Thursday, March 16, 2006
Have You Bought The Package Or The Product?
Leigh McLeroy, writing at Common Grounds Online, notes the increasing trend in retail to stock packaging on the shelves and make consumers use that as a mean to retreive the actual product. Then she notes
For one, why do we as the church concentrate so much on the packaging when it's the product that matters? In business it is not unusual to use packaging as a means of promoting and selling an otherwise unremarkable product. More sometimes, really mediocre product out sells really outstanding product based on packaging. (How many times have you taken an awful movie home from the rental store because it looked good in the box?) If we focus on the packaging of our faith it means, at least in part, that we do not believe our product itself is very good - or at least it means we think it is a commodity. It certainly means we are competing for market share instead of growing the market. Does that sound right to you?
Secondly, the trend she notes to display packaging and retreive product is done for security reasons - generally it is too easy to secret the product out of the store without paying for it so they make you come to the point of sale to get the product and thus you are forced to pay for it. Do we, as a church really have to worry about security? Isn't our product free anyway? Once again this belies a desire to capture the customer instead of move the product.
And that is the real problem - it seems like the object today is to capture congregants instead share Jesus. The outlet and the packaging is not the product. Somehow I think the church would be well served to concentrate more on the product and less on the packaging and the outlet.
Related Tags: church, marketing, packaging, product, Christianity
And while, in both instances, the packages themselves provide incentive enough for consumers to keep on demanding their contents ? I'm struck by the fact that many of us, when "shopping" for something to believe in, buy just the packaging of faith and are satisfied to leave without the "goods."She's absolutely right and it raises so many issues.
We buy the trappings of religion - stirring music, a certain worship style, a charismatic teacher with a dynamic delivery - and make ourselves content with these. We equate demonstration with devotion, attendance with attention, and liturgy with love. I know, because I've done it. And down through time, others have, too. We find the package "enough," and so we miss the God inside.
C.S. Lewis likened this to the man who is so thrilled by the letter he's received that he completely ignores the mail carrier who left it. The Bible records that the Israelites - God's chosen people - preferred at times to keep Him at arms length, and deal with Him through a go-between. In Jesus' day, the Pharisees' passion for ritual obedience completely satisfied their appetite for holiness - to the point where they wanted nothing to do with the very God-in-flesh who stood before them!
For one, why do we as the church concentrate so much on the packaging when it's the product that matters? In business it is not unusual to use packaging as a means of promoting and selling an otherwise unremarkable product. More sometimes, really mediocre product out sells really outstanding product based on packaging. (How many times have you taken an awful movie home from the rental store because it looked good in the box?) If we focus on the packaging of our faith it means, at least in part, that we do not believe our product itself is very good - or at least it means we think it is a commodity. It certainly means we are competing for market share instead of growing the market. Does that sound right to you?
Secondly, the trend she notes to display packaging and retreive product is done for security reasons - generally it is too easy to secret the product out of the store without paying for it so they make you come to the point of sale to get the product and thus you are forced to pay for it. Do we, as a church really have to worry about security? Isn't our product free anyway? Once again this belies a desire to capture the customer instead of move the product.
And that is the real problem - it seems like the object today is to capture congregants instead share Jesus. The outlet and the packaging is not the product. Somehow I think the church would be well served to concentrate more on the product and less on the packaging and the outlet.
Related Tags: church, marketing, packaging, product, Christianity
