Category Archives: Marketing & church growth

Why do you visit liberal religious Web sites?

At this year’s General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists in the United states, I’ll be leading a workshop on creating great Web site content. Here’s the description that will appear in the program book:

You don’t need a huge budget or technical wizardry to create a great church website. What you need is great content. Learn how to create rich content to attract guests and to help existing UUs deepen their faith. From case studies and presentation get practical, immediately useful ideas and techniques. Keywords for GA program index: website, electronic technology.

Now I’m looking for some input from people who read religious Web sites, and also from people who create liberal religious Web sites.

On the one hand, I’d love to hear from readers….

  • What kind of content do you like to see on a liberal religious Web site?
  • What kind of content keeps you coming back to read a Web site, week after week?
  • What kind of content would make you tell a friend about a religious Web site?

On the other hand, I’d also love to hear from religious bloggers and people who maintain liberal religious Web sites….

  • What kind of content gives you the most hits on your Web site or blog?
  • How much time do you spend each week creating content for your blog or Web site?
  • What strategies do you use to organize your content so visitors will have easy access to it?
  • And of course, if you have a magic formula for great Web content, let me know!

If you are moved to do so, spread the word — I’d love to get input from people other than the people who read this blog. You can leave a comment below, or if you’d prefer you can send an email message.

What do you believe? — part two

In an earlier post [link], I quoted from an old Unitarian Universalist pamphlet by Duncan Howlett, titled “What Do YOU Believe?” In the portion I quoted, Howlett wrote that Unitarian Universalism is not concerned with traditional belief systems. Indeed, Howlett explicitly rejects traditional belief systems (I’ve silently updated gender-specific language):

What then do we tell our friend who asks us what the Unitarian Universalists believe? We tell our friend in the first place that we reject all doctrines and creeds and theologies if they pretend to any finality. We think the fabrication of such systems valuable, but we do not believe one or another of them.

For me, that statement sums up the core of Unitarian Universalism. If you have the so-called “seven principles” posted in your church building, maybe you should take them down and replace them with a poster bearing the above quote. But you might want to add a positive statement about what we stand for (again, language silently updated):

A Unitarian Universalist is not an unbeliever. In fact, a Unitarian Universalist believes a great deal. Our beliefs are of a different order, but they are nonetheless real. The first of them is belief in humanity…. When we say that we believe in humanity we mean that we believe that human beings are endowed with the power to move toward truth. We believe that human beings are endowed with the discrimination by which to tell the difference between truth and falsehood and error. Yet we know human beings are fallible. We know that individuals make mistakes. Thus when we speak of humankind or humanity we mean the interaction of mind upon mind, experience upon experience….

We believe humanity is to be trusted — not each human being, but humankind taken together, with the testimony of each checked against each. We believe that humankind can find truth, know the right, and do good — again, not each individual, but taken together, with each checked against all the rest. We believe human life has meaning, that the high purposes of humanity may be achieved and the spiritual nature of humanity indicates something about humankind and the cosmos as well. In this faith we live, by it we labor, and through it we find the courage to carry on amidst all the tragedy, misery, and stupidity of life.

You could make all that into a poster — or into an “elevator speech,” a short spiel about our faith you could give to someone with whom you happen to be sharing a ten-second elevator ride. Either way, I find Howlett’s statement to be a far more satisfying (and accurate) summation of Unitarian Universalist “beliefs” than the “seven principles.”

Why church is important

Here in New Bedford, the anti-gay attack at Puzzles bar in the North End sent shock waves through our community. How could an 18 year old man walk into a gay bar to attack the patrons with a handgun and a hatchet just because those men happened to be gay? Right now, many of us in New Bedford are trying to figure out what to do.

Scott Lang, our mayor, has called on churches and other religious communities to provide better support to youth. I’m all in favor of supporting teenagers, but I don’t think it works quite that way.

First of all, research shows that teenagers who go to church are far less likely to engage in risky behaviors of all kinds. The issue is not providing additional support to the teens who are already coming to church, the issue is the large numbers of teens who have no religious affiliation to speak of.

