Why should a religious service bother about positioning?

QUESTION: We’re husband and wife in our late 50s and who are devout Catholics. Two of our three teenage children have left the Church to become born-again Christians. As a mother, I’m upset and still don’t understand their conversion. My husband and I have agreed to join our two Christian teen son and daughter in two or three of their Sunday worships. While my husband liked the services, I honestly did not. I found them too rehearsed. Even the preaching was more for show than spiritually inspiring.

I’m not writing your column for those reasons. I understand from our other daughter, who remains Catholic, that you once spoke about social marketing at her school conference in La Salle Taft. She said you mentioned “positioning” as something that can help our Church retain its devotees, both practicing as well as non-practicing, and even help bring back those who left.

I don’t mind telling you that I have a rather low regard for marketing, particularly what you call “positioning.” I’ve been a professor myself. I taught Theology at Miriam College. As far as Catholicism is concerned, I think marketing brings with it problems more than solutions to the troubles in our Church. Your marketing practice is too preoccupied with TV commercial slogans that often give promises that cannot be fulfilled. Your positioning “trick” can only pollute our faith’s spiritual message and God’s word. But my daughter insists that I should ask you to explain to me and to my fellow Catholic advocates and friends why our religion should bother about positioning.

Answer: I hope you don’t mind if I drop the term “positioning” in responding to your question. In place of “positioning” I’ll refer to “motivating.”

When positioning a brand, a marketer is essentially motivating customers to buy and use a brand. So your request can be read this way: “Please explain … why our religion should bother about motivating?”

While I’ve replaced positioning with motivating, in my explanation, I will retain using many other marketing terms that are easily understood and less offensive in their denotations.

Let’s start with a clear statement of our Catholic Church’s problem as you described it. That may be a way to “help our Church retain its devotees, both practicing as well as non-practicing, and even help bring back those who left.”

To solve our Church’s retention problem, including bringing back those who left and converted to born-again Christianity, the key social marketing Rx tells us: “Always start from where those to be retained are, and where those to be brought back are, and never from where you are as the change agent.”

Because “motivating” (or positioning) is essentially about satisfying the intended beneficiary’s priority devotional needs, we rephrase this starting point this way: “Start with understanding the spiritual needs that those to be retained are happy with, and the devotional needs of those to be brought back found fulfillment where they converted. Never start from the spiritual needs you as change agent want to fulfill. Consider those afterwards and only secondarily.”

We begin with the segment of the faithful like yourself. There are so many of you and so the Catholic Church’s share of the devotional market, where you belong, must be retained if it is to remain the “market leader church brand.” Your experiencing of the Church’s spiritual service is what has kept you and will keep you in your faith. For as long as that experience satisfies your expectations, namely, a religious experience that’s not “rehearsed” and the preaching is “not for show but spiritually inspiring,” you and those like you will stay.

But that’s you.

What about your husband, for example, and those like him? He obviously has a different set of religious service needs.

Social marketing calls them “underserved” needs and those with such needs, the underserved market segment. He and those in this segment while still Catholic, likes “the competition.”

So, you belong to one devotional market segment, the “retained” segment. Your husband belongs to another, “the at-risk” segment. And the-at-risk segment seems to be growing. Your other daughter who has so far remained Catholic is like your husband. That’s why she referred your positioning (or motivating) issue of our Church to this MRx column. There’s another at-risk Catholic segment that has “unserved” spiritual needs. They are those we see during Sunday mass who go outside when the homily starts.

Is this saying that the total Catholic devotional segment is destined to eventually become the minority devotional market? This is certain to happen if our Church doesn’t do anything about our underserved and unserved Catholics.

Over a decade ago, a small group of practicing Catholics decided to do something. They called themselves “Light of Jesus Family” and their religious service, “The Feast.”

The motivating (or positioning) message of The Feast’s Sunday religious service is unmistakable. It’s promising and delivering the spiritual experience to fully serve those underserved and unserved devotional needs. For example, Bro. Arun Gogna, Bro. Bo Sanchez’s deputy and senior feast builder at The Feast Alabang opens his Sunday preaching by asking those attending: “How among you want to be blessed now so that God will make your dreams come true?” After moving everyone with his hour-long preaching that’s thankful for God’s merciful love and mixed with his happy “parables,” he ends when asks: “How many of you now feel that you’ve been blessed and your dreams coming true?”

But isn’t this the very same or similar spiritual experience and need that your Christian son and daughter are getting from their born-again Christian community? So are the born-again Christian denominations the “competition?” But there is no competition here. That’s because both the Catholic Church and the born-again communities are after the same end. That’s to give the spiritual experiencing of Jesus’ merciful love. The end is the same. it’s only the means to the end that differ. The means cater to differing needs, motivations, positionings. So there’s the explanation you seek, and it says why a religious service should bother about motivating, about positioning.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to me at [email protected].