Throw Away Your Marketing Books!

Having worked in the marketing profession for about a decade now, I have read more than a few books about marketing. Each one professes to have the answers every marketer seeks to make their business grow and prosper.

While reading Tom Asacker’s blog entry, “Friedrich Nietzsche on skepticism” over at A Clear Eye, I began to finally harvest some of my own ponderings about the whole marketing spectrum that have been cultivating for several weeks now.

Today, it finally all started to come together. My conclusion is that all these supposed answers that millions of pages of books, websites and newsletters claim to have can be summed up in as little as a single paragraph! I am going to take a stab at it right now:

Consumers are referred to as consumers for one reason — they consume (duh, right?). What does that mean for marketers? Um, well . . . first, you need to give consumers something to consume. Then, you need to tell them why they will want to consumer it and then you need to not only LET them, but HELP them consumer it!

Okay, that is very basic, I know. But that is the honest-to-goodness simple truth of marketing. You need a product and then you need to make it appealing enough and easy/convenient enough to obtain it! Success will fall in line if you do those things.

Case in point: my friend over at FromTheMorning has been blogging rampantly about The Emergent Church. I honestly have not had a lot of time to read up on the subject to speak intelligently about it yet (but I will).

However, I don’t think I need to be a scholar on the subject to ponder what is happening there: quite simply, Christians and seekers are longing for something to consume; in this case, that is the Lord’s grace and salvation. Moreover, they seek a comforting place to worship and not feel intimidated while doing so. On one side, you have some churches and denominations steeped in tradition who are holding onto those traditions, old hymns and relics with a deathgrip so tight their knuckles are white. Yet,they cannot understand why membership is dwindling and very few under the age of fifty are coming to church. On the other side, you have churches and NONdenominations who are respectfully creating NEW traditions and contemporary ways of offering worship. Their constituents are younger and growing in number.

In other words, both tribes are providing the same product to the same groups of consumers. However, one is making it more appealing than the other and then HELPING them consume that product by teaching them how to worship in ways that are appealing rather than saying “here’s a book, all the answers are in there.” While that is true, being handed a massive tome and then being told “I hope we see you in Sunday school so we can talk about it” is a sure-fire way to turn away newcomers.

Okay, this post is long enough now. I am sure I will write more on this idea I am having, but I wanted to give it a start and see if anyone else had opinions. (That means it’s your turn. Use the comments link to offer your insight).