Secondly, I’m increasingly of the opinion that the way we get teens into our churches is to support their families. In a recent article about ministries that support whole families (instead of just supporting, say, youth), Rev. Phil Lund asks a rhetorical question:

…Why are so many of our current youth strategies and programs focused on trying to put the pieces back together after kids are already in crisis rather than on providing the early and continuing nurture that will keep them healthy and whole?

Phil’s answer is that congregations should be what he calls “authoritative communities,” and before you get your back up about that word “authoritative,” let’s find out what Phil really means. Citing a new book titled Hardwired To Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities, Phil writes:

Authoritative communities are [multigenerational] groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life.

Authoritative communities have 10 key characteristics. Based on careful analysis of both the new science of nurture and the existing child development literature, the Commission on Children at Risk [authors of Hardwired To Connect] identified the following 10 principal characteristics of an ideal authoritative community:

  • “Authoritative communities include children and youth.
  • They treat children as ends in themselves.
  • They are warm and nurturing.
  • They establish clear limits and expectations.
  • The core of their work is performed largely by nonspecialists.
  • They are multigenerational.
  • They have a long-term focus.
  • They encourage spiritual and religious development.
  • They reflect and transmit a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person.
  • They are philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all people and to the principle of love of neighbor.” —[Hardwired To Connect]

This might provide a useful model to us here in New Bedford: make sure our churches and religious communities function as this kind of authoritative community.

More to the point for my own church, this should serve to remind us why we’re doing what we’re doing. You don’t come to church when you feel like it so you can hear some good music and maybe an inspiring sermon. You come to church to be a part of a multi-generational community that is shaping the life of the surrounding community, by transmitting what it means to be a good person, and by promoting equal dignity all all persons as set forth in the Golden Rule.

Not that that is easy. But the more of you who show up at church, the easier it will be, and the less likely it will be that we’ll have another incident like the one at Puzzles bar. And no, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I’m trying to give you a good reason why you should get out of your comfy jammies on Sunday morning, leave behind the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper, and go out into the cold to come to church. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I’m telling you that you really do make a difference when you show up.

Link to Phil Lund’s complete post

More on “lovemarks”

I’ve begun to hear more talk about what happens to kids who grew up as Unitarian Universalists, and then left our congregations. My older sister is one of those people, and in response to my series of posts on “Lovemarks,” she sent this long comment about the “new Unitarian Unviersalism”:

Your comments about the new Unitarian Universalism (UU) nailed it for me: I find UU largely offputting now. The jargon — seven principles? — the stuff — the chalice? — the almost lockstep political correctness — these elements of UU now are not the thoughtful, considering, curious UU I grew up with. UU has become a brand, and the brand is not one I particularly connect to, nor feel welcomed by. There was a certain mystery to the UU we grew up with, and I don’t think this came simply from being a wide-eyed child; for me the mystery was embodied in the amazing things we learned in Sunday school about art and science and our pal Jesus. In UU as I remember it, Jesus too had some mystery — not of the religious sort, but of the kind of mystery embedded in any very passionate person who believes in doing right, asking hard questions, teaching a new way of looking at the world, and then with clarity acts on those beliefs.

I look at UU now and I see a rather cookie-cutter multiculturalism, as if indeed we all are one big family, loving everyone everywhere. Really? What really gets me, and I’m thinking about particular upper-class communities here [in Indiana], is that all the do-goodingness seems to happen somewhere else. Instead of going to the other side of town, well-meaning Unitarian Universalists go to the inner city. Instead of interacting genuinely with people of different socioeconomic classes in the ordinary transactions of life, there is a dramatic intentionality to interactions: find someone noticeable, different, clearly other, and “help” them.

Clearly I’m focusing on class issues; it seems that caring about class, especially lower class white folks, is not cool in UU — race and ethnicity and sexual orientation are. I would argue that class issues are one of the most important things we can focus on right now. The split between those who have and those who do not is growing wider and wider. Yes it’s interwoven with race and ethnicity and sexual orientation, but at the heart of the great divide in this country is socioeconomic privilege, or lack thereof.

