Tim Challies has an excellent post on the marketing technique behind The Purpose Driven Life. The book was written by a guy in the US who is the main minister at a mega-church.

Rick Warren’s book was wildly successful, not because it’s a particularly good book, or even a theologically sound one. It was successful because of the technique of Zondervan’s marketer, Greg Stielstra.

His technique flew under the conventional radar of traditional marketing.

He calls his marketing strategy Pryomarketing. It is aptly named. Consumers are the fuel (or suckers - whichever you prefer).

Stielstra is putting his own book out on his technique in June. Challies breaks down the four points: gather the driest tinder, stike the match, fan the flames and gather the coals.

This four-part approach, which is cyclical in nature, reveals the secret behind the success of The Purpose Driven Life. It all comes down to a particularly brilliant marketing solution. It is brilliant, because while Stielstra does not say so, there are clearly three factors that he takes advantage of within the church:

Naivety. This approach dupes Christians into becoming marketers, not for a book, but for a marketing approach, and ultimately for a profit-driven corporation. This marketing approach is supposed to work as easily with any product as with what is a supposedly-biblical book. There is nothing inherently Christian about the approach and it has no biblical basis.

Ignorance. This approach also benefited from the ignorance of evangelical Christians, that they were not able to see beyond the marketing and see a book that was, in many places, clearly unbiblical and which said little that had not already been said before, either by Christian or secular writers. Were Christians properly-educated in the Scriptures, this approach would fall flat.

Pragmatism. This approach is, at its heart, pragmatic. This is the charge that has long been levelled at the Church Growth Movement, that success becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth rather than the Word of God. In a sense all marketing is pragmatic, especially when it is designed to sell a product.

In a consumer driven society with credit easily available and a fair amount of disposable income, we don’t always know the difference between our wants and our needs. And newer, refined marketing techniques such as pyro and guerrilla marketing count on that ignorance. I think the marketing techniques count on people’s insecurity - their fear of being left out, left behind, not accepted. The blurring of lines between needs and wants is deliberate when targeting potential consumers.

Jordon Cooper links up to Business Week’s article Earthly Empires, the marketing of churches.

So successful are some evangelicals that they’re opening up branches like so many new Home Depots or Subways. This year, the 16.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention plans to “plant” 1,800 new churches using by-the-book niche-marketing tactics. “We have cowboy churches for people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle churches aimed at bikers,” says Martin King, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board.