Religion as a Brand
The competition between Brands and Religion in our brains
Written by Andre Soff
Brand Director at VBAT
Students at home lead to academic discussions. Last weekend my daughter told me about her findings about the commonalities between religion and brands. Her first finding was research by Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungerman that focused on the correlation between blue laws, laws that restrict some or all Sunday activities for religious reasons, or rather the absence of such laws, and religious attendance and participation. What they found, was that as soon as blue laws were repealed, a significant drop in religious attendance and contribution appeared. Religion is for a group of people in direct competition with secular demands.
In his book Buyology, Martin Lindstrom did find a neuroscientific explanation. In an experiment in which devoted believers are shown pictures of so-called “smash-able brands”, brands whose products can be recognised by just a small piece of it, mixed with pictures to do with religion.
While looking at these pictures, brain scans were being made, and the results were jaw-dropping: the pictures of brands evoked the same patterns of activity in volunteers’ brains as the religious ones did. This means that in some cases, religion causes the same neural stimulation as brands.
Just imagine that the geeks on the front row of the launch of that new iPhone are experiencing the exact same thing as the people listening to the Pope speaking on St. Peter’s Square. Could the introduction of brands have introduced a replacement for religion as we know it?
Should we perhaps consider religion a brand in itself?
And is Christianity one of the first and best executed brand strategies that has ever existed?
Anyway, you can imagine that these discussions make that I’m even more longing to see and speak my lovely daughter Leanne next weekend.
Sources:
Gruber, J., Hungerman, D., (2008), The church versus the mall: what happens when religion faces increased secular competition?, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23 (2): 831–862.
Lindstrom, M., (2008), Buyology, Doubleday.
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Written by Andre Soff
Brand Director at VBAT