I will qualify this by saying I don’t think this willful blindness to class is unique to UU’s. I am seeing it right now in the institution where I work [part of the state university system]. An alternative spring break is planned here, as I imagine it is in innumerable places, to go “help” the “victims” of Katrina by working for Habitat for Humanity. This is worthy, of course, and who knows, I may even go myself. But I also think that projects like this are not enough. They are showy, contained, and somewhere else. After a week of doing good then we all come home, safe, back to life as usual. What if, I wonder, we spent a day every week “doing good”? There are houses here, in this town, that are riddled with lead paint, asbestos in the basement, mold in the walls. What about them? What if we spent an hour every day working on that? An hour a day simply “doing good”? Or every damn minute of every day no matter where we are or who we meet? Jesus did. That’s kinda why we liked him. And if I recall correctly, he loved everyone. Equally.

But, what do I know. I’m just a grumpy English professor.

Love, Jean

Yup. Just remember, the key point of my series of posts on “Lovemarks” was actually quite subversive. OK, Unitarian Universalism has been turned into a kind of brand name. So take that a step further, apply the latest thinking in marketing, and turn Unitarian Universalism into a “Lovemark.” With a lovemark, the consumer owns it, not the big corporation. This means we own Unitarian Universalism. Us. Not them.

(Can you imagine if Jean, or my younger sister Abby, lived near my church? I’d make them come and teach Sunday school, infecting another generation of kids with mystery, stories of our pal Jesus, and those impossibly high ideals we learned as Unitarian Universalist kids. Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!)

Davidson Loehr’s angry letter

Davidson Loehr, senior minister at First Church Unitarian Universalist of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) back on November 30, 2005. In that letter, he lambasted the Pathways Church project, a Unitarian Universalist start-up church sponsored by denominational headquarters, for its complete failure to meet any of the initial goals of the project. Loehr said he believes that failure is tied to another problem with contemporary Unitarian Universalism, “the lack of a serious religious center.”

Now that’s a sweeping generalization, but Loehr does have a point about the wider denomination. My partner, Carol — who is unchurched — once pointed out that many Unitarian Universalist sermons sound like commentary on National Public Radio, which is to say, while hip and fun they are not particularly religious. At denominational headquarters, I am not aware of serious theological thinking affecting policy since Hugo Holleroth (who grounded religious education in existential theology) left there in the 1970s. Loehr elaborates on this problem later in his letter:

The center [of Unitarian Universalism] is political rather than religious, as it has been for decades. I’m not saying this as a crank; I’m saying it as someone who earned a Ph.D. in theology, with a good understanding of what religion is, and what it isn’t.

Rev. Peter Richardson has been instructive for me in this area, in pointing out that there actually once was a vision of a religion for the future that would still work, but that the UUA actively sabotaged it from the beginning. This was the vision of a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions — the “wisdom traditions” of the great religions — with its symbol of the circle of logos from eight or so of the world’s religions. While this seems the logical — even obvious — path toward a pluralistic future for any liberal religion, it simply can’t be done now, and may not be possible for a decade or more, unless there is a conversion of consciousness.

Actually, Ph.D. or no, Loehr is a little behind the times, intellectually speaking. That old idea of thinking that Unitarian Universalism could be a “a religion grounded in the deep ontological commonalities of the great world religions” has been seriously challenged in recent years. If you subject that idea to some simple deconstruction, you uncover tendencies towards an unfounded sense of superiority, reductionism, and imperialism. The unfounded sense of superiority comes into play in the assumption that we’re so much better than anyone else that we can find those “deep ontological commonalities” that somehow managed to elude the greatest religious thinkers up until now — it’s possible, but no one else in the world seems to recognize this superiority of ours. The reductionism comes into play in the assumption that religions can be reduced to relatively simple ontological “commonalities” that can be divorced from a lived religion, including liturgical practice and day-to-day embodied living of one’s religion — that’s a little too Cartesian and Western to be considered universally true. The imperialism comes into play when the previous two assumptions remain unexamined; and the imperialism can manifest itself as cultural misappropriation or worse.

A number of us who are a bit younger than Loehr are heading in a different religious direction. Some of us are looking within our own tradition for a religious center — and we’re finding it. I don’t want to speak for others who are doing this work, but I know I’ve been drawing on Universalist and Transcendentalist religious thought, filtered through American pragmatism (which has roots in Emerson) and ecological theology and ecojustice (with roots in Thoreau and Emerson) — and uncovering a deeply religious center for my religious praxis. This is in distinct contrast to Loehr’s stated aim to incorporate “eight or so of the world’s religions.”

