Religion and marketing hybrids are flourishing in the digital age. This multimedia format session provides a “sneak preview” of our forthcoming (2024) volume, Selling the Sacred, which does a deep dive into the entanglements of religion, media, and marketing. Volume contributors and co-editors will examine dynamic fusions of religion and marketing in and through a variety of approaches and analytical lenses as they explore dimensions of religion as it relates to TikTok religious influencers (both Orthodox Jewish and Evangelical); holistic lifestyle/human potential gurus; notions of “sacred work,” mythic landscapes, and Western wear; the messianic promises made to stay-at-home mothers by a multilevel marketing exercise clothing company; and the hawking of religiously branded campaign swag to market candidates for public office. Our “sneak preview” presentations and provocations will be crafted so as to leave plenty of time for stimulating audience engagement.
Utilizing TikTok as a marketing/evangelizing platform has become not simply an effective strategy but the effective strategy for reaching and evangelizing younger demographic cohorts. More than a quarter of adults under 30 now get their news from TikTok, a phenomenon not lost on influencers—religious and otherwise. In this presentation, drawing insights from practitioner “best practices” and social capital theory, in conversation with Religious Studies, I will use content analysis to examine how influencers leverage resources (followers, personal branding, content, engagement) to enhance religious content on this platform. Importantly, TikTok’s algorithm is “hyperpersonalized,” increasing opportunities for parasocial relationships and word-of-mouth marketing on a level not seen elsewhere. For this paper, I will analyze Orthodox Jewish TikToker’s like @miriamezafui, an Orthodox nurse who answers questions about her faith, and the Christian revival at Asbury University, which was driven by promotion on TikTok.
Consider the following lines from an Ariat western wear TV spot, voiced over images of rugged cowboys and cowgirls driving cattle across a majestic range: “Don’t get me wrong. It’s hard work. It’s long days. It’s all kinds of weather. But when you work under the open sky, you come into contact with something bigger than yourself. It’s not a job; it’s a life.” Drawing from marketing scholar Christopher Miles’s (2018) work on the “magical foundations of marketing theory,” and from folklorist Linda Dégh’s (1994) theorizing of advertising as contemporary “magic folktale,” this multimedia presentation analyzes the enchanting dimensions of Ariat’s ad campaigns and how/why they might evoke particularly powerful public resonances in the digital/Zoom era. Ariat, this presentation argues, effectively casts a “magic folktale” of bygone “sacred labor”—vocations in tune with America’s mythic landscapes that provide powerful (and personally/nationally regenerative) conduits to the transcendent.
This presentation considers discourses of capitalist productivity in the work of prominent life-advice gurus who today cast free-market capitalism as an aