, but it will only sell one copy. The person who reads it will be changed and will become my servant and take the Gospel to millions of people all around the world, and all because he read your book. Alternatively, I can have your book sell millions of copies, you will be rich beyond your dreams, but only a few will be saved. My son, it’s your free choice.”
What do we ultimately want from writing books? Fame and fortune? Or to be walking in God’s will?
Of course, the Lord has a strategy to communicate his message to the world. Undeniably, he uses the power of the Word to get the message across to the greatest number in the most effective way. And he uses great orators to reach the lost, but persuasion is not their business. Their business is communicating the truth about the Son. The way God markets his message turns human wisdom and cleverness on its head.
When God wanted to free the Israelites from Pharaoh’s tyranny he sent a guilt-ridden, reticent, stuttering, fearful man called Moses to get the job done.
When God wanted to proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ he used an eccentric wild man, dressed in animal skins, eating locusts and honey in the desert.
When God wanted to save the world, he sent his all-powerful and eternal Son to be born naked in a stable for animals. As a human child he was vulnerable, weak, dependent and unable to live without his mother and father’s protection and care.
When God wanted to reconcile us to him, he allowed his Son be crucified, killed on a cross of wood, dying as a common criminal rejected and alone.
I wonder what the top marketing gurus and the best advertising companies would have come up with, if God had asked them to create a package to ‘sell salvation to sinners?’
They might have come up with a great sales strategy and a winning message to achieve customer optimization, perhaps throwing in an unforgettable slogan, an amusing jingle too… yet somehow, like the Quaker box of porridge oats I bought, I think it would fallen short, been so much air and less substance. I think their sales plan would have missed the target, somehow betrayed the truth, don’t you?
An interesting article, in fact one of my passions!
ReplyDeleteI see Jesus as a great marketeer. Albeit, he is the Son of God, and yes we have to differentiate what he did over what he came to do, but when I look at Jesus teachings, I see a certain amount of marketing skills involved....please, don't see me as a heretic though!
1 - Copywriting... we know that Jesus came to fufil the Jewish law, but how he preached was different from anything that had come before. Current culture was to understand and love God through knowing the Torah inside and out and following the religious rules to the letter. Putting aside what he came to do, to fufil those laws....how he did it was interesting.
He made God's love come alive in small parables - a story that is culturally relevant, easy to grasp and with just a few words the listener was able to understand Gods love without 5 years of teaching ... all of a sudden, it was accessable to all (I'm thinking of the Prodigal Son as a good example here)
In my job, I do this every day, I take 2 A4 pages of text about what a company is / does and wants to promote, and turn that into an A5 flyer with less than 500 words on it. I distill the content down to it's core and make it appealing to the audience.
Jesus did this, and he was good at making the content reach the audience, whether educated or not, he used verbal imageary to communicate his message.
2 Sales Force - Jesus 'employed' his 12 disciples, and the disciples had a further 72 people under them, almost like having a Director, Area managers and Account managers for a modern sales company today. He understood that he was one man, and could speak to only a few people, but by equipping a team, they could then go their seperate ways (once trained) and multiply the spread of his message.
What's more, each apostle then establishes an office in their chosen localle, inviting others to join the movement, and also equipping those people to sell the message as well. In a way, this is where MLM started!!!
3 Jesus went viral - it took 30 years before Jesus started his campaign, we know very little about the period of his life between birth and his main minsitry - but we do know that when he spoke, people in their thousands listened. Why is this?
I can only deduce one outcome - people listened, because they wanted to listen. Why did they want to listen? Because they'd heard a snippet of information about this guy...and the snippet of information could have been about a miracle or a testimony or that he was crazy - either way - they'd heard something that interested them enough to want to hear his message - whatever that message was!
This makes me think about modern viral campaigns, this is all they do, give a small amount of interesting content to make the customer want to find out more about the product or service in question.
So, hopefully you don't think I'm a heretic for what I've shared! I'd like to finish by sharing a little of what Fallons marketing agency said about church marketing... "The church is a marketers dream, you have a congregation of free labour, committed to your cause, utilise them correctly and your message will exponentially grow".
Incidently, Fallons were the agency responsible for the transformation of Skoda in the 90's from the eastern european joke, to the modern respectable brand they are today. They commented "Marketing the church is very similar to marketing Skoda, the problem you face is the same - if you're telling your kids one morning, we're going to look at a Skoda today for the new family car - the kids will cry and scream - they don't want to go, they don't want to be seen in a Skoda! The same applies to church - make it an appealing place to go for young and old people. Appealing doesn't mean changing your message, just your method".
Wise words in my opinion!