I have a suspicion that what I’m seeing, in my differences with Davidson Loehr, is that he is very much within the modernist tradition of creating grand meta-narratives that attempt to encompass and explain everything. Those of us who find themselves immersed in post-modernism are far more wary of making grand claims about religion — for instance, we’re wary of saying that we can incorporate other religious traditions into our own. Instead, from a postmodernist perspective, I might say that I am a post-Christian: acknowledging that I am very much in the Christian tradition, but recognizing that in a postmodern globalized world we have to accept that we are influenced by other world religions; the difference being that we aren’t trying to co-opt those other religions, but rather to understand what impact they have on us.

So where does this leave us? I think we do have a religious center, which I’d call post-Christian. Other Christians might not accept us, but we know that we are in, and came out of, the Christian tradition. Looking back to our past, I think we started becoming post-Christian as early as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hosea Ballou, diverging from the Christian mainstream, rejected by them, and growing into something new. By claiming our place on the margins as our religious center, by engaging in “theological archaeology” to find out who we were and who we are, by avoiding the construction of grand metanarratives about who we might be — I think we could become a far more viable postmodern religious tradition.

What do you think?

Original post revised in light of Scott Wells’s comment.

“Lovemarks,” conclusion

This is the final installment on Kevin Roberts’ marketing book Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands.

One key point that Roberts makes over and over again throughout the book is the importance of getting out of the office and out into the field, coming into actual people who are (or aren’t) using your products…..

I discovered this first-hand when I was working in the Middle East for Procter & Gamble. Like other companies at the time, P&G’s research was done by the numbers. Sometimes it seemed to me that we did little other than to verify what we already knew. We were tied to benchmarks and followed norms. I found it tough to see the value of all this, so I spent as much time as I could out of the office, three weeks out of four.

My passion was store checks and home visits. After going through all the numbers, I’d head into Dubai and visit a hundred little shops in the Soukh and get myself invited into consumers’ homes. I talked wtih retailers, consumers, people just walking by. Irrespective of what the nubmers said, I got my insights from these connections….

How does this insight apply to churches?

Let’s first explore the ongoing complaints about denominational headquarters. In the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere, it’s hard to find anyone who actually likes denominational headquarters. And if you talk with actual church-goers, you’ll often hear things like, “They seem so distant from what actually goes on in our church,” and “The denominational magazine just has nothing to say to me,” and “The Sunday school curriculums just don’t apply to our church.” The sad reality is that many UUA staffers do not get out into ordinary congregational life; a goodly percentage of them don’t even attend church regularly; and when they do church visits, UUA staffers are far more likely to have lunch with the senior minister than to get themselves invited into an ordinary Unitarian Universalist household.

There are exceptions to this trend. The director of electronic communications at our denominational headquarters, a woman named Deb Weiner, is an active member of a local church (serving on the Board, sending her kids to Sunday school and youth group, deeply involved in the social life of the congregation). To my mind, her involvement shows in the high quality of the denominational Web site; no doubt there are problems with the Web site, but on the whole it appears to be responsive to the needs of actual Unitarian Universalists. (My only denominational involvement right now is volunteering for that Web site, because when I volunteer for Deb I find I learn about real live Unitarian Universalism.)

Another exception is the newsletter for lay leaders, “Interconnections.” The editor of that newsletter, Don Skinner, is a former journalist who knows how to listen to people and report what they have to say. His ability to listen well shows up in “Interconnections” — lay leaders consistently report to me that “Interconnections” is by far the denominational “product” they love best.

What applies to the denomination applies equally to local churches. I’ve done a lot of work as a religious educator, and I discovered that lots of people — ministers, lay leaders, directors of religious education, parents — think they know what kids get out of church, and think they know what kids need from church. But when I sat down and actually listened to kids, I found what they were getting from church was different than what adults thought they were getting. Adults think kids get lots of intellectual understanding at church. Kids report that Unitarian Universalist churches change their hearts; they may not know much about their faith, but they feel it, and love it, far more deeply than adults who didn’t grow up as Unitarian Universalists.

Remember, Roberts says that a “lovemark” is owned by the passionate consumer, not by the big corporation. In denominational terms, the lovermark of Unitarian Universalism is owned by the passionate Unitarian Universalist, not by denominational headquarters.

