Marketing can play a significant role in helping religious organisations conquer their problems and take advantage of their opportunities, according to Bruce Wrenn, Philip Kotler and Norman Shawchuck in their book Building Strong Congregations: Attracting, Serving and Developing Your Membership. The book is a detailed manual, complete with worksheets, for churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious organizations as they plan and execute marketing strategies.
Is it even appropriate for religion to be marketed? According to the authors, it is inappropriate for an anthropocentric method to tell a theocentric story, and therefore it is not appropriate to market worship or evangelism (the “spiritual” aspects of congregations), but it is appropriate to use marketing to promote community and social services (the “social” aspects of congregations).
I felt somewhat uncomfortable as I read the book, because I am not fully convinced that many people really need or want generic religious communities and social services. The early chapters are devoted to explaining the importance of understanding who people are and what they need, but I suspect that most readers will simply skip over to the “good” bits which explain how to hit your target market with your religious products.
The book does a reasonable job of explaining a range of marketing practices in a necessarily secular manner because the authors are trying not to limit their book to just one religion. Philip Kotler, one of the authors, is an internationally recognized authority in secular marketing. However, some of the content is surprisingly out of date. The book’s copyright is dated 2010, but social media marketing is largely ignored. An article on page 364 is dated 2001 and says that 70% of churches have computers and 37% of them have a website. The book seems to be an incompletely updated version of an earlier book, although the title page does not make that clear.
At around 550 pages, there is a lot of content in this book, and it comes with a CD-ROM containing more resources. If you are a church leader looking for numerous worksheets to help you through the practicalities of creating and executing a marketing strategies, then you might find this book helpful. However, if you are looking for the best discussion of contemporary church marketing, I highly recommend Branding Faith by Phil Cooke and Church Marketing 101 by Richard Riesing.