Coca-Cola and the Profits of Religion

Is the pendulum swinging…again?

You don’t have to look far to see that as a society, we tend to be overly committed, over extended, overly tired, and over stimulated. We are in a constant commercial, complete with 30-second attention spans. (This is only confirmed by the fact that I am working on this article in the waiting room of my wife’s obstetrician waiting to find out the sex of our first child.)

Many corporations are now realizing that their quick flashing, highly colorful marketing campaigns are fizzling out in effectiveness. For the last 20 years the “MTV way” of fast cutting, use of computer generated images, and loud eccentric television hosts was the mark.

And thus, the appearance of the new Coca-Cola can.

I recently read an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) that said Coca-Cola is redesigning their cans and working to eliminate clutter for consumers. One marketing director for Coke said the new can is less about nostalgia than about getting the attention of time-pressured consumers. “What you see is companies really getting rid of clutter and getting rid of confusion,” says chief marketing officer Katie Bayne.(1)

Although I’m not old enough to remember one of the most successful ad campaigns in automobile history, I’ve used the example many times. In an age when the station wagon reigned supreme, Volkswagon came out with a simple ad that caught the eye of millions.

Think Small.

That’s it. VW placed ads in newspapers and magazines across the country, and in the face of traditional marketing decided “to lead the way into the promised land of the new creativity. Simplicity was proving to be a virtue and relevance a far more powerful persuader than empty flights of fancy.”(2)

The momentum always follows the pendulum…

On the exact same front page of the AJC, another article appeared with the first line reading, “Jesus is a big and growing industry.” “I think in Western society there is a growing hunger for things that provide meaning, beauty and significance in life,” says Jim Seybert, a consultant for secular companies investing in religious markets. Jesus is now a $4.6 billion dollar industry.(3)

So it appears that Coca-Cola is about simplifying and de-cluttering our precious mind-share, and the Jesus industry is booming because consumers are flocking the stores to buy every music CD, book and magazine, apparently because some say we’re finally producing a product worth buying, though many would still argue this. Don’t get me wrong. I own the entire Donald Miller collection, but I’m still like most of the West in that I have no time to read them.

We as a society are hungry for meaning and purpose; not bells and whistles and programs and events and the next best thing. Meaning; not doing church (little “c”) activities, but being the Church (big “c”), for those of us who are the Church.

My best friend Tim runs a website and blog called Letters From Leavers where people can blog as to why they’ve left any form of Christian community. It seems the majority of leavers were wounded by people and relationships, not the lack of their minds’ market share.

Could it be that most churches (little “c”) are still investing way too much money and time in being just another great flashy empire, and not enough in relationships and people?

For me, it has always been a painful truth when I hear it said (I often say it myself) that the church is behind the times and culturally slow. And I wonder where the church is heading…(4)

We as the church need to wake up. Corporate America is beating us at our game! Evangelism has now become synonymous with “zealot,” rather than “committed to discipleship.” I find it humorous (and quite sad) that in so many ways, corporations are “evangelizing” even better than the church.

It’s true. My friend got the I-phone within a few days of its release. He called me (on his new phone) and told me all the amazing things about it that I hadn’t previously heard about. I quickly had I-phone envy.

When I bought my first Mac, I called everyone I knew, and told them what a far superior genius of a machine it was. I called all of my “PC” friends and rubbed it in that I now was a “Mac Guy” and I created arguments nearly equal to the Baptists and the Charismatics. I was a new convert, and a darn good evangelist of the product.

Google hired a man named Vint “Father of the Internet” Cerf, whose sole (soul?) purpose was “helping people understand—both inside and outside of Google—Google’s potential.”(5) Sounds a lot like evangelism to me.

Please hear me out, I love the church and being the Church. I’m just concerned that the church will be figuring this out 15 years from now, on the heels of when the trend changes again. People are the church, not the MTV, rock concert production we spend so much time planning. To be honest, my fear is that we’ll be seeing more and more letters from leavers, rather than changed lives.

And it turns out that we’re having a boy…

1. Duane D. Stanford, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Coke honors ‘roots’ with new can, July 11, 2007
2. http://www.cheshiregroup.com/vw1960.html
3. Christopher Quinn, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Profits of religion, July 11, 2007
4. A good read about this idea of a simple church is a book called Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples by Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger
5. James Pethokoukis, U.S. News & World Report, Spreading the Word: Corporate evangelists recruit customers who love to create buzz about a product, November 27, 2005