Mars Hill Marketing

My least favorite course back when I was working on my MBA at the U of MN was marketing. I never could figure out how to position a product so that it would sell. The question was always, should I make it upscale and sell it to fewer people at a higher price, or should I mass market something in plastic and make my profit on volume? I always picked wrong. I don’t think I ever worked harder and got nowhere in my life.

The easy part is picking a product. What you do is, you see a need that’s not being met, and you design a product to fill it. If it’s the only one, it’ll sell. The problem is, if there’s a real need, there’s always going to be more than one product competing for the attention of the consumer. That’s where I always got into trouble, with product differentiation.

Sometimes an entrepreneur has an idea for a product, but the consumer doesn’t think they need it. Then there’s an additional step in the process: you have to create a need, usually through advertising. Or you link your product with some other need, like status or popularity or success or power. The problem is that if the potential customer doesn’t have a need - whether you create it through advertising or they already feel it - it doesn’t matter how ingenious your idea may be, it’s not going to sell.

When I was taking evangelism in seminary, our prof divided the class up into teams to develop a new evangelistic tool sort of on the order of Bill Bright’s Four Spir-itual Laws. Anybody here familiar with those? Bill Bright was the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, and he put together one of the clearest and simplest plans for sal-vation since Paul left Antioch for Gentile country. The laws go like this:

1. God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.

2. Human beings are sinful and separated from God. Therefore, we cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.

3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin. Through Him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life.

4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.

The only problem is, these laws presuppose that people think of God as personal, and won’t argue - or get defensive - when you claim that human beings are sinful. But in our culture, you can no longer take that for granted. Just like Billy Graham’s approach, offering peace with God. Far too many people don’t realize that they aren’t at peace with God. After all, they’re pretty good people, why should God have anything against them? Surely God grades on a curve!

No, you have to start where people are, with something they can tune into. They have to recognize that you’re talking about them.

And that was what Paul did, that long ago day in Athens. He had been walking around, doing the tourist thing, trying to get a feel for what made the people tick. And what he saw was spiritual hunger. One writer from the period estimated that there were as many as 30,000 different gods there in Athens. Makes you think of the spirituality shelves at Barnes and Noble, doesn’t it? Or the New Age book stores or web sites. There’s channeling and crystals, gurus and Gaia, Sophia and Wicca, a dozen different varieties of Buddhism and a million Hindu gods. I hear that in Southern California some people are trying to revitalize the Aztec religion. It’s a spiritual smorgasbord, and you can fill your plate with whatever pleases your palate.

But that doesn’t sound like spiritual hunger, does it? Not at first glance, at any rate. It looks more like spiritual overload. How does anyone decide? Is there any product differentiation? With so many to choose from, is there any point in even trying? They can do as I did - two years before I met Christ - I joined a Unitarian church in St. Paul. I had been raised Unitarian, but hadn’t attended in years. When they interviewed me for membership, they asked why I wanted to join. I said that although I didn’t believe that there were any answers to life’s most important questions, the questions themselves were important, and I wanted to be involved in exploring them.

I didn’t know it, but I was a living, breathing example of the central hunger of post-modernism. People no longer believe that there are any answers - but they know they are hungry for something.

The people in Paul’s Athens believed that all the gods were equally likely, but that everybody needed to identify with some spiritual reality. So they, too, could pick anything, and hey - if it worked for them, nobody cared one way or another. They were all equally true, and equally untrue. First century Athens was more like 21st century Amer-ican than most people have any idea. And so Paul’s experience and example are incredibly relevant.