A while back, I had a nice chat with the fine folks of the St. Cloud State University Secular Student Alliance. We talked about the marketing of secularism. They were a fun crowd. Patrick Mefford was kind enough to write a review. He says:
This past Tuesday (26th of Feb), my local SSA group had a guest speaker from the SIN blog network; the very informative Beth from Incongruent Elements. Her topic? Marketing. While usually not a topic that perks my interest, I found the whole presentation to be fascinating.
That’s because marketing is fascinating. Anything that can persuade people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t… who wouldn’t find the topic intriguing? 🙂
Beth’s presentation reminded me about how it seems honesty is always demanded and assumed in personal relations, but how quickly that demand is forgotten when it comes to effective market strategizing. I don’t mean to say that Beth was teaching us how to be dishonest to get what we want, but it struck me as interesting that almost everyone feels at least complacent with the fact that we are targeted daily by savvy advertisers who use subtle and not-so-subtle psychological manipulation, but play a different tune when we discover someone specifically in our personal lives doing the exact same thing.
I want to stress that Beth was simply the messenger at this point, she was sharing marketing strategies that worked and wanted us to have them at our disposal. I couldn’t shake a discomfort I had about appealing to people’s unconscious fears and greed to get a foot in the door. It reminded me of Aristotle’s book on rhetoric where he draws a sharp distinction between the practice of rhetoric and dialectic; the former being the art of persuasion and the latter being a strategy of getting at the truth of the matter between two conflicting viewpoints.
That’s true. Never assume honesty. Just because you’re honest, that doesn’t mean your persuader is. It’s funny how trusting most people are and while that’s a good thing, it’s also unfortunate.
Speaking of your discomfort, I often felt uncomfortable during the hey-days of my copywriting career. I had many discussions with my long-suffering husband about the ethics of the products I was selling, the wrongness of persuading people to buy an over priced doo-dad they didn’t need… lots of reasons for discomfort. That’s why I got out of the biz. Persuasion, particularly advertising can get quite smarmy at times.
However, in selling skepticism, I feel this is a very valuable “product” and we don’t have to delve to the dark side to sell. 🙂
Interestingly enough, Beth had numerous examples of Christian organizations and ministries who artfully ply the trade of psychological manipulation to garner money. Her point wasn’t that these ministries are almost indistinguishable from more secular scam artists trying to sell you their real estate strategies, but that we should been keenly aware of how they operate.
This is where Beth’s talk went beyond being informative for me and started becoming more important. She stressed the importance of doing research, of observing these ministries and organizations to see just how they get their message across and what their selling points are, so you can effectively deal with it when the time comes. This deeply resonated with me because trying to understand the rival worldview on its own terms is something I take seriously, but I think most others in the secular/skeptic “movement” often ignore.
I love my swipe file! If you weren’t at the talk, I brought a pile of correspondence (read: junk mail) I’ve received from various Christian organizations. It’s fascinating to read how they invisibly lure readers through their sales pitch. I included pieces from Focus on the Family, Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, and more. They’re pretty slick marketers.
I was quite pleased with Beth’s entire talk, while she probably doesn’t care for my comparison of marketing as psychological manipulation, I found the presentation to be simultaneously informative, entertaining, and important. A hat trick that is hard to hit
Awwww… thanks. I’m glad you found it informative. Also, while it may not appear so on the surface, the subject matter itself is exceedingly entertaining. As for important: effective marketing is probably the one element missing from many skeptic’s correspondence. That’s too bad because an important message that doesn’t get attention creates a very unfortunate situation.
