The Anti Marketing Marketing Campaign of Irony and Truth in Advertising
I know marketing and how to get the word out. I just do not see the tools used in the business world as always appropriate for the church. Maybe for some churches, but not all. Anyway, before some of you think I am just some hippie idealist who hates corporate America, I need to give you a little background.
From 2004 to 2007 I ran two small enterprises. Silver Strand Solutions and GigaStrand Computers. Silverstrand was a Linux migration consulting firm and GigaStrand was (at the time) one of a few companies out there selling computers with warranties that had Linux installed on them. Running this small operation out of my house with a small band of cohorts we were able to get some clients that included names like Linspire, Novell, State of Indiana Board of Education, Intel, Microcenter, and a few others of note. End of the day, I know how to use marketing and drive a successful campaign. Just because something works, though, does not necessarily mean you should use it. Frankly, I am no longer convinced many of these tools work as well as some think in the church. Though some of these tools may get the desired result of more butts in the seats, I wonder if it is sending the wrong message and becomes a "bait and switch". The irony of bait and switch by the church is that in the business world it is generally considered unethical and in some cases, illegal. But that is not the point of this entry.
The point of this entry is this. I have spent the last few entries venting some frustrations I have had about business as usual, but not offering a better way. I am not so myopic as to think that what I propose is THE way or even a BETTER way, but it is an alternative that I feel more comfortable embracing. At our last service we spoke about how we are almost a year old and now that we have a better grasp of who we are as a community, we want to start inviting other people to come to the party with us. Why? We feel there is safe harbor in this community and it is a great place to explore those deeper spiritual questions and make a difference. We do not wanna have pizazz and zing and wow factors, we just want to extend a simple and honest invitation and be honest about what we are inviting people to.
So last Sunday I took out a easel and marker and we wrote down some things as a community. We wrote about LifeBridge and YASO and here is what ended up on the board.
We ARE:
Open Minded
Accepting
Reality
Loving
Conversation (everyone has a voice)
Direct
Open hearts eyes and ears (togetherness)
We Are NOT:
Pressuring you to conform
Snarky
Phony Smile Sunday personality
a Right Wing-Republican-White Man Empire
Hypocritical bunch of legalistic pharisees
no dancing around touchy subjects like other places.
manipulative
money hungry
About Lifebridge:
We Talk about God stuff
Open up
Conversation
Freedom of Expression
Every day People-not perfect
About YASO:
Eye opening
Understanding environment
Youth group, but not
Group Therapy, but not
What is not in this picture? We never mention the music, kids programs, and other wow points. We have a simple identity and now we want to tell people about that and invite them to it, if they want to come. In a good marketing arc, you want to create awareness of a problem and show how your product or service is best suited to solve that problem. But the gospel and a gospel community is not a product or a service, it is a journey. How do you invite people on a journey or a quest? The best way is to do it honestly and conversationally. As community we have decided that there are other valid ways to invite people on a journey. We still have to have a few meetings about the matter so I cannot tell you what we will do yet, but I can tell you that it is likely we will use the same tools some marketers use. The internet, social networking, newspapers, press releases, stickers, etc. But these tools are used by many other people other than marketers. Websites and Social Networking groups are too vast to rationally discuss here, press releases talk about a great many things, newspaper ads are not always ads. If you look at older papers that pre date the internet and telephones, you will find that people used the paper to communicate social events in simple and honest ways. Not much wow factor was added to a bridge game at the Smith’s house..unless cucumber sandwiches being served is a wow factor. Stickers and posters….okay…these are mostly used for marketing, but in our message, the stickers will say…
" As Christians, we’re sorry for being self-righteous, judgmental bastards." Why? Well, we feel the apology is overdue.
Because we embrace the conversation, much of what we say and do in this will likely be very conversational and verbose in it’s nature. I doubt we will use a newspaper ad, for instance. I am not sure what you could put on a 3 by 5 inch section of print about this. I also doubt we will do direct mailers. My issue there is the impersonality of it all. With a sticker or a website or a youtube link or a facebook page, there is an opportunity to interact and someone can share with someone else the link or the sticker or whatever. You send a mailer and you look like you are trying to sell something no matter how well and honestly it is written.
I will keep you in the loop of our next steps, but for now, I wanted to tell you a few things that were important to me.
1. There is a difference between invitation and marketing even though some of the same tools are used.
2. We wanted our community more established in its identity before we started inviting people more broadly to it.
3. We wanna be honest and would rather state who we are than talk up the music, preaching, art supplies for kids, and have pictures of a bunch of multi ethnic smiling people of a borad age range. All of those tings are images, something you project…we want people to know our identity…who we are. If they like that…cool, if they do not…cool.
