Benedict XVI Tackles Brand Development

Pope Poses Eternal Question: Who’s the Target Market?

Haven't We Seen This Positioning Before?

We’re only days into the new papacy, and already Benedict XVI is honing the Church’s positioning and strategy. And have you noticed how similar the Vatican strategy is to the Karl Rove strategy?  "Dictatorship of Relativism" is linguistic genius, up there with "Right to Life” as a meme. What a brilliant way to frame the issue: anyone who isn’t a doctrinal hard-liner is now cast as a wayward westerner, rolling his own morality, with no reliable sense of good and evil, and quite possibly a secular humanist with no need for God. This is up there with Rove implying that all Democrats are faith-free people.

Both Bush and Benedict XVI are playing to a very conservative base. Difference is, if you live in a democracy and you’re outvoted you still gotta obey the law. If the President gets a tax passed, you pay. If gay marriage is illegal, gays don't get married. If conservative judges get appointed, we all get judged conservatively. In religion, when folks get fed up they actually have the option not to go to church, or ignore teachings, or more actively, change sects or religions. Just ask Martin Luther. Ratzinger would prefer to have fewer, but more devout followers.

This is an accepted brand strategy, but implementing it is tricky and I’m not sure it’s the best way to manage an already huge, mass-brand religion.  It certainly doesn’t look like a growth strategy.  I’ve been around this mass/targeted market issue my whole career, and since the new pope hasn’t appointed his deputies yet, I figure I have a responsibility to chime in.

Here are three examples for my friends in the Vatican:

1) When I ran enterprise marketing at Apple in the late 80’s we built expensive high margin products for enthusiasts . We liked catering to the true believers; senior management disdained cutting prices and making it easer for the masses to get our products. (I could tell you just what Jean Louis Gassee, head of products said about going mass, but we’re supposed to keep secret what happened in the conclave.) We were a hell of a cult, but we also lost share very quickly to Microsoft and Windows which offered their form of the WYSIWYG gospel on a much more approachable platform. More recently, Steve Jobs returned and made the Apple brand so appealing and cool that people are happy to convert back even if it means adopting some of the orthodoxy that comes with being an Apple enthusiast. But this strategy only works if you give the customer a product that is insanely great and that they enthusiastically embrace and want to share with others.

2) My grandfather Modie Spiegel ran the family business, Spiegel Catalog, for most of the 20th century. He sold to a big, middle class customer base and offered credit to practically anyone. The business grew like hell. (Ok scratch hell, it grew big. The Pope is in a nearby paragraph, and under the new rules I’m not gonna get any closer to blasphemy than I have to).  But by the 1970’s the middle class had K-Mart and lots of local shopping options so sales and especially profits worsened.  The masses were not an especially appealing market, so when my Uncle Ted Spiegel took over marketing, he targeted the company at well-heeled working woman who didn’t have time to shop. He eliminated millions of customers, pruned the list and made the place more profitable.  This was a gutsy thing to do, but he was compensated on profit, not absolute numbers of customers, so he did the right thing. In the world today, you’d think the pope would want more followers, more priests, and an easier to follow religion. That’s what grows. Instead he’s opting for the tougher strategy of going for a more elite, “better” customer base. This is a gutsy, admirable strategy. But it also seems like a big risk and big change for a church that once engaged in crusades and has supported missionaries and conversions throughout history.

3) I recently served as President of Gloss.com, the online cosmetic retailer formed by Estee Lauder, Chanel and Clairns. These are prestige cosmetics companies. They sell expensive color and skin care products at a high price through exclusive department store channels. For example, Lauder sells an 8 oz jar of Re-Nutriv cream for $1000.00; yet you can buy a skin cream for just a few dollars from mass brand L’Oreal. This works great for brands like Estee Lauder and Chanel that have cultivated rarified exclusivity for half a century.  If the pope starts focusing the Church on a more exclusive following, he should ask, “Is that what our brand is about?”  I’d suggest than any movement that’s has 1.06 billion followers and has been perusing a channel expansion and growth strategy for 20 centuries is a probably a mass brand, should celebrate mass, and should not get too hung up on making itself more exclusive.

Yet here we seem to have a pope who is going for a brand that is more committed and orthodox; one that plays to the base. So from a marketing strategy perspective, this would seem to create an opening for an alternative for the many Catholics (especially in Europe and the US) who may not want this. The Cardinals seem to have picked a Western European pope specifically because they thought that liberalism in Europewas the big issue to deal with. I’m a Jew, so I’m not a big expert on how less orthodox forms of Catholicism get started and spread (although the reform dilution of Judaism sure was a big theme over the last century in our faith), but this seems like a perfect set up for a market share battle between an inflexible incumbent brand and a challenger that’s designed around customer desires. (And I suspect the incumbent brand would probably think that “customer desire” itself is a sin!)

