All Marketers are Liars

Disclaimer: I received this book free as part of the bzzzagent program. That is because I love books so much and I’d go broke if I bought all the ones I wanted to read. The following should be taken with a grain of salt since I am very easily bought off by books of any type. You should try buying me off with books too if you’d like. During our last residency, we all brought three ads to class and spent a few hours discussing them. It was amazing how much we learned by looking at advertising. Very rarely is the product the main feature of any ad. Instead, the ads tell us a story, and if that story connects with us, we tend to like the product too. The thing is, so many of the stories that the ads tell us are false. Nobody ever stops to analyze them long enough to realize this. If the ads actually said, “Buy this watch and you will be as sexy as Diana Krall,” that would be ridiculous. But the story flies under the radar, and most often, we end up buying the story. (And I am still not as sexy as Diana Krall.) You could apply a lot from this, especially about the power of image and story. It turns out that Seth Godin has done a lot of this work in his book All Marketers Are Liars. Godin writes about marketing, but what he is talking about applies to the spread of any idea. I’m thinking about this not in terms of how to market the church better, but in terms of our awareness of the stories we tell ourselves. Do most of us really understand the stories we believe? Have we examined the stories we use to explain our worlds? Most of praxis is about which story we choose. I’m reading this book – and I think it will ultimately give me a lot to think about in terms of faith. (Godin has started a blog about the book as well.)