When I wrote about the Multi-site church and MLM, I thought I was on to an original idea, that building a large multi-site church has a lot in common with building a large Network Marketing business. It turns out that my idea is pretty original, but a book has been published about how the marketing behind 'The Purpose Driven Life" applies to MLM. I'm sure I will have more to say about PyroMarketing once I read the book.
Greg Stielstra, who directed the marketing campaign for The Purpose Driven Life, presented lessons learned from that project in a network marketing how-to book, PyroMarketing. Zondervan, an Evangelical Christian Bible publisher, had issued Mr. Warren's book and planned to publish Mr. Stielstra's. But before the release of PyroMarketing, Mr. Warren pressured Zondervan to censor all references to his book, because he was concerned that it would make people think his phenomenal success was driven primarily by network marketing techniques.
Mr. Warren later relented, and HarperBusiness published PyroMarketing in September 2005 after making certain changes. However, Mr. Warren emphasized, "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, which no one anticipated."
Mr. Stielstra has broken down this "supernatural and sovereign plan" into four easy steps that treat converts as customers and customers as evangelists.
PyroMarketing: The Four Step Strategy To Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life reveals the network marketing strategy that made The Purpose Driven Life one of the best selling hardcover books in American history by using a fire metaphor that involves four steps:
(1) Gather the driest tinder - people most willing to buy your product (for example, mega-church members);
(2) Touch it with a match - give people a free preview of your product (for example, Left Behind Games is distributing "presale" DVDs through pastoral networks);
(3) Fan the flames - for example, Mr. Warren sold the first 400,000 copies of The Purpose-Driven Life for $7 each to ministers and churchgoers. They formed study groups, which drove up sales of the hardbacks at some $20 a pop.
(4) Save the coals - keep a database of your customers, so you don't have to start again from scratch. For example, Left Behind Games told the Los Angeles Times that it plans to distribute 1 million copies of its violent video game through churches nationwide.
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