Benjamin McNutt: In defense of marketing
Editor’s note: This is the last post in a series on marketing. Read Melissa Wiginton’s and James Howell’s posts from last week.
This is asking for a theological beating, but it needs saying: marketing is not the capitalist manifestation of Lucifer himself.
Here are three reasons why.
1) That assumption takes the narrowest, least charitable view of what marketing is. All marketing doesn’t consist in pressuring 14-year-old girls into buying Juicy Couture (and distorting notions of femininity) or making men feel like “real men” for drinking Bud Light (ditto, for masculinity). Marketing doesn’t just happen on Madison Avenue a la Don Draper, and it isn’t about turning your church or organization into a consumer product or the people you serve into spiritual shoppers. It’s about communicating clearly who you are and what you do, and understanding who you serve.
It’s remarkable how easily we can lose sight of this, particularly in large institutions. Marketers force you to clarify the mission and goals of your institution, do real homework about who you serve (rather than make assumptions about them) and ask effective questions about how best to serve them. Tim Radford, a veteran editor at “The Guardian,” has a writing rule that applies here: “No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.” That’s what marketers do.
2) Marketers know how to ask fundamental questions about human identity, questions that at their root are theological. They ask about human desire and identify human need. As one character from “Mad Men” puts it: “We help people make choices between what’s expected of them and what they want.”
The church, we Christians say, isn’t about giving people what they want, or making Christianity palatable, but about making disciples.
True, but that doesn’t give us permission to table the question of desire, mostly because it’s a theological one Christians have asked at least since Augustine. Jamie Smith, in Augustinian fashion, says it this way: “If I really want to know who you are, I'm not going to ask what you know. I'm not even going to ask what you believe. If I really want to know what you're about, the question I will ask is: ‘What do you want? What do you love?’” Smith puts a finer point on this in “Desiring the Kingdom:” “Could it be the case that learning a Christian perspective doesn't actually touch my desire...and at the end of the day I love not the kingdom of God but rather the kingdom of the market?” If current Christian thought and practice doesn’t “touch” desire, other entities will gain our loves and, ultimately, the commitments of the people we seek to serve.
3) Marketers don’t simply ask what people want, they ask what generates commitment or “brand loyalty.” We want disciples in church, and to my knowledge, disciples -- whatever else they may be -- are committed. In a time when leaders worry over the decline in commitment to Christian institutions, understanding what generates commitment in people seems to be of vital significance.
We’re wonderfully equipped to deconstruct all the ways marketers distort moral life, but too often our own arguments get in the way of what marketers can actually teach us. You need not arrive at the same conclusions as marketers to ask the same questions.
With their help we can be clearer, better theologians and makers of disciples. Nothing seems particularly demonic about that.
Benjamin McNutt is the editor of Call & Response. You can follow him on Twitter at @benjaminmcnutt.
Really?
1. Careful. Marketing is not the same as communicating clearly.
2. This is your logic? Marketing has some insight into human desire; desire is important; therefore marketing is important. Really? The ends don't always already shape the means?
3. If Christianity were just the best product on the shelf (out of a multiplicity of substitutions), then, yes, we'd want "brand loyalty" or commitment. "Brand loyalty," however, might seem a bit anemic when it's cross-bearing that we are after.
4. Simulacra.
Yes, really.
1. You're right, marketing isn't exclusively about communicating clearly, just as it is not exclusively about convincing people to buy things. I don't believe I argued that. There are some kinds of marketing that do that and there are some kinds of marketing that help people, organizations, schools etc. tell their story well, or as you say communicate themselves clearly. It's not the whole of marketing, but it is a primary part of it.
2. and 3. are best answered together and by way of example: Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson isn't just a product; it isn't even just a brand; Harley Davidson is a way of life, a "religion" with its own leather chap wearing apostles who travel, congregate and support one another. Harley Davidson is a “religious community”; it even has its own "holy week" in Daytona Beach every year. Harley has tapped in to some fundamental need for human community that shapes a person's identity. And here's the remarkable thing about Harley: as a piece of machinery it's inferior to many other motorcycles (sorry Harley riders), so they generate that kind of commitment without even being the biggest and best. I dare say churches would hope for the same level of devotion and sense of community.
4. Dang, I knew something was missing from this post.
Don't Respond Under My Name
1. I don't know who posted the response under my name, but I can attest that it wasn't me. Unless there is another Parker Reeves floating around out there who reads the the Call & Response Blog, the author isn't who it claimed to be. Ben is a close friend of mine, I would have found an in person conversation much more enjoyable than an online response.
2. Simulacrum
Marketing language
I find that Christians are uncomfortable with "marketing" as a term for something the Church does because it seems to imply some level of calculation or strategy, as if we are spending too much time thinking and not enough time sharing the Gospel or caring for the sick or planting gardens in abandoned inner city neighborhoods.
Perhaps we should just acknowledge that throughout the length and breadth of our culture there are powers or institutions that happily market to consumers without a second thought, and to leave them as the only voice speaking an insightful word is reckless as well as irresponsible.
Good points. Why pretend?
To the first commenter: I'm surprised you've pretended to be someone you are not, because the points you make are quite good. I'd think you'd want to stand by them?
Marketing 101
You state that marketing is "about communicating clearly who you are and what you do, and understanding who you serve. This is true; moreover, I would add that marketing and "spreading the gospel"/discipling can be made almost synonomous.
Let's go back to the basic definition of Marketing (remember marketing 101). smallbizu.org is an OK for a quick reference on marketing.
smallbizu.org states: "While selling and promotion are a part of marketing they are not the most important part. In principles of marketing, Philip Kotler states:
If the marketer does a good job of identifying consumer needs, developing appropriate products, and pricing, distributing and promoting them effectively these products will sell "themselves" very easily. These "products" can be tangible or intangible goods, services or ideas."
"Marketing can be defined as an activity designed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes. The ultimate goal of marketing is to make selling nonessential. To know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him or her and sells itself."
God (Jesus) knows his customers very well!
Applying these marketing concepts to our Lord's command to disciple all nations and spread the gospel making disciples of all nations seems a relatively easy task. Moreover, We should let the gospel sell itself, after all, the gospel alone is a very attractive message! (need/idea).
Jesus, our Lord, the Omnipotent Marketer has already identified all consumers' (every human beings') needs; developed the appropriate product, (He has already sacrificed Himself for the salvation of all sinners) and established pricing (John 3:16 provides the price for salvation - simple faith - BELIEVE), and He has distributed and promoted this gospel effectively (Jesus taught the disciples, gave them (and us) distribution directions and sent us out to inform the world). The product (The Christian belief, the gospel) will sell "itself" very easily provided we preach the "true" gospel, and not other false teachings or versions.
Your thoughts?
Dr. Whited
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