Church mission: Lessons from marketing

In this video, renowned marketing expert Seth Godin delivers a speech at Google where he shared his insights on marketing, excellence and building a remarkable organization. Although the video is fun to watch, and very insightful, it is in the applications that I see to church planting that the gems are there for the taking.

He touches on the following points, each of which are main points on each of his books:

• Permission marketing – In western cultures, in order to approach people with a message, you really have to ensure that they have given you permission to approach them. In other words, speak to those who want to hear you, have shown an interest, and are open to the message.
  • All too often marketers will blanket bomb the town with a message that nobody wants to hear. This is “spam” type of “evangelism” and it risks proposing a solution without the person having an underlying relationship of trust with you – a recipe for rejection.
• Have a product or an idea worth talking about. The concept, idea, service or product must really sell itself.
• Purple cows – All cows look the same (read boring) – but a purple cow is remarkable. It makes you stop, take notice, call friends, and make a remark. Always seek to build a purple cow.
• Ideas are like viruses – evangelists are like sneezers who sneeze on people who give them permission to get infected, who in turn become carriers and then sneeze on others.
  • Infecting a small group of people who want to be infected – they then infect others and you have effective growth.

What type of organizations are we building? Purple cows are organizations that are remarkable because they stand out from the crowd – the marketing funnel (Getting people from the target audience and feeding them through your organization) has been turned on its side to become a megaphone that preaches your distinctives from the rooftops.

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