Is Marketing Manipulation or Good Communication?

It's easy to package things together and not be able to separate them. In my house, Fridays go with pizza, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Pizza can exist without Friday and the reverse, but it's hard to imagine.

This is the danger with stereotypes. Not all characteristics fit all the people. The same dilemma exists with values and behaviors. If we hold a certain value, we tend to lump behaviors, style and all sorts of things when we think about following that value. But things change over time, and every once in awhile, we need to do a little reorganizing. Something that was useful at one time, may no longer serve a purpose. Realizing this can free us to separate motive with style.

This principle can be applied to communication. Many may disagree, but there is no neutral communication. Communication comes out of the hearts of people. It is the world interpreted through people and re-sent out, then assimilated through another individual. Emotions, thought, experience all go into the sending and receiving. So it is important for Christians to constantly be aware of their heart when communicating. I think we see this message in Proverbs 10:19.

"When words are many, sin is not absent,
but he who holds his tongue is wise." (NIV)

To stop and think is wise. But at the same time, there are places in the scripture that call us to speak. So, the goal isn’t to be quiet always, just to speak what and when we should.

Psalm 37:30 says, "The mouth of the righteous man utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks what is just." (NIV)

In Christian work, we tend to lump the need to “market” in missions and churches with guilt over materialism and other values we try to avoid. Marketing communications has so changed our way of giving and receiving information, that the two should no longer be tied together. People have a hard time receiving a message if it is not packaged in a way they have been trained to receive it.

While it is good for a church or mission to commit to the principles of non-manipulation and trusting God, it is not accurate to assume that any communication that smells of marketing would taint that commitment. To do so is a decision to not communicate effectively—especially to those who do not know a time where messages were not packaged. We need to think through ways that we can connect with people to communicate our needs while still trusting God.

It isn’t easy to communicate with a pure heart when the world has trained us all to receive messages in the style of sales and marketing, but it isn’t wise to stop communicating because we do not like how our culture and language have changed.