How to Build Your Marketing on a Biblical Foundation
This article is an introduction to a new book, Lessons from a Prodigal Marketer: How to Build Your Marketing on a Biblical Foundation, by Roy Herr. To learn more about the book, see the associated ad.
If you’re in business in the 21st century, you need to market. And it usually takes more than just pounding a sign in your yard.
But many of us feel some discomfort about marketing and don’t know how to reconcile it with our faith. It is good to feel cautious because marketing is powerful. Empty promises destroy trust and leave disappointments in their wake. People try to satisfy their desires with things, and marketing often fuels that idolatry.
Is there a better way? Does God have anything to say about marketing?
Would Jesus be a marketer?
Maybe that question feels irrelevant to you.
We could try this question instead: Is God pleased with me as a marketer? Relevant? Yes, very relevant.
Much of the marketing we see today lacks integrity. Empty words offer false hopes, promising meaning and fulfillment that cannot be found in owning or using a product. Marketers, along with their comrades in the sales department, are seen as slick and untrusty. Marketing drives consumerism and promotes materialism.
Thoughtful Christians may wonder if marketing is inherently wrong. Maybe you have considered some of the following questions.
- Isn’t it proud to make grand statements about your products and draw attention to your business?
- Isn’t it poor stewardship to waste money on expensive marketing that may or may not offer a return?
- Is marketing simply a necessary evil in today’s business environment?
- Is marketing a legitimate occupation for a Christian?
- Is it even possible to market in a way that honors God?
- Can marketers ply their craft in a way that stems the tide of consumerism and decadence?
- Is it possible for marketing to be a genuine blessing to people, something that truly benefits society?
These questions seem complex and multi-dimensional. No doubt you, like me and many other sincere Christians in business, have wrestled with questions like these over the years. The purpose of this book is not to answer all the questions. Rather, it is to discuss relevant biblical principles and inspire healthy dialogue in the Christian business community.
Introducing the greatest commandments
I believe that marketing can be an honorable profession for a Christian. I had better believe it because I have been working in marketing for over 25 years! However, I deeply regret that the first half of those years were spent more like a prodigal in the world’s marketing pig pen than like a faithful son in the Father’s House. Even though I was a born-again Christian, my vain husks of selfishness, pride, and ego drove me to violate biblical principles many times.
Jesus is the faithful Son whose love for the Father guided His interactions with people. When Jesus walked this earth, He was always unselfish and kept his listeners’ best interests at heart. He asked questions that piqued their interest. He told them stories. He educated them. He showed people their need and offered them a choice. He brought them to a place of decision. How can we use this example of Jesus in modern marketing?
Jesus taught us the two greatest commandments: love God with all your heart and love others as yourself. Love is the acid test of marketing. When we love God first with everything that we are, He straightens out our priorities, enabling us to treat others according to Jesus’ example. Practicing the Golden Rule in our marketing pleases God and blesses others.
Husks in the pig pen
There’s no doubt about it; marketing is powerful. We don’t need to look far for marketing with empty promises that destroy trust and leave disappointments in their wake. This vain marketing husk comes from the pig pen of the world. Advertisements abound with overcommitments to deliver happiness, personal fulfillment, and success in a box.
Grayson Pope says this, “Marketing originated out of the need to let the public know about a product or service that one truly believed in. Today, however, much of marketing has become an art form of trying to seduce the public into thinking they can’t be happy without a particular good or service.”
As Christians, we know that the deepest needs of the human heart are only satisfied by God’s work of grace within us. The latest invention of men to tickle our senses will at best be a temporary distraction from our deepest pain and loneliness. At worst, these things can become idols that we passionately serve at the expense of our relationship with God and our loved ones. This is certainly very destructive.
For centuries the devil has been using the husks of worldly marketing to twist people’s values and beliefs. From the ancient messages inscribed on buildings in the Roman Empire promoting gladiator shows and brothels to the mass media consumer advertising of newspapers, radio, and television of the 20th century, the devil’s lies have increasingly brought cultural degeneration. This influence continues to escalate in today’s world of big business, online marketing, social media, and the seemingly ever-present smartphone.
What are we to do? Are business and marketing inherently evil? Is work itself a part of the curse? It’s to the Creation story that we now turn to look at the origin of work in God’s good earth.
Where in the world did work come from?
God created the world through His Word. Planets spun, the heavens sang with stars, and the whole earth spilled over with His glory. He formed humans from dust, but He made us like Himself, in His image. God declared the entire work “very good.”
