When you think of Satan, what picture comes to mind? Do you picture a little red man running around with his pointed tail and trident, or evil incarnate scarring you to within an inch of your life?
Before he was called Satan, his name was Lucifer meaning “light bringer.” He was one of God’s most beautiful creations.
He’s also one hell of a salesman (forgive the pun). After all, he talked Eve into giving up paradise over a piece of fruit. Just imagine what he could do with a used car!
How did he do it? Well, his tactics have not changed. He used the same approach on Christ that he used with Eve, and while it didn’t work on Him it certainly still works on us.
The Devil’s Time Tested Marketing Plan
So what is this great marketing plan that Satan has employed so effectively? Well, we are warned against it in 1 John 2:15-17.
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
Did you catch it? Go back and read the account of Eve and the serpent, Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, or simply turn on your television. Do you see it?
Cravings of Sinful Man (aka The Lust of the Flesh)
The first tenet of Satan’s marketing plan is to appeal to our desire to feel, to experience pleasure. You might be asking what is wrong with this. The answer is nothing. These desires are all given to us by a good and loving God.
He wants us to experience pleasure – He created it! The problem is that Satan’s product is a counterfeit version that never delivers on his promises. They are like those paddles that had the rubber ball attached by a rubber band. It’s fun for a few minutes, but then the string breaks and it becomes a paddle used to spank you. Ouch! Bad memories.
Retailers have known about this marketing technique for quite some time. Think about McDonalds. How many of their commercials actually sell their product? Not many, they are selling a feeling. This is innocent when compared to those who use seduction and sex appeal to market their products.
Zig Ziglar says that selling is about the transference of feeling about a product from you to your prospect. He’s absolutely right. Zig usually is.
As Christian entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to make sure we sell and market products and services that are of the highest quality that actually fulfill a real need.
The Lust of the Eyes
The second tenet is to appeal to the lust of the eyes – the desire to have. There’s a bumper sticker that reads, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” This thinking is running rampant in our society today, and is a major reason for the economic recession we’re experiencing.
Many have bought into the lie that you need to have lots and lots of things to be happy. The housing market crashed due to homeowners convinced they needed to have larger houses than they could afford to be happy, and unscrupulous lenders who were more than willing to feed this delusion with risky loans.
We are constantly being sold new things to replace the old things that either still work fine or we never use anyway. We become slaves to MasterCard and Visa to purchase things to impress people that we don’t even like and don’t care anyway. Keeping up with the Jones has been much more costly than we could have ever imagined.
As Christian entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to make sure we sell and market products and services that are of the highest quality to people who actually need them.
The Boasting of What He Has or Does (aka The Pride of Life)
The final tenet in Satan’s marketing plan is to tell people they can be somebody. We all have the desire to make a difference with our life, to have a purpose.
It seems that marketers today are trying to convince us that using a deodorant will make us a sex symbol, drinking a certain beverage will make us the life of the party, or buying {insert your widget here} will make us the next {insert your fabulous role here}.
The truth is that we are somebody already. The Bible tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that God had plans for us before the very foundations of the earth. We do not need to purchase anything.
As Christian entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to make sure we sell and market products and services that are of the highest quality that help people achieve their dreams, but do not promise that they will accomplish them simply by purchasing it.
How’s Your Marketing Plan Stack Up?
If you look at any effective the marketing plan of most of the major advertisers today , they will rely on one or more of these tenets. Why? Because they work. They are what I like to call the three P’s of marketing – Pleasure, Possessions, and Position.
These three P’s are a corruption of our need to feel, to have, and to be. On a spiritual level, these needs can only be filled by God – which is why I believe He’s hard-coded them into us. What Satan offers us instead, is his counterfeit version of God’s gifts.
Satan has sold us a corrupted dream to satisfy our longings instead of fulfilling our needs. His tactics work so effectively that they have been mimicked successfully by many advertisers. Their claims, and the images they conjure to evoke a feeling, have little to do with what they are actually selling.
While they are quite effective tactics, we are called to “not be conformed to this world” as Christian entrepreneurs. This doesn’t mean that we cannot employ these tactics market to these three basic needs, but we do have to make sure our promises and our offerings measure up in the light of eternity.
UPDATED 12/07/08: Sometimes we do not hit the mark as authors in trying to express our points. It’s become abundantly clear that this post has been one of those examples. Since there are some very great comments below on the original post, I’ve decided to show the edits I’ve made. Additions are in this blue font color, and deletions have been struck through rather than removed.
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[...] A friend of mine wrote a post that had me thinking It was entitled: “Are you literally marketing like the devil?” [...]