On Marketing and Max Lucado

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those.

I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  But, before I do this, I want to talk about marketing, and more specifically marketing the Episcopal Church.  Now, the moment you use business terms or business concepts in the context of the church, people tend to get very nervous, and I understand where this anxiety comes from.  This purposes and goals of the project of Christian life cannot be reduced to business or marketing thinking.  But that is really an issue of what sorts of questions you are asking.  If you ask a spiritual question (i.e. "how do I live a life pleasing to God?"), then you need a spiritual approach, and no amount of marketing or business thinking can answer that question.  But if the church is asking a business question, then I think business thinking can provide useful insight.

Moreover, my experience with the operations of the Episcopal Church shows that (1) there seems little hesitation to utilize business and marketing thinking on the part of the leadership of the Episcopal Church; but (2) when business and marketing thinking is utilized, it is often done so very badly and incorrectly.  And whatever you think of the role of business thinking in the life of the church, it seems to me that we can all agree that bad business thinking, or perhaps more accurately business thinking done badly, is no good for anyone.  If you are going to do something, you should do it right.  So, for those that object to using marketing thinking in the context of the Episcopal Church, I would ask you to suspend your objections to the premise for a moment, and go with the call of the question--how to properly market the Episcopal Church.

So, the goal here is for the Episcopal Church to both get more people into the doors, as well as to retain those people as repeat "customers"--regular communicants, active parish members, raising their children in the faith, tithing, all of it.  In other words, the Episcopal Church wants to expand its market share, to be very crude about it.  To expand your market share, you should first identify three things (1) what is the nature of the product or service you are providing; (2) what is the nature of the market to whom you will, or could, sell your product or service; and (3) your competitors for that market.  The ideal scenario would be a product that is perfectly tailored to a discrete market of people, and whom you have no competitors for that market.  If you can find such a thing, then you should focus your efforts on that specific market, because that will provide you the greatest return on investment.

Now, we could define the relevant market as "everyone in the United States who is looking for meaning and purpose in their lives," which is the functional equivalent of "everyone in the United States."  The problem with this approach is that there are an enormous number of competitors in that space--not only every other religious tradition and group, but also a wide variety of somewhat inchoate alternative products.  This makes your marketing efforts challenging--convincing someone who finds meaning walking in nature to give up that up and come to the Episcopal Church is possible, but very difficult.

OK, fine.  Let's refine our market to "everyone who was or is a Christian."  That helps, because at least now everyone in the market has a conceptual sense of what the product is that is being offered (it's hard to convince someone to try a soft drink if they don't know what a soft drink is or why it might be pleasant to drink).  But we still have enormous competition for this market, much of it very well capitalized.  And there is tremendous diversity in the market--the active practitioners of Christianity range from Cornel West to Franklin Graham, making it difficult to come up with a singular pitch that works for that entire group.  If you try to market to "Christians," you end up with either a very thin product pitch, or more likely a series of incompatible product pitches that go hither and yon, not adding up to any kind of coherent brand identity.

No, what the Episcopal Church needs is a micro-targeting marketing solution.  You want a single, relatively cohesive group, ideally one that is not currently loyal to one of your competitors in the marketplace (because it is hard to dislodge existing brand loyalties).  This is pretty close to a unicorn in the marketing world.  But, here's the amazing thing--such a group actually exists, at least for the purposes of the Episcopal Church.

Ex-Roman Catholics.

13% of all Americans--not "13% of Roman Catholics in America," 13% of everyone in the country--was raised Roman Catholic but are no longer one.  That is in the neighborhood of 48 million people.  Now, some of those have moved to other faith traditions, and some are anti-religion or anti-Christianity and practically unreachable.  But you don't need to reach all of the people in that group, because the group is so large.  If the Episcopal Church were to reach 5% of that population and get them in the door, it would more than double in size.  Even modest gains in that space will have enormous effects.

It gets even better.  The Episcopal Church has enormous structural advantages in marketing to that group, advantages that don't really require the Episcopal Church to do anything to its product.  First, there are already a ton of ex-Roman Catholics within the Episcopal Church (people who, it should be said, found their way into the Episcopal Church without any meaningful effort on the part of the Episcopal Church in a corporate sense to attract them), so there are many "brand ambassadors" out there to be empowered to smooth the transition of new folks into the fold.  Second, once these ex-Catholics do get in, they will find an experience that is broadly similar to what they knew as a Roman Catholic, especially in terms of liturgy, and that familiarity will ease the transition.

But, the real advantage here is that many of these ex-Roman Catholics are ex- because of the Roman Catholic Church's position on sexuality generally, and the role of women and LGBT people specifically.  No doubt many of those folks would have stayed active Roman Catholics but for those positions.  Well, the Episcopal Church doesn't have those positions.  So, the Episcopal Church can micro-target within the micro-target, and go after Roman Catholics who left because of gender and sexuality issues.  And it even has a catchy slogan--"All of the Catholicism you love, none of the bigotry you hate."

