When it comes to having a relevant & resonant brand, passion is far more important than loyalty.
BRAND LOYALTY
Most brands care about fostering supporter loyalty. After all, the greater the loyalty, the greater the potential for repeat transactional value. But that doesn’t mean those supporters will get you more supporters or more equity in the marketplace. This means more of their transactional loyalty dollars have to be reinvested back into acquisition and equity instead of mission.
BRAND PASSION
Passion, on the other hand, fosters supporter excitement — the kind that deepens brand engagement, builds brand equity, and feeds organic growth. You can be Loyal to a brand without being Passionate about it. You can’t really be Passionate (in a good way) about a brand and not be Loyal to it.
Is kindling Brand Passion even possible anymore? or just a nice Idea?
It’s easy to say that Brand Passion is valuable. But that doesn’t mean it’s achievable in today’s busy and digitally distracted age.
For Christ-led bands who are in the business of loving the broken & serving the least of these, there’s a massive hurdle that is getting in the way of cultivating Brand Passion.
More and more, today’s Christians are just too busy to care.
They are too busy and too distracted to become passionate about practically anything anymore. Too busy to read emails. Too busy to read a letter in the mail. Too busy to practice the Sabbath or get dressed to go to church when they can tune in online from home.
And unfortunately, they’re often too busy for God.
And why is this a problem for us?
“Hurry and love are incompatible. Because love is incredibly time-consuming”
This line represents the COVID-giving bump in the faith-based charity space (think mass-donor programs). What’s happened since 2021? A return to diminishing returns.
Why are fewer and fewer Christians giving charitably these days? Some might cite economics, or recessions, or even politics. But we think it’s partly because love is incredibly time-consuming.
During COVID, we had time on our hands. People were forced to slow down. But the busyness train is back in full force and even playing catch up.
“The accelerated pace and activity level of the modern-day distract us from God and separates us from the abundant, joyful, victorious life He desires for us. It separates us from seeing God and seeing the needs of others.”
In 2007, Dr. Michael Zigarelli published the renowned Vicious Cycle of Busyness which states:
Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry, and overload, which leads to
God becoming more marginalized in Christians' lives, which leads to
a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to
Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to
more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry, and overload. And then the cycle begins again.
If this was true back in 2007 before Smartphones and Facebook, then its only gotten worse — not better.
Not only are we experiencing a collective deterioration of Christian relationships with God because of our culture of hurry and distraction, but a more marginalized God in our society and an increased vulnerability to adopting secular worldviews.
This cycle and our current environment are the worst environments to stir up Brand Passion possible.
If you don’t shape your supporters, other brands will.
In today’s rapidly changing world, brands have more power than ever to form people.
Because of hurry & distraction, more and more Christians are becoming susceptible to having their core identities shaped more by the brands they wear, the sides they choose, and the media they consume, than by God’s word. We all know this is true because the amount of time Christians spend consuming branded content versus God’s Word is dismal.
Brands are massive spiritual formers because, as entities with the power to actively engage with people at scale, they carry influence, sway consumption, entice experience, endorse philosophy, and deliver solutions to most of life’s daily problems. They are the gatekeepers to content and knowledge. What is and isn’t available on Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok, what soulless algorithms choose to show and not show, forms their users.
It used to just be churches and schools and local communities alone that did this. Now that power is in the hands of brands that are often not driven by Kingdom-building motives. Most secular brands want us to be busier. They want us to become more addicted to our screens, and their branded content, and vulnerable to the commercial pursuit of “happiness”.
As a brand, as the Parachurch, you are in one of the most influential places to influence Christians to be formed in Christ and to slow down enough to care.
“Everything is Spiritual Formation, from what we buy to what we watch, to what we read and hear — everything forms our spirit.”
The unfortunate reality is that the majority of Christianity time and time again has always gone with the flow. Pre-reformation, most Christians were fine buying indulgences to pay off time in purgatory because they didn’t know any better. Most Christians pre-Abolition owned slaves because they didn’t know any better. And today, most Christians are fully sucked into a digitally addicted, distracted, and truth-twisted worldview because they don’t know any better.
Every big Church movement that changed these behaviors started with voices that took it upon themselves to challenge their peers to know better.
The majority is not going to do it for themselves — and today it is on Christ-led Brands to be those voices.
Brand Passion is not only possible, it is essential.
If you are going to succeed, you must be distinctive in a way that is relevant enough in today’s busy distracted world to get noticed, AND you must be disruptive enough in a way that helps people resonate with the upsidedown rhythms and priorities of God’s world.
To be Distinctive, you need Passion-kindling Carrots.
These are things you can dangle in front of people to get their attention, even while they are in that state of busyness and distraction.
The goal of these carrots is to attract people who could be passionate about you and your cause. This doesn’t guarantee passion, but getting these elements into your brand experiences can be a great place to start.
To be Disruptive, you need Passion-kindling Yokes.
These are things that get people to slow down to Jesus’ pace of life so they can love as He loved. After all, His Yoke is easy, and His Burden is light.
This is the biggest challenge you will face. Being Resenant & Relevant as a brand in our rapidly changing world means confronting, navigating, and solving for the very environment in which we live.
Learn where you’re at and how to build from there.
If you don’t know where to start, we can help.
Different individuals will be passionate about different brands for many different reasons, so it’s hard to measure collective passion. But you can measure how well a brand communicates the elements that can create passion to begin with.
There are a lot of ways to start thinking about how to become more Relevant & Resonant as a brand today, and we’d love to explore this with you.
If you're interested in connecting to learn more about how to kindle Brand Passion in your audiences, check out our Brand Passion Webinar and Resources or fill in this form — we’d love to meet you.