providing comforting support. These notices were inconsistent with what the brand claimed to stand for, and this was exceptionally irritating to the pharmacists. I worked with accounting to change the language in all the notices they sent to be consistent with the values of the brand. Over time, the pharmacists were no longer offended and became strong proponents of the brand.
A Catholic organization that takes brand seriously is the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. FOCUS trains young men and women just out of college to be missionaries on university campuses. One thing that will strike you when you meet a FOCUS missionary is his or her deep joy. Every single one of them demonstrates joy from faith, from God, and from this gift of life. Joy is hard to teach, as are many values and attitudes. FOCUS missionaries are hired in part for this attitude, as well as for their deep faith.
To hire for an attitude, you have to know what attitude or value you are seeking, which is where understanding your brand comes into play. FOCUS understands a few things about its brand:
1. Joy is central to the expression of the Catholic faith and, therefore, central to the role of their missionaries.
2. Members of FOCUS communicate the FOCUS brand and the call of the Gospel in how they approach and live their lives.
FOCUS recognizes that everyone in the organization plays a role in owning and expressing the brand. Each member of the organization is a part of the same body. At the same time, they recognize that their organization is part of the Body of Christ.
For Reflection
How do you express brand ownership as a member of the Body of Christ?
Do you see yourself as having an integral role in promoting the brand, especially if you work for a faith-based organization? Or do you sit back and let others lead the charge?
Truth 5
To Communicate Well, Less is More
“Better is a little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked.”
— PSALM 37:16
Have you ever wondered whether you should just do more when it comes to communications? If only you posted more on social media, sent more email marketing, planned more fundraising, more advertising, more promotions, more, more, more. It doesn’t help that our society tells us that “more” is the answer to everything.
But what if I told you that the answer to achieving success is actually communicating less? It’s true. When it comes to marketing, less is often more — much more. The problem with always doing more, more, more in communications is confusion and lack of focus. It is better to do a few things really well than many things poorly.
We see this in the business world quite a bit. Companies do well and then think their opportunity for further growth is to market differently or to communicate new messages. The secular world abounds with companies that, in the course of trying to communicate more, simply did damage to an already strong brand. Yahoo tried to redesign its logo in 2013 to freshen up the brand. They spent thirty days introducing various new logo options to their followers until the big unveiling of the new logo. An audible sigh went up in the marketing world when the new logo was released. It was not all that different. More importantly, Yahoo irritated its followers by pestering them with thirty different options over the course of thirty days. More communication was just that — more — and it caused more harm than good to the Yahoo brand at that time.
The fact that less is indeed more is a hard corporate lesson to learn. This lesson applies to many aspects of a ministry, parish, or religious organization. More communication, more emails, and more social media are often simply more. Challenge yourself with this question: what is your core message? What really needs to be shared? Are you communicating a lot simply to say you are doing so? Or are your messages clear and making a difference for those you want to reach?
Several women’s religious orders provide an unfortunate example of how more is simply more. Several of the orders facing the fastest decline are hesitant to state their exact purpose. They indicate that they are serving social justice, which is outstanding, of course, but too broad. Are they serving the environment, the poor, the disenfranchised, education, sex trafficking, housing, impoverished nations? The list of possible activities is long, and they talk about all these options on their websites and in social media. These religious orders struggle to attract vocations, due in large part to the confusion caused by seeking to do more. They share a little of everything, and their fundamental message gets lost.
One such religious order shared with me that sisters are free to work for and support anything they see as a social justice issue. While the premise is noble, the result is that this order is not known or understood for anything in particular. Young women considering a vocation cannot figure out how they might fit in, what they would actually do, or how they would participate in social justice. With so many options, they simply walked away to another order with a distinct message — one doing less, but with greater clarity.
Many young women considering religious vocations seem to be turning to orders such as the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This order is newer, having been founded in 1997, and has more than 138 sisters as of this writing. Part of the attraction is the clarity and focus of their mission. Their website states, “Our apostolate follows upon preaching and teaching the Truth in order to gain souls for the Kingdom of Christ.” They have a special devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, and to the Eucharist, and they make it clear that their apostolate flows from their prayer. They communicate well, and their message is direct; the results are clear.
This challenge of less is more plays out in marketing and communication constantly. When you do more social media or more email marketing, or more of anything, there is a natural inclination to change the message a bit. We don’t want people to be bored or to get tired of what we say, so we shift it a little here and there. The next thing you know, those little shifts end up accumulating, and before long your message is off point.
More creates confusion. More is not necessarily clear. As written so superbly in the Book of Psalms (37:16), “better is a little that the righteous has.” The solution is to strive for much and achieve that by doing less.
For Reflection
How would you define the core purpose of your organization or parish?
How does the push to do more distract you from your primary objectives?
Truth 6
A Brand is a Promise
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”
— MATTHEW 23:25–28
A brand is fundamentally a promise that you as marketers, as communicators, are making to a consumer. As a promise, it has two parts: performance and perception. In the marketing world, we create perceptions that convey our promise. We then honor those commitments by what we do — our performance. Considered in light of the above verse from the Gospel of Matthew, perception can be likened to the outside of the cup. Performance
