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