Therefore, any lay leader or denominational staffer or minister or whomever, has to get out and talk with passionate Unitarian Universalists one-on-one. I suspect that if all the top staffers at denominational headquarters made it a point to be active members in local congregations, and to get out in the field and listen hard to real live Unitarian Universalists, and let it affect them in their hearts — I suspect we’d see big drop in complaints about denominational headquarters. Same principle is true in local churches, where lay leaders and ministers have to make it a point to listen deeply and listen well to persons who are in the church. This doesn’t mean that you kowtow to every passing whim — but you do have to listen hard, and listen well.

Kevin Roberts has a cutesy name for this — “Xploring” — and he tells us how to do it:

Simply put, the Xplorer puts on a pair of comfortable shoes, grabs a backpack, and heads off. There are no one-way viewing mirrors. No projective techniques. Just interaction, observation, and lots of conversation.

Roberts would predict that such interaction would lead to increased respect and increased love for our denomination. I think Roberts is right. And I think this is a kind of marketing I can actually use.

Lovemarks follow-up: Link

“Lovemarks,” third part

I’ve been writing about Kevin Roberts’ new book on marketing, Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands [ Link to part one Link to part two]. Roberts’ main contention is that marketing has to move beyond brands to something new. Here’s one more take-away point from the book:

Brands vs. “lovemarks”

Throughout the book, Roberts says that the key to a new kind of marketing is to develop “emotional commitment.” To show what he means, he includes a table contrasting qualities associated with brands, and qualities associated with a new kind of marketing….

BRAND –> Lovemark
Information –> Relationship
Recognized by consumers –> Loved by people
Generic –> Personal
Presents a narrative –> Creates a love story….
Symbolic –> Iconic
Defined –> Infused
Statement –> Story
Defined attributes –> Wrapped in mystery…
Professional –> Passionately creative

Apply some of these contrasts to Unitarian Universalism:

  • On promotional literature for our churches, instead of giving Information, how about promoting a Relationship?
  • Instead of worrying about being Recognized by consumers, how about worrying about being Loved by people?
  • Instead of Generic statements about what “we affirm and promote,” how about Personal statements about who we are as persons?
  • Instead of Presenting a [historical] narrative of a church, how about Creating a love story of our life together in faith?
  • Instead of trying to Define exactly what we are (which too often involves negative statements of what we’re not), how about Infusing our living values through everything we do?
  • Instead of Statements about who we are and what we believe, how about Stories about our lives and relationships together?
  • Instead of Defined attributes, why don’t we just Wrap some things in mystery?
  • Instead of being Professional, why don’t we try being Passionately creative? (…and come to think of it, that’s exactly what I try to do here on this blog….)

Things to think about as we try to spread the word about our churches.

Next: final installment on “xploring”

“Lovemarks,” part two

As I said in an earlier post, Kevin Roberts’ new book on marketing, Lovemarks: The Future beyond Brands, has been making me think about how we market religion. When I ask people why they come to church, one of the most common replies is that they are looking for, or found, some sort of intimacy in a Unitarian Universalist church. Roberts has a whole chapter on the search for intimacy, in which he writes:

Intimacy was crushed over the course of the 20th century. Everyone was determined to reduce complex exchanges of buying and selling into fast and efficient transactions. Little wonder that the people visiting the mall figured something was missing from their lives. Where once the moment of choice was wrapped in an intimate relationship with the seller, it has often become a sterile experience in an aisle that stretches forever.

The same is true in religion. In our Unitarian Universalist churches, we have lost the intimacy that we used to get when most churches were part of the fabric of community life, and you’d see the same people at church, at P.T.A meetings, in the grocery store, at the town dump. To try to regain that lost intimacy, we try all kinds of things — candles of joy and concern, small group ministries, support groups — that sometimes lead to real intimacy, but too often result in false intimacy. As Roberts points out, people are very good at detecting falseness. This may be why we lose some many newcomers after just a year or two: initially attracted by intimacy, they soon find it is false.

I predict that real intimacy, if we can figure out how to make it happen, is going to be at the heart of any renaissance of Unitarian Universalism. According to Roberts, demographics alone supports this contention:

A new global trend — the rising number of singles.

