This post is a response to a question posed my Rob Feature in a recent episode of Geeks and God. Why does a church even need a logo? He couldn’t come up with an answer, so here is mine.
First some setup. You can’t talk about a spark plug without talking about an engine, and we can’t talk about a logo without talking about marketing as a whole. Go read these articles to make sure we’re on the same page: Church Marketing Defined, and Church Marketing Sucks: Tony Morgan Thinks Churches Should Stop Marketing. To summarize, marketing isn’t billboards and direct mail, marketing is managing people’s perception of your organization.
Whether you’re active and intentional in your marketing or not, people are forming an opinion of your church. If we’re not thinking through what that opinion is, we could be turning people away from Christ before they even walk in your door. Would you think you were going to learn something that would be relevant to your life from a church with this logo?
But do you actually need a logo to be intentional in managing people’s perception of you? Well, that’s up to you. What do you want people to think about when they think about your church? If you’re a small group of people who meet for a Bible study in a coffee shop and think of yourself as the “un-church,” a logo would be counter-productive to that image. But in most cases a logo is one of the many tools that we get to use to communicate who we are to our community, and you should be using it wisely.
UPDATE: Apparently the Akismet module isn't working, and spambots have taken a liking to the site, so I've had to turn on comment moderation until I have time to fix the problem.
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Seth Godin spoke at Catalyst this week. If you’re not familiar with who he is, he’s a marketing expert who’s written several books about the topic. His blog is one of my favorites, so I was pretty stoked to get the opportunity to be hear him speak.
He spoke about “tribes,” which wasn’t much of a surprise since that is the title of his new book. In a nutshell, the theory is this: top-down targeted marketing doesn’t work anymore. The new way to market your product is to get people to connect with other people who use your product so that they sell it to each other. So the best way to sell more widgets is to create a culture of people who not only use your product, but who want to hang out with other people that use your product.
At first glance, it really makes a lot of since for churches. Most of us have already been doing this forever. We have groups for men and women and youth and singles and anything else. When people connect to other similar people, it creates a connection that keeps them coming back to church, and hopefully work of the kingdom gets done.
But as a non-Christian, what Seth doesn’t understand is that our goal isn’t to grow our congregation or to connect people to other people. These are just byproducts of a higher calling: to help people connect to God.
As people working in any kind of church communications, we’ve got something that nobody else does. We aren’t trying to make people feel good in order for them to “buy-in” to to what we’re pushing. We are communicating the truth so that the Holy Spirit can work in the lives of those who are called. (Romans 9 and 10)
Here is the danger: if our churches are growing for any reason other than the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives, it’s not work worth doing. If we want to just do good works, we can join Habitat for Humanity or the Red Cross. If we want to entertain, we should get into show business. But either of those would be selling ourselves short of our greatest purpose which is to reveal the Kingdom of God.
Just say it: church marketing. Does it make you cringe a little bit? Because that’s the reaction I used to have too. It conjured an image of a church that is inward-focused, trying to be flashy, and selling people a gospel of over-production and moving lights. That didn’t sound like anything I wanted to be a part of.
But than I heard a definition of marketing that made it all make sense: Marketing is perception management.
Perception Management
What people in your community know (or think they know) about your church builds an image in their mind of what your church is. Maybe it’s as simple seeing your logo on some promotional material and thinking it looked cheesy and out of date. Maybe they have a coworker who had a bad experience as a first time visitor. Or maybe they couldn’t afford to feed their family and your church fed them. Everything that your church does (or doesn’t do) that your community sees affects their perception of you. So let’s start being intentional about it! Hence the term perception management.
But there's more to it than just wanting your community to have a positive perception of your church. You want them to have an accurate perception (hopefully positive and accurate aren’t mutually exclusive!) Do they think you’re a big flashy church with lights smoke and fire, or do you meet in a coffee shop? Are you modern? Traditional? Big? Small? Friendly? Note that none of those adjectives are good or bad. They’re just who you are.
It goes deeper than that too. Don't forget that you don't only reflect your church, you represent Christ to non-believers. Their impression of your church will affect their perception of Christ.
So What?
Since perception management reaches into every part of your church’s ministry, there’s an endless amount of things to be said about it. We’ll continue to explore this topic here. But for now, just know that definition. Every time we talk about marketing here, we mean perception management.
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I'm not the first person to think about this. Here's some of my favorite resources:
