I would like to share another part of a writing I made a couple moths ago:
It seems like if church buildings are adopting the marketing techniques of the corporations, but the truths is that they have used these techniques since long before. Most church buildings are greedy business that requires ‘tithes’ to keep their institutions alive, many of them also make researches and respect the norm of: the majorities people desires are in charge. All of them play with people emotions and are customer centered.
They approach on these ways:
- Mind sharing; by teaching how the church building ‘identity’ (their practices, symbolisms, activities, behaviors, etc.) must be understood in the follower’s minds.
- Emotional branding; trough the emotional relationship created on the followers minds by the sum of all their experiences and memories with the church building personality.
- Viral branding; expecting the followers (consumers) to talk about them (to advertise them), since these builds confidence between them and their followers. [Church buildings also have to link themselves to highly influential personalities].
- Cultural branding; by trying to resolve big conflicts on a certain society since they know that there is great possibilities for them to be able to approach a respectable ‘cultural Icon status’.
[As we can see it, these is all about the brand not the product]
Yes, church buildings are brands! They are unique and ‘identified associations’ with names that differentiate them from the competition, they also have distinctive slogans, logos, symbolisms, jingles (repetitive propagandist songs), rituals, spoken persons, and many use mass media communications to deliver their messages and have a targeted audience. Both; church buildings and corporations have the same core values but expressed on different ways (with different terminologies). Their main preaching is about what does the church building ‘identity’ is and what does the brand stands for, they both love to recall who their best loyal customers are and why.
I have said ‘customers’ on church buildings because what people is trying purchase is mostly happiness. And even if many church buildings supposedly don’t agree with being materialistic, when they use the same marketing techniques of the corporations they support the way that gross materialism works, by doing these rather than being subversive, they have more possibilities to turn into the ‘mainstream’, whatever they can ‘positively’ say matter very little. Anyhow, as I heard once somewhere; ‘‘they are the best free advertising for everything that they supposedly hate.’’
And as the common denominator of almost all of them; they teach that humans do have free will. They say that there is a hell, but I dare them to look at their non-christian grandmas directly into the eyes and tell them that if they don’t believe like them they are going to burn and be tortured forever. What will burn are all their hell ideas, our weak nature and all those idols!