Gospel as Social Object
I’ve been browsing around GapingVoid today, thinking about Hugh’s concept of emerging marketing being driven by the Social Object. Here is a great quote by Seth Godin about emerging marketing:
“You make what my friend Hugh MacLeod calls “social objects”—things that people want to talk about. That’s what the iPhone is. People say the iPhone was superhyped, but Apple didn’t hype it. People hyped it to each other. The challenge is not “How do I spend $50 million on advertising?” The challenge is “How do I spend $50 million on product development, so I can make a product people will talk about?”
The premise here is, in a hopeless quest for relevancy, many companies believe that if they digitize their products they will find new market shares and be validated to continue to make the same product they have always made. Money is poured into new marketing streams, but renovations to the product itself do not receive similar funding. The goodness and usefulness of the product is seen as timeless once it has been validated using one marketing method. Seth Godin again:
“First, companies have to decide: Either they’re in or they’re out. You either make meatballs, or you’re part of this new regime. But if you only want to use the regime to just sell more [meatballs], you’re going to fail. Gillette invented the safety razor on the back of two things: a really good factory and aggressive mass marketing. And they’re really good at it. The question is: Why do we think Gillette deserves to succeed in this new medium? My answer is: They don’t. There’s nothing about what Gillette does that makes them worthy of conversations online, that makes their ads in Google clickable, that makes you want to visit their website.”
The church is struggling with the same tension. Certainly, almost eveyone has recognized that the forms and structures are changing and need to change, but we have been very slow to pick up on the fact that these changes are actually compelled by a need for a reinterpretation of the Gospel itself. Otherwise we end up looking just as silly as Gillette.
The Gospel was a compelling social object in Jesus day. It was Good News to everyone. It drew crowds. It breathed hope into a people that had been demoralized by empire. It wasn’t the relevancy of the packaging that drew people.
The Gospel is a compelling social object in our day. It is not a timeless truth that simply needs to be given a new slogan every decade. It is a fully incarnated, integrated reality, necessarily different in every way, every day, but never diminishing in goodness through each incarnation.
Tags: Gospel, Marketing, Social Object, Seth Godin, Gapingvoid, emergent, emerging
