Faith marketing assignment

Advertising online is not Just cost effective, but also considered as easy to reach the most precisely defined target audiences through different websites and social media platforms. The term ‘ online religion’ was born, referring to not only promoting churches online, but also calling believers to practice their religion online in forms of liturgy, prayers and meditation. In this century there is a great change in consumers’ behavior in terms of how they seek their daily “ spiritual food”. They spend considerably more time online looking for information and can be less touched by TV or door-to-door canvassing. Soupy, 2002) The idea that repeatedly appears in the literature of marketing of religions is that in spite of all technical developments in order to transmit messages to attract or convert believers to a church, it is still the power of personal invitation that best helps recruiting new members to a church within any denomination. Referrals and direct mails are named by Webb et al. (1998) as the most important tools for the attracting and retaining of members, while Raising (2006) urges churches to make members eager to invite others – thus using the power of the community where new members might want to belong to later.

This is where church organized events such as arts fairs, concerts and sport events can still help attract new members today. Could the classic business methods be used for branding a denomination? If we think about branding: how can a brand be defined? The brands consists values, image, distinctive elements and also a style of communication. Considering a Christian congregation as a brand, we can find features that we can relate with each categories.

Due to the nature of the examined ‘ industry, research methodology that lacks biases has to be chosen carefully. The method of the primary research has to meet the demands of enabling the examined population to express qualitative data that helps to find key learning about the research question on the demand side. Methodology and research design In order to find out what marketing elements attract customers to different congregations and to explore any possible relations between different factors found, I am going to implement both secondary and primary research.

The data is then to be analyses and a conclusion regarding the research question is to be made in the dissertation. As part of the secondary research, a wide array of relevant literature is to be processed, with special attention to specific marketing communication tools and examples to showcase the supporting or contradicting notions to the research question. Following that and based on the emerging findings, in-depth interviews are going to be conducted. This kind of qualitative research was chosen as this method enables a deeper understanding of the ideas, concerns, reflections, and experiences of the interviewed individuals.

During the interviews, notes will be taken that after the interview will be processed to be able to highlight similarities, differences and valuable patterns that will serve as the base of the Findings section of the dissertation. Any further limitations that arise will be mentioned and considered in terms of validity of the findings of the dissertation. The interview questions and the summary of the data will be available in the attachments section. A reflection on potential difficulties and suggested solutions

Potential difficulties throughout the research process and possible solutions: Insufficient amount of literature on religion marketing. This has been a valid concern in 1992, when Cutler (1992) mentions that only 35 articles have been published on religion and marketing in the previous 30 years. Since then, with the development and availability of quality research Journal articles and books it is not an issue anymore. On the other hand, it is the other extremity: finding valuable information online has to be proceeded by quality check of the source, author, relevancy of the iterate, and making sure only up-to-date information is used.