“Marketing done right is almost indistinguishable from ministry, it is identifying people with needs and connecting them with people and services that meet their needs.”

If you own a copy of The Purpose Driven Life you may well have been suckered in by the marketing genius behind this quote. Either that or you have been ‘led’ to buy this book by the Holy Spirit, rendering marketing strategies surplus to requirement. Which way got you hooked?

This is the view of Greg Stielstra, former senior marketing director for Zondervan’s Christian trade book department, who was involved in the phenomenal success of Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life bestseller.

For an outside perspective [as opposed to an ‘inside' Christian perspective] of the phenomenon that is Rick Warren and Saddleback an Orange County online news source site [ocregister.com] provides a 20 part series looking at the origins and the latest developments in Saddleback’s rise and rise to stratospheric heights.

The series is written by Gwendolyn Driscoll who writes for The Orange County Register.

In part 5 of her series: ‘Moving the Message’, she examines the phenomenal sales success of his book and explores the nexus between marketing and the power of the Christian network:

>>>For an American audience awash in choices, “The Purpose-Driven Life’s” success may owe much to its prescriptive tone. Warren says he wants to make it easy for people to find God. Or, in this case, a book about God.

Which is why Warren suggested that his publisher, Zondervan Publishing House, sell 400,000 copies of the $20 hardcover for $7.

Zondervan feared it would be giving away the book’s profit. Instead, the discount, paired with a book-club-type campaign Warren crafted around the book’s launch, created a sensation.

The result was both an international best-seller and a validation of Warren’s vision of church as a network through which messages can be moved.

“The organization of the future isn’t the organization,” Warren says. “It’s the network.”

Warren’s network is pastors.com, a for-profit Web site he created to e-mail advice, as well as sell sermons and books to pastors. Such Web sites are hallmarks of modern megachurches, which often rely as much on the profit they make selling religious products as they do on the tithes they collect each Sunday. In 2003, Purpose-Driven Ministries, of which pastors.com is a part, reported nearly $21 million in revenues. (To see a list of church networks, go to ocregister.com/link.)

Warren put his network to use, contacting 1,200 pastors who had already bought “The Purpose-Driven Church.” He offered the pastors and their congregations “The Purpose-Driven Life” at the cut rate. He also offered them a new “40 Days of Purpose” program Warren created, in which small church groups form to read chapters of the book.

The “40 Days” campaign was the “engine” that drove book sales, according to Greg Stielstra, then senior marketing director for Zondervan’s Christian trade book department. Reading the book became synonymous with worship. The group setting also reinforced consumer decision-making.

“If your friend is reading it, buying it, chances are you will too,” Stielstra says.

Zondervan tracked the results and found that the 400,000 churchgoers bought an average of five copies each for their friends and families - at the full retail price.

Sales of “The Purpose-Driven Life” grew as Warren advertised it at the church-growth conferences offered by his Purpose Driven Ministries. Book clubs multiplied as pastors in search of the secret to Saddleback’s success promoted a product that might hold the key. About 400,000 church leaders have attended “purpose-driven” trainings to date, according to Purpose Driven Ministries.

Stielstra calls the technique “pyromarketing,” in which core supporters of a brand - Stielstra calls them “dry tinder” - “light the fire” of wider sales through an organized campaign.

He decided to write a book about the book’s marketing, titled “PyroMarketing.”

Then the book’s June 2005 print date was delayed. Stielstra was quoted in Publisher’s Weekly saying that Warren was obstructing publication because he did not want the book’s success to be associated with marketing.

Stielstra calls the technique “pyromarketing,” in which core supporters of a brand - Stielstra calls them “dry tinder” - “light the fire” of wider sales through an organized campaign. He decided to write a book about the book’s marketing, titled “PyroMarketing.”

Then the book’s June 2005 print date was delayed. Stielstra was quoted in Publisher’s Weekly saying that Warren was obstructing publication because he did not want the book’s success to be associated with marketing.

In a statement to the trade publication Christian Retailing, Warren denied he had opposed publication but said his “concern” was that readers understood that “the worldwide spread of the purpose-driven message had nothing to do with marketing or merchandising. Instead, it was the result of God’s supernatural and sovereign plan.”

In a subsequent conversation, Warren says his objections rose more from his belief that Stielstra had “absolutely nothing to do” with the book’s marketing, a point Stielstra disputes. He then attributed the book’s success at least “one-third” to his network.

“Absolutely it was the network,” he says. “[But]the book would have died if the content had not met a need. No marketing plan in the world can get people to buy books by the dozens and give them to their friends. They only do that if the content changes their lives.”

Stielstra’s book was published in September 2005, about the time Stielstra left Zondervan.

“Rick regards marketing as a servant of the gospel,” says Edmund Gibbs, professor of church growth at Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary. By disputing the role of marketing in the success of “The Purpose-Driven Life,” Gibbs says Warren is attempting to defuse “those within the Christian community that say he is where he is because of his publicity machine.<<<

I find myself in the no-man’s-land position of both using and relying to a degree on the multi-million dollar Christian marketing bonanza [and therefore perpetuating it] whilst at the same time feeling a sense of revulsion and deep concern that I and my fellow believers are trapped in a consumer cycle that differs very little from ‘the world’.

Check out the whole absorbing series here.