  • In 1950, about 3 percent of the population of Europe and the United States lived alone. Today in the U.K., seven million adults live alone — three times as many as 40 years ago. The statistics bible Social Trends estimates that by 2020 one person households will make up 40 percent of total households….
  • The shift towards solo living is most pronounced in the big urban centers of the West — with over 50 percent of households in Munich, Frankfurt, and Paris containing just one person, while in London nearly four in ten people live on their own….
  • The growth in single-person households is mainly a result of an increasing number of 25s to 45s opting to live alone.

If we don’t want to fade away, we have to get those 25s to 45s into our churches, and that will almost surely involve offering a sense of true intimacy. And Roberts suggests three things that can foster a sense of intimacy:

First, empathy “so that we can understand and respond to other people’s emotions…. There is only one way to understand other people’s emotions, or anything for that matter. By listening.”

Second, we have to establish commitment “which proves that we are in the relationship for the long haul…. commitment can transform loyalty from an unthinking acceptance to a real state imbued with real emotion — Loyalty Beyond Reason.” As an example, Roberts cites the commitment Mac lovers have to Apply Computer. Apple can make mistakes and Mac fanatics still forgive them.

Third, and I believe most important for Unitarian Universalism, is passion “that bright spark that keeps the relationship alive.” If Unitarian Universalism is lacking anything these days, it’s passion. Yes, there are many of us who are passionate about our religion, but the religion itself offers little passion. Our “seven principles” are a wonderful statement, but they are cold and passionless.

To be continued Link

“Lovemarks,” part one

Carol has been reading Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, a new marketing book by Kevin Roberts, CEO of the renowned marketing firm Saatchi and Saatchi. Roberts says that we’re seeing the end of the dominance of brand names and brands. I believe there are brand names in religion, too: many of my co-religionists conceive of “Unitarian Universalism,” not as a religion, but as a sort of brand name.

Now, I don’t like to think of a religion as a brand name, nor of people in churches as “consumers.” But Roberts reminds me that you have to listen to the people you’re serving to see how they’re thinking and feeling. So in churches maybe we have to engage in two-track thinking. On the one hand, we want to move people away from thinking of church in terms of a consumer item or a brand name. On the other hand, we have to recognize that Unitarian Universalism is treated as consumer item with a brand name, by at least some newcomers, and by at least some people already in our congregations.

Indeed, lots of folks, both at denominational headquarters and in the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere, have been trying to think of Unitarian Universalism as a brand name. Denominational headquarters has been marketing Unitarian Universalism under the brand “The Uncommon Denomination”; the blogosphere has been talking about things like “the Unitarian Universalist iPod strategy.” But Roberts suggests we need to move beyond brands to a new approach to marketing. In the passage below, Roberts tells us why brands are finished — and I’ve included comments in square brackets about how the Unitarian Universalist brand is finished:

Brands are out of juice. They can’t stand out in the marketplace, and they are struggling to connect with people. Here are six reasons why:

1. Brands are worn out from overuse…. Making sure the flowers in reception conform to the brand guidelines just shows you are looking in the wrong direction…. [Just like making sure we Unitarian Universalists are supposed to mention the “seven principles” when we talk to newcomers.]

2. Brands are no longer mysterious. There is a new anti-brand sensibility [in religion, this may well be an anti-denominational sensibility]….

3. Brands can’t understand the new consumer. The new consumer is better informed, more critical, less loyal, and harder to read. The white suburban housewife who for decades seemed to buy all the soap powder [and run all the Unitarian Universalist churches] no longer exists. She has been joined by a new population of multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-national consumers [and we Unitarian Universalists are still marketing to the suburban white folks]….

4. Brands struggle with good old-fashioned competition…. If you’re not Number One or Number Two, you might as well forget it [and Unitarian Universalism isn’t even in the top twenty!]….

5. Brands have been captured by formula. I lose patience with the wanna-be science of brands…. Formulas can’t deal with human emotion. Formulas have no imagination or empathy.

6. Brands have been smothered by creeping conservatism. The story of brands has gone from daring and inspiration to caution and risk-aversion [and certainly risk-aversion and caution have been the hallmarks of Unitarian Universalist efforts to let the world know about us]….

That’s a quick summary about why we have to move beyond brands. In the next post: “Lovemarks” and intimacy….