Creating Emotional Attachments (That Our Guests Don’t Care About)
Join me as I process something in real-time, won’t you? (Why, thank you. Thank you for joining me.)
For all of the church-branded t-shirts and caps and coffee mugs and bumper stickers that we foist upon our first-time guests, how many of those things really mean something to them?
(Full disclosure: I ask this as a guy who leads a team that designed a bag which contains a tumbler, and the tumbler is festooned with our logo and website.)
It’s a nice little gift. But does it spark any sense of attachment for a guest who otherwise has none?
A few months ago I visited a church that handed out a different kind of tumbler. This one had their city’s skyline (which was attractive). It had one word on it (which was not the name of the church). And then…in a kind of obscure spot on the tumbler…there was a very minimalistic, very small version of their logo. If you saw the tumbler in the wild and weren’t familiar with the church, you’d have no idea it came from there.
I like that. I mean, I really like that. The tumbler created a sense of “us” (we’re in this community together), it promoted a common, familiar, iconic city skyline. And rather than becoming a de facto commercial for the church, it was a piece of drinkware that I got the feeling people would actually want to use.
Church-branded elements are great for strengthening emotional attachments for people who are already attached. But how do we create value for our guests without necessarily creating promo opportunities for us?