But you never want to put your eggs in a single basket, as promising as the ex-Roman Catholic basket is.  There's another obvious basket out there--progressive evangelicals that are alienated from the evangelical world due to gender and sexuality.  They are not as large a group as the ex-Roman Catholics, but it is a growing group.  This is promising, because you have message synergy with the ex-Roman Catholics, as the two groups have similar problems with their previous religious homes (especially as conservative Roman Catholics and evangelicals become increasingly aligned).  There are a few more problems integrating ex-evangelicals into the Episcopal Church in terms of the experience of attending than there are with ex-Roman Catholics (basically, you have to sell them on liturgy), but nothing insurmountable.  And you have some high-profile evangelicals who became Episcopalians, led by (God rest her soul) Rachel Held Evans.  

These two groups have two things in common that make them a particularly desirable from a marketing perspective.  First, these people are looking to buy, or at least open to buying, the core product that the Episcopal Church is selling--the experience of church.  Second, they view the wars that the Episcopal Church has fought for fifty years over gender and sexuality as wars that were worth fighting, and that Episcopal Church was on the right side of that war.  There is no need to be embarrassed or shy away from the positions that the Episcopal Church has taken, and in fact those positions are a core element of the marketing pitch.

Now, I think all of this is incredibly obvious, to the point where I find the fact that the Episcopal Church is not actively trying to market itself to ex-Roman Catholics primarily and ex-evangelicals secondarily is operational malpractice.  The reasons for this, I think, go to the heart of the cultural problems in the Episcopal Church, especially the leadership that (at the risk of opening a can of worms) was born between 1946 and 1964.  But even more obvious is that a marketing message like "All of the Catholicism you love, none of the bigotry you hate," requires you to actually get rid of the bigotry piece.  Because if the Episcopal Church isn't serious about inclusion, then there is no reason to consider yet another non-inclusive vision of Christianity that is not all that different from the non-inclusive churches that they have left.  Any backsliding, or the perception of backsliding, on the inclusion of women and LGBT issues, is utterly poisonous to any marketing message to those groups.

Backsliding such as, for example, inviting a well known non-affirming evangelical leader to preach from the most prominent pulpit in the Episcopal Church.  And here's the part I just can't understand--for whom? for what?  What is the benefit to the Episcopal Church or the Washington National Cathedral in bringing him in?  Do they think it will help them bring back the ACNA crowd?  Even if you think that having Lucado speak will work to heal that split (a dubious proposition at best, I would say), the cold fact is that the number of people who are in ACNA is tiny compared to the number of ex-Roman Catholics and ex-evangelicals who are out there.  Why alienate them, not to mention the folks who are already in the Episcopal Church who support LGBT inclusion, in the hope of maybe bring in a handful of ACNA folks?  And tacking toward the conservative evangelical crowd in general is a sucker's bet--there are a myriad of non-affirming churches out there, and the Episcopal Church would be just another one of those, albeit with an affectation for weird clothing.

Here's the other thing--Max Lucado agreed to preach at Washington National Cathedral.  That means that the pulpit at WNC matters, and has power, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered.  So, why not leverage that power on behalf of your brand identity?  If you wanted to bring in guest preachers who are not Episcopalians, why not invite Roman Catholic women--religious sisters, academics, folks like that?  In doing so, you are making a very clear point, which is that these people are not allowed to express their gifts and their perspective in their own contexts, but can do so in the Episcopal Church.  Or along the same lines, if you want to focus on evangelicals, why not invite evangelical women--Beth Moore, for example--who also aren't allowed to preach in pulpits in their churches?  If you are going to use that pulpit as a showcase for diversity within the Christian world, why not use it for diversity that is in alignment with your values and your marketing pitch?  Why would you bring in someone who has a message that is antagonistic to your message?  It's like Pepsi hiring a Coca-Cola executive to talk about why excessively sweet soft drinks are over-rated.  It doesn't make sense.  

The Episcopal Church is actually well positioned for the future.  It can offer something that is actually unique in the Christian "marketplace"--it is the only church in America that can offer a robust presentation of the historical Catholic faith and full inclusion of women and LGBT folks in all parts of church life.  The fact that Episcopal Church hasn't pushed this message is inexplicable, but voluntarily giving up one portion of that message is lunacy.  Even if you don't actually care about the lives and dignity of LGBT people and their friends and supporters, both those in the Episcopal Church and those who might join (and, to be clear, you should care about those people), Lucado-gate is awful on pragmatic grounds.  It's throwing away the best thing the Episcopal Church has going for it, and gaining nothing in return.