Over the last few years there has been a surge in the Marketing of Atheism, led pricipally by The God Delusion author, Richard Dawkins.
There is a lot, as marketeers that we can learn from this.
It is a very modern, 360 degree campaign including:
- A (very press worthy) atheist summer camp for kids (more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5674934/Richard-Dawkins-launches-childrens-summer-camp-for-atheists.html)
- A high profile (and very press worthy – this picture was from the Daily Mail) bus advertising campaign letting the public know that there porbably is no God, so they should stop worrying and enjoy life
- Facebook groups with over 4,000 followers
- A youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/richarddawkinsdotnet
- TV Shows, such as channel 4’s ‘Faith & Belief’
- Talks on ted.com
- Twitter https://twitter.com/richarddawkins with over 17,ooo followers
And a whole lot more.
This campaign has had a lot of success and from a marketing perspective it is not hard to see why; a true cross-media campaign with a consistent message – “God does not exist. Science (and evolution) is proven, so you stop stop believing in God and put your faith in science” – and things that get people and the press talking.
The cynical amongst you may think that this is even cleverer than a good campaign to market atheism, and is in fact an amazing campaign to sell books, but for the sake of this I am going to take Richard Dawkin’s at his word in the ted.com talk – that he wants to promote ‘Militant Atheism’.
Taking the promotion of ‘Militant Atheism’ as the campaign goal I would like to point out where I think that Richard Dawkins could do better. The reason for this is not any desire to promote atheism, it just shows a very good example of how, in-spite of great media campaign the creative message can be improved to get better results.
There are 2 things that Richard Dawkins is doing wrong from a marketing perspective:
1) Telling people that they are wrong
2) Talking about the product, not the benefits
1. Telling people they are wrong
No one likes to be told that they are wrong and it is a bad way to convince anyone of anything. Taking the atheism example, people believe in God, most of them always have and you telling them they are wrong and proving they are wrong is not going to convince them because they will always have an answer for it, usually along the lines of ‘you can’t prove God doesn’t exist’ – which is a ridiculous argument, but people will stick by it.
So what should you do? The best thing to do is to tell people that they are right to believe in God.
That may sound counter-intuitive, but telling someone that they are right to believe in God is not the same thing as telling someone that God exists. The next step is to prove from a scientific perspective why they believe in God. There are evolutionary benefits to believing in God; people who share a belief can be more easily controlled and led – This can lead to many evolutionary advantages, such as fighting together, building together etc. Therefore people who are genetically predisposed to believing in God would be more likely to survive and pass on the ‘believing gene’ to others.
Similarly many people believe that God helped them through an event/ recovery from an injury etc. These people have managed to use their belief to dig deeper within themselves. You cannot tell these people that there is no God, because they have proof (their recovery). To convince these people the best way would be to do some research into “The God Placebo effect” and explain to them that it was their belief that helped them, not the existence of what they believe in
If I were Richard Dawkins I would make the next step of my campaign “The Evolution of God” and say to people ‘You are right to believe in God, but let me explain to you why you do believe in God’ by explaining to people that their belief in God is an evolutionary trait to ensure survival you are helping them to understand that there is a difference between believing in something and it existing and you can explain how evolution does work, you nudge them in the right direction and then they can make up their minds with the facts presented in a “you’re right” not a “you’re wrong” way.
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?
Here is a very simple example:
You are launching a new brand of health supplement “Product Q” there is already a market leader in the category “Product B”.
What you want to do it tell everyone “You are wrong for buying Product B, you should buy our Product Q instead. It’s better”, but this is not very believable, because you can be sure that the makers of Product B will say that that is better and you are giving consumers no reason to believe you over them.
Instead you could say “Product B is a really good product, we know it must be good because it has some of the same active ingredients as our product, Product Q. However our product also has other ingredients such as xxx, xxx and xxx, that offer the following benefits….”
This way you are not telling customers that they are wrong to buy Product B, you in fact are telling them they were right to buy it, but by educating them you get them to realise that they would be ‘more right’ to buy Product Q, your product.
(I do appreciate the slight irony that this article is about what the Athesist marketeers are doing wrong, but I am not necessarily trying to convince them to do anything)
2. Talking about the products, not the benefits
Also known as ’selling the steak, not the sizzle’.
This is where a lot of people go wrong. It is not important to tell people about your product, it is important to tell people about what your product can do for them.
In the ‘Marketing Atheism’ example we are being told that God does not exist and science hold the keys to understanding our world. This is a great claim, but is nothing compared to the benefits that are being offered by the competition (organised religion); being part of a community, curing disease, life after death, absolution from sins, 24 virgins in heaven (this one is the product, the benefits are for you to imagine), caring, happiness!!
So what does atheism need to do to get someone to chose Science over Religion? Simply it needs to offer benefits. Let’s say you are selling atheism to a teenager, he already understands a bit about religion and has known about it all his life. He also knows a bit (hopefully) about science through schooling. You can say that he is at an imaginary cross roads, where he could choose to learn more about science. You tell him that ’science holds the keys to understanding our world’ – he doesn’t care. Instead you could tell him that by understanding science he could invent the next ipod and make a fortune, or develop a medicine and save millions of lives, or develop an alternative power source and save the planet whist making a fortune. Now science is competing in benefits with happiness and life after death.
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?
When you know a lot about your product it is very tempting to tell people why it is so good… but they don’t care, they care about what it is good for them.
Taking the health supplements example once again. It is very easy to tell people about all the active ingredients that your product has and this will even work to some people who know about these active ingredients. But for those (the majority) that don’t know about these ingredients they need to know what your product does for them. For example if your supplement thickens hair, you could mention the ingredients and hope people know about them, better than that you could tell them the product makes their hair ticker, even better than that you could show a down-in-the-dumps person loosing their hair, then the same person with think hair looking happy – so you go from selling ingredients to selling happiness, and everyone wants happiness!!
I hope you have enjoyed this article as a very roundabout way of explaining 2 very common errors that you can see in marketing campaigns… and if you do know anyone involved in the ‘marketing’ of religion or atheism, please pass on to them.
