By Corey
One of the things that I love about Missional Church is that I have an opportunity to be around people with different fields of study. Being a marketing major I often take classes with economics students, future accountants, and other business students. On the other hand, Missional Church is filled with theology majors, communication majors and myself, the lone student from the business department. As we have talked about consumerism and materialism in our class it seems that marketing and advertising get accused for much of the blame. This is something that I hear often and don’t take any offense to. However, I do think that the marketing gets an unfair share of the blame and I want to suggest that we shift that blame elsewhere.
The first thing you learn in business school is the law of supply and demand. Grounded in Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory, a business student learns of the inverse relationship between price and quantity on the demand side and the direct relationship between price and quantity on the supply side. All that to say, each business student is taught that to keep the doors open a business must sell products that the customers actually want. Therefore, the customers are the driving force of what is sold, not businesses.
I believe that businesses sell benefits not products. When this approach is taken the customer, once again, holds all the power. Take for example, a new pair of shoes. A person does not buy a new pair of shoes just to have them; a person buys a pair of shoes for the benefits. Whether it is to improve one’s self image or to keep one’s feet dry, consumers look for these benefits when deciding what product to purchase. Further, it is the marketer’s job to make sure that the customers’ desired benefits are met. As a marketing student I am not interested in making sure our country is more obsessed with consumerism, I am interested in giving people what they want.
It is not the marketers and advertisers that are behind the unhealthy consumerism, it is our culture. The business side of consumerism is a by-product of our culture and therefore at the mercy of what our culture wants. I suggest that we begin to shift the blame to ourselves for a culture that is fascinated by individualism and consumerism. And as our culture begins to shift away from consumerism the marketing and advertising will as well. After all, the first rule of business is supply and demand.
-cz
I think that consumerism in churches as well as Christians is unhealthy to the Church. I agree with you that subverting what most often is pushed forward to attract Christians to Church is the best way to get away from our culture’s consumerism. Hirsch and Halter outline this very well in their books, “The Forgotten Ways”, and “And”.
In regards to certain reads that look into supply and demand I have a couple that I have read and a couple that I want to read. The ones that I want to read are, Kenman Wongs’, “Business for the Common Good” and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”. Based off of his book and his beliefs, Adam Smith seemed to believe that capitalism should serve the common good, not self interest.
A couple things that I have read that are good are Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy”. This book looks at the behavior of American consumers and the pre/post purchase behavior linked to products. Secondly, there is an article on q ideas that is a short yet interesting article: http://www.qideas.org/blog/is-it-wrong-to-pursue-a-profit.aspx
I think that it is fair to say that the more we develop products and create new ‘benefits’ in life, people will want those due to their desire to improve their life and or create a unique identity. Also, it creates a new sort of poverty of opportunity, only furthering the working poor from the wealthy as they are now falling behind in the man-made trend of stuff. I personally do not find that I have ever been satisfied by material things sold by businesses.
Further, do we really need to continue creating stuff? How many generations of iPods are there? How many computers are discarded within a few years? Until recently, most of these discarded electronics ended up in developing countries to be “recycled”. I don’t know, I guess I have a tarnished view of new products.
I would strongly suggest that many people who are seeking to make their life better through stuff or new ‘benefits’ are missing the point of life, namely living life of Christ and bringing about God’s Kingdom.
I hope that did not seem like too much of a rant.
Corey do you have a suggested read that does a good primer on what you’re talking about here in terms of supply and demand. I’m intrigued and would love to read some more from a perspective I don’t read much from.
My personal take has been to subvert the sort of things that churches push forward as the reason people are looking for a different church and instead focus our community on those who aren’t interested, as we believe mission tends to draw us towards those who aren’t necessarily looking for a church community.
Peter, I agree with you that the church has adopted a model from business that is not very helpful to the advancement of the Kingdom. The two readings that we were supposed to read for Friday did a great job of explaining it I think. A quote that stood out to me was, “Consumerism can only exist if we let it exist”. – Halter
I agree with you that our culture is more to blame for individualism and consumerism than the marketers and advertisers. I don’t have a problem with marketing and business models based on giving people what they want. What I do have a problem with is when the church adopts this method. Our churches should not be trying to sell people their products and services and just trying to give them what they want. Our culture has made us view church in this way however and with so many options to choose from it can begin to look like a shopping mall where everyone can pick and choose their favorite service. Every good business needs a good marketing strategy and must take into account the profile and desires of their target market. The church definitely needs to be flexible in its approach to different people as well but it should not be operated as a business trying to sell a product or service.