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Positioning, the Breakfast of Communication Champions
By chris | February 16, 2007
Let me pick with your brain a little. What kind of breakfast cereal would you eat if you were a champion? What kind of cereal is just for kids? What kind of cereal would you eat if you wanted to help your heart by lowering your cholesterol? If you are like most people you would have said Wheaties, Trix and Cheerios respectively. But why do you think that way about these products? What got all those ideas about breakfast cereals in that brain of yours? Do you need a life or what?
Whenever I go to the store, I love to pass down the cereal isle. And it’s not just to visit my best friend Cap’n Crunch! There is a communication battle going on there and, being a student of marketing, I like to go down and see who’s winning the war these days.
Cereal is pretty basic stuff. You have your wheat based cereals and your corn based ones. There’s a whole genre of rice based ones. (Man, I have to start eating before I post these blogs!) How do they take simple commodities and turn them into such powerful communication? The answer is positioning!
Before we start explaining what positioning is, let me make sure you understand, I am not about to tell you how to reduce what you are doing down to the level of marketing for breakfast cereals.
Can you imagine what it would be like if churches were marketed as breakfast cereals?
• Post Modern Flakes, I tried these, there were too Sweet and I needed to take Alka-Stetzer
• Frosted Liturgicals, best served chilled with extra trappings
• Reform Church Crunch, now 25% more fortified against change
• Holy Ghost Toasties, a scoop of nuts in every box!
• Cell Church Congra-bits, homemade flavor, less committees
• Cheeful-ios, Popped with psychology and a pat of answers
• Praisin’ Bran, All Hymns for Older Believers
• Multisite-O-Meal, merging with a church near you!
• Sweet-N-Seeker, Flavored with tasty sound bites
• Contempo-Pops, new from HillSong FarmsOkay, just having a little fun there.
In my opinion, ministry marketing has far more potential for abuse from people who only study marketing at the secular level and apply it to ministry. I need to temper what I learn from secular marketing with a missionary mentality. But, I am very interested in the communication principles I see applied by marketers, even marketers of cereal.
Before you accuse me of being simple, let me remind you that Jesus had more than a few reflections that were cereal-based. We call them parables. There’s the parable of the “Sower”. The story of the “Wheat and the Tares” Jesus even was busted by the religious police of his day for crushing and eating a little grain on the Sabbath. Clearly, biblical reflection on cereal is not mere trivia. Just as Jesus drew his teaching from the everyday mundane world, ministry marketers can learn from cereal marketers principles that help them become more effective communicators.
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
What do people think when they think of you? (More than likely, they don’t think of you at all if you are not out in the marketplace communicating. But I digress.) When people hear about you, or hear a message from you, if they pay attention, they will file you away in their memory somewhere. Think of it like the file extensions on a computer file. If you write a letter, your computer files it as a .doc file, if you make a presentation the computer files it as a .ppt file. You have .jpeg files, your browser reads all your .html files. Let’s not forget the celebrated .mp3 files!
Your computer knows how to label a file. But only you know where you are going to put each file in your computer. People are the same way. We file things in our mind based on our perceptions. Perceptions are later hardened into prejudices. As you collect more ideas (read prejudices) about a particular subject you develop a “taste” for a certain perspective. Your taste becomes your preference. Once you have a preference, it is hard to break through with something else.
For example, I spent eight years of my life serving in ministry with Chinese peoples. It took me almost all those years to get my Anglo best friend to try Chinese food. (He actually tried Hawaiian Chicken, so this illustration breaks down if you push me!) Now, he will only eat that dish if we each Chinese, he now has a taste for it. It may take me another eight years to get him over to Sushi!
People form tastes and preferences and that’s life. I know a lot of people will never respect my message since they have already filed anything I say on this site under their preconceptions and prejudices against “ministry marketing”. I may not like being painted with the broad brush of another’s prejudice, but I need to be aware it is happening when I communicate. Who knows, if I communicate effectively enough, I may eventually get them to put me in another file in their mind one day! Right next to Albert Einstein!
I am not alone, other people get filed too. Rick Warren gets filed somewhere in your mind. For some he’s a saint, to others the Devil’s nephew. Jerry Falwell, he’s filed in there in your mind too. (Is it filed next to Teletubbies —how’d it get there?) How about Billy Graham? Where do you file him? Start sorting; you have John Piper, John MacArthur, Beth Moore and Joel Osteen. None of them are filed the same way in your mind because you have different perceptions of each. Your mind is always sorting and putting away information in files, so when you need the information you can find it. You filed these names because, at some point, you paid attention to communication from or about these people.
They way things get filed in our minds is important when it comes to communication. First, you have to know how you want people to file your message. In other words, you need to be intentional in how to present your message. Secondly, you need to know how people actually perceive your message. The process of managing perceptions is called positioning. Let’s look more closely at what positing is and how to use it in ministry communications.
Stay tuned!
Topics: Uncategorized, Develop the Message |
February 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
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