Considering the Language of Church Marketing Planning

The discipline of marketing has developed a rich vocabulary over the years to describe processes, facilitate planning, and enable tracking and measuring. A deep set of terms enables marketers to track everything from consumer sentiment to number of times you saw that billboard on the highway.

So what role do the terms of Business World play in the planning processes of Church World?

The thing about words is that they carry semantic freight from context to context. It’s difficult for our minds to differentiate between the current context and most common context for a given word.

For example, what do you think of when you read “Twitter?” What if you’re discussing bird watching and someone mentions a bird tweeting?  If you’re involved with social media at all, chances are your perceptions will be colored by your experiences.

Certainly some phrases lose much of their original meaning over time (like if someone is “point man” on a project, I doubt many people envision the jungles of Vietnam), but marketing terms are much more frequent and recent.

What happens when churches begin defining target audiences and developing their unique selling proposition?  What happens when they begin to develop a pricing strategy and attempt to measure ROI on their different outreach efforts?

Because our choice of language affects our perception, ministry leaders must move towards an intentional vocabulary when defining marketing activities for the church.

Is it easy to appropriate existing terminology?  Yes, but the path of least resistance is rarely the most fruitful course.

Do I have a set of terms ready for you to use? Not yet (didn’t I just say I’m not taking the easy route?).