Branding

I’ve been watching America’s Next Great Restaurant, a show where contests compete by pitching their ideas for a new restaurant chain.  The winner gets funded by Bobby Flay, Steve Ells (the founder of Chipotle) and others who will help the lucky person open a three-restaurant chain with the promise of more. 

This past week, part of the competition was creating a logo for their proposed restaurants.  While they were overall hit or miss, it was interesting to hear the judges critique a couple of...

There’s a fairly simple way to get a little more out of your church’s Facebook page and all you have to do is take full advantage of your profile picture.  Facebook actually gives you quite a lot of real-estate to use.  Their max sized allowed is 180 pixels by 540 pixels.  That means you can make a fairly tall image for your profile picture. 

This gives you a great chance to share more information about your church or organization.  Nonprofit Tech 2.0 has a few examples of some organizations...

I’m like many of you.  I can’t get enough Apple.  I’m into the tech blogs that speculate on what the next iPhone is going to be like.  I love the events where new products are launched.  And I enjoy using Apple technology.

With that said, I had fairly low expectations for this week’s unveiling of the iPad 2.  Techies were predicting the updates would be minor.  Add a couple of cameras and boost the speeds.  And for the most part, those predictions were right.  Apple also changed the body...

On a recent trip to Costa Rica, there were signs along the roadway that always caught my eye and made me laugh.  They were signs wanting you to pull off the road to eat what they said was “typical food” (or sometimes “tipical food”).  It was funny because my American marketing brain couldn’t imagine advertising any product as simply typical.  But as I saw more and more of these signs, I realized it wasn’t some sort of broken English attempt to advertise to travelers, but instead a common way to...

Last week, I wrote about a recent visit to Community Christian Church’s Yellow Box campus in Naperville, IL.  While the focus of the last post was signage, there’s something else CCC is doing well that deserves a second post.

Community Christian did a great job of communicating their core values throughout the worship service.  For example, right before the offering, the pastor said, “I want to let you know how your giving is making a difference.”  He went on to tell about a church plant in...

Brian Kaufman wrote a great article this week for Shrink the Church talking about the things we do as churches to focus inwardly on ourselves instead of reaching out to our communities.  He listed five practices of an inwardly-focused church which you can read here.  But one of them stuck out to me.  Kaufman wrote:

An Inwardly-Focused Church Offers Multiple Styles of Worship

This one is difficult, so bear with me for a moment.  Is our God traditional or contemporary, emergent or conservative,...

As the new year closes in, I’ve been thinking about what you could (and should) do in 2011 to help your church focus on a clear vision and communicate more effectively.  Here are my top five thoughts:

Stop investing in the yellow pages.  I know churches that spend thousands of dollars on yellow page ads, but refuse to invest in a good website.  The yellow pages (printed on paper) are dead.  Some phone companies aren’t even printing them anymore.  It’s good to be listed, but you don’t need an ad...

The Church Juice Branding Process case study is now available.  It’s a follow up to the blog series we did in the Fall where we took a look at how Church Juice came to be.  All of those posts have been collected into this case study as well as a few tips we found helpful along the way.  It’s a free download that follows our visioning process, name selection and logo creation.  Hopefully it’s helpful for you if you’re looking at branding a new program or re-visioning your church.    ...

(This is a post I wrote a little over a year ago when developers were working on a new Disney video game where Mickey Mouse received a tough guy makeover.  Last week, Epic Mickey for Wii was released to fairly good reviews, so I thought it might be a good time to take another look at the issue of changing something that’s very iconic and established.)  

The world’s most recognizable mouse is getting a makeover. I was reading an article in the New York Times talking about how Disney is going...

“We have a saying out here in Los Angeles that ‘Hollywood is great at making fake things look real, and the church is great at making real things look fake.’ Hollywood understands the power of quality.”

This is a tiny excerpt from a Q&A session Church Marketing Sucks did with filmmaker, writer and media consultant Phil Cooke.

I’m drawn to this quote from Phil because it sums up a lot of thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately about what’s going wrong in many churches.  While I...