As I pointed out in my last post, the papacy is really not about listening. And that’s not a complaint: there is something amazing and eternal about an institution that changes over centuries and is not driven by whim! But on the other hand, if you have a movement that’s committed to not listening, and an alternative that is, you gotta think that the team that listens might score some points. Especially in an interconnected zero-friction global village kinda world. So maybe religion is subject to the rules of cluetrain after all!

Comments

[Chris Hodel]

A friend told me of your blog. I thought I'd come take a look. Interesting reading.

Apple is not God. One can change Apple to be more appealing to the customer, but you can't Change God. What can be changed is how the Faith is presented, and it can be improved.

Interesting that you profess that Benedict XVI would prefer fewer but more devout Catholics. I'm quite certain that he would much prefer greater numbers of more devout Catholics.

I don't know what knowledge you have of Benedict XVI but it seems that you judge him to be "extreme" and "doctrinaire". My reading of him produces an image of a patient, humble, extremely modest man, not at all Teutonic or harsh.

The product is God, the customers are all humans that ever were or will be. He must be presented as He is to those who are as they are. The challenge is in the fact that we are fallable, willfull, self-centered, in other words, human.

The Church Listens, but it's desire is to hear Truth.

[Bob Kaufman]

Chris makes an interesting point.

As we used to say at Bain, we may have a business definition problem. Is the Pope in the business of interpreting truth, or is he in the business of amassing followers?

Why do people go to church? It's probably to find truth and the word of God. If that's NOT what they're after, then they probably have better things to do on a Sunday morning. So paradoxically, he may be providing a better product to the faithful by not watering down his message.

However, I'm a big believer that truth encompasses tolerance, understanding, and plurality. Anyone who claims to be interpreting "Truth" had better see that we all see God in our own way. The real question is whether the pope feels he has a monopoly on God's word, or whether other religions also have valid interpretations of God's Truth. This Pope isn't supposed to represent Jews or Muslims, just Catholics. So he can be as purist as he wants to be, as long as he's not judging the customers of other market segments.

[elise]

Interesting that yesterday's NYTimes headline reads, "Benedict XVI promises dialog and reconciliation". (Only in the paper version, not the online version.

The truth is that the biggest growing market for Catholicism is in Africa and Latin America. There the main issues are ones of social justice, not abortion, birth control, euthanasia, divorce. The Vatican's main competition in Africa is Islam, in Latin America it is the evangelical Christians. So from a market growth perspective, the Vatican is going to get more new members from these markets than from the stagnant Western markets.

I think that at one level of personal development people really really want to believe in the absolute - they want to cling onto something solid. Both Islam and E-C are way more fundamentalist than Catholicism. If you look at the core teachings of the Catholic church you'll see where a lot of the attitudes of the Vatican come from. The West has become more secular. It has embraced relativism. The church emphasizes God over all. The number one commandment is to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind and being. So, they are going to press for more absolutism in the face of Western secularism.

[Reg]

You have some interesting points. Remember though that the reformation occurred because 'the brand' had become watered down. Luther's call was to restore the church to its historical beliefs. The reformation occurred partly becuase the church was not willing to allow itself to be renewed. The rise of German nationalism was another cause.

Also, in today's world the Catholic Church has major competition from the 'evangelical brand'. In Guatemala 25% of the people have switched brands. Why do they switch. They see a vitality of faith they are not seeing in their existing brand.

This is what the previous pope and the new pope are trying to deal with.

There brand has been too liberal and weak and they are attempting to return to the heart of their faith (brand).

That is my take.

[Dan Guy]

I think that Pope Benedict XVI believes that the best way to grow the brand is to increase quality. This means going to the factories which are rolling out product that does not meet minimum standards of quality and bringing them up to standards or shutting them down entirely. It also means shutting down product lines which do not fit with the overall company direction, and which may have proven distracting to the public.

[CountvonCarstein]

I have to disagree with your statement that "Ratzinger would prefer to have fewer, but more devout followers." If that were true, he would start excommunicating folks left and right. Given the church's response to the sexual scandals, I just don't see that happening.

[Lisa]

Interesting information about Gloss.Com -- we stock some Estee Lauder brands (Darphin is our main one, which they recently took over), and we're facing a growing body of "elite consumers" that order the products online at discount rates from grey/black market retailers.

The quality of service (meaning professional skincare recommendation) that clients receive is probably reduced to near nothing on a black market transaction, but the bottom line is, given an internet connection, Gloss.com is just as accessible as a "poor source."

Our internet-connected clients are increasingly revising and downgrading their notion of prestige skin care, and that's eroded our profits and goodwill.

[jack]

Great post. Thanks.

[sara]

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