God is a worker. God built work into His very good design from the beginning. As people created in His image, He designed us to work as well. Adam and Eve’s assignment was to steward the earth and its resources. That is our assignment, too. In Genesis 1:29-31, Moses writes:
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
In the sinless perfection of the Garden of Eden, work was present in all its glory, joy, and fulfillment.
Have you ever wondered why God created work? I have. As a boy, I asked my mom, “Why do I have to pull the weeds?” “Why must I dry the dishes?” “Why do we have to work?” Now I’m asking it again, although possibly from a slightly different perspective. I say “possibly” because the core of the question might still be the same. My parents saw to it that I learned to enjoy working hard. So I’m no longer complaining about the need to work. But I’m still asking about its underlying purpose.
Couldn’t God have created an existence for us that didn’t require work? The fruit would automatically grow perfectly for us to reach from the closest branch on our morning stroll. The wheat would yield fully baked breakfast bagels complete with cream cheese spread by a bird. A cute little fountain of orange juice would always be arching from a nearby rock ready for our lips to draw in. I’m quite certain God could have done this. But this isn’t God’s design.
Instead, God created a world of work. Why?
We should be very careful in assigning motives to God. He is incomprehensible. We see through a glass darkly. We can be confident though, that work was created with our best interest at heart.
Imagine with me for a moment: a world without work. What would change? How might this affect your relationship with God? How would this affect your relationships with other people?
Work is a part of our existence that calls us to dependence on God and healthy interdependence on one another. Work invites collaboration and relationship. Work is a platform for developing community. Think about times you have spent working together as a family, with a group of friends, or with your team on the job. Think about God’s faithfulness in germinating the seed you planted and giving it sunshine and rain. There is bonding and togetherness that happens when we choose to unite our efforts in a work project.
Would you agree that a benefit of work, maybe even the primary benefit, is the opportunity to build relationships?
The Fall
But Adam and Eve sinned, and all their children followed suit. The human family distorts the gift of work in many different ways.
- Work becomes an idol, the thing that gives us our identity.
- We greedily use what we earn. We build our own empires.
- We forget that God gave us what we have, thinking we earned it through our good sense and our own effort.
- We despise work, become lazy, and bury our talent in the ground. (See Matt. 25:14-30)
Rather than using work to build relationships, our selfishness makes it a divisive force that erodes our relationship with God and with others.
The hope of our calling
However, the commission hasn’t changed. God still calls us to exercise dominion over His creation. He still wants us to dress and keep the earth and to multiply its resources to provide for ourselves and others.
Ephesians 4:28 instructs us, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” This verse is often applied to charitable giving–and rightly so. Shouldn’t it also characterize our work and business transactions? The customer should have more value after the transaction than before. In that way, we work to give to the customer.
We need the blood of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to transform our work into a ministry of redemption. When Christians transact business honorably with love and respect for vendors, customers, and coworkers, the Light of the World shines brightly. Relationships are strengthened. Trust is built. Wandering prodigals get a glimpse of hope.
Relationships are the fundamentals
Remember again the two greatest commandments which fulfill the law: Love God and love your neighbor. At its core then, our work in the world is centered on relationships: our relationship with God and our relationships with other people.
Business thrives on relationships, and marketing is the communication that fuels those relationships. Through marketing, we create new relationships. Through business, we touch the lives of people whom we would otherwise never encounter. It’s also through continued marketing communication that we nourish those relationships.
As Christian marketers living in a fallen world, we offer our work to bring blessings to other people’s lives and extend genuine relationships to them.
Marketing fit for the Father’s House
When Jesus cleansed the temple, He said, “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). Would Jesus throw your business out of His house? The Father’s House is a place of worship. Is your work an act of worship or an act of selfish robbery?
Jesus and the Bible are relevant to marketing in the 21st century. It’s our relationship with Jesus, the Holy Word, that fills us with reverent fear about the words we use in our marketing. It is imperative that we keep a fresh and living connection with the Word through regular Bible reading, prayer, and relationships with other Christians. We should invite the Holy Spirit to guide our methods and filter our messages.
The Father invites all prodigal marketers to return to a deeper relationship with Him. In the Father’s House, there is love and respect for other people. This is the opposite of the husks of worldly marketing. With love as the foundation, this book discusses five biblical principles to guide your marketing so your business can honor God and bless others.
- Grayson Pope, “The Dilemma of Christian Marketing – Ekstasis Magazine,” EKSTASIS, January 13, 2021, https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/kingdom-meets-culture/2019/10/14/the-dilemma-of-christian-marketing?rq=Grayson.
