Remember when you were strutting about in your “Tommy” jeans? How about all the pictures you took with your Kodak camera? These are but two once hugely successful brands that have, for a number of reasons, been knocked out of prominence in the marketplace. What caused these brands to falter is instructive for how the church should position itself in the global marketplace.

Yes, the Church must compete in the marketplace.

While the economic marketplace is certainly a reality for churches (they have to hire staff and manage assets just like any business), the competition in that area isn’t really a big threat to the church right now.

What is a threat is the marketplace of ideas. Thanks to technology, this arena is more crowded and more competitive now than in any other time in human history.

Not to imply that the Apostles had an easy life evangelizing in the first century, but their ideological competitors were few and quite different from what other were offering. Differentiating their “product” wasn’t a huge challenge, especially in the Gentile world. Today’s church must compete with more flavors of “religion” than Baskin-Robbins has ice cream and a host of secular world views.

We do share a similar challenge with the first century evangelists: our message of Christ crucified and a life of selflessness is a tough pill for most to swallow in a self-centered world.

The Importance of Branding

Branding is the strategy marketers use to differentiate their product from that of their competitors. Successful branding is multi-faceted, but involves these foundational principles: Awareness, identity and trust.

Christianity, as a brand, has little problem with awareness. Hardly a person on the planet is unaware of its existence. Unfortunately though, we’ve allowed Christianity to move into a dangerous area known as “brand parity.” We’ve allowed Christianity to become simply “another religious option” instead of the unique and life-changing choice offered by Jesus.

Ironically, we’ve done that by accentuating another type of brand loyalty. Over the past century, American Christianity has spent most of its energy focusing not on presenting Christ crucified as the “heart” of the brand, but a denominational variation. In short, we’ve lost sight of the core principle of the brand and focused too much on differentiating on levels that ultimately the “customer” doesn’t find meaningful.

Tommy Hilfiger

Remember when the Tommy Hilfiger logo was as recognizable and omnipresent as Nike? Tommy jeans were absolutely “must-haves” in American wardrobes. Boosted by over a decade of brand dominance and recognition, Hilfiger saw its shares spike at $40/share in 1999. By 2006, Hilfiger sold his company for $16/share. What happened?

Tommy Hilfiger told his people to “push the envelope.” They wanted to be first in every trend. In the process, they overdid their trend-setting and lost their customers.

Probably their biggest mistake was jettisoning their trademark logo, which in Hilfiger’s case was THE core value of the brand. It’s ultimately what the customer paid for.

Apax, the company Hilfiger sold his brand to, wisely went “back to basics” and re-instituted the logo. Apax sold the brand to Philips-Van Heusen in 2010 for almost twice what they paid for it. (Source: “Brand Failures” by Matt Haig, 2003)

The Lesson for Churches

Awareness, identity and trust are all intertwined. In an effort to be “trendy” don’t sell out your core values.

Go to your local church. How prominent is the cross? How prominent is the message of the cross in that church’s pulpit, website and literature? Most importantly, do its people live out the message of the cross?

The cross of Christ is arguably the most iconic “logo” in the history of the world. The good news associated with that message is “the word” (logos) that the Apostles spread throughout the ancient world.

I’m not here to cast indictments on any “brand” of Christianity today, and this is not to promote “icon worship” but I will ask these questions. Are you and the leaders in your church ready to honestly answer them?

Are there other doctrines or traditions that have overshadowed the cross in your church’s “branding” of Christianity? Have they become the “core values” of the brand rather than the cross?

In pursuit of being “trendy” has your church lost its emphasis on the message of the cross?

Do the people you serve in your community recognize you as “people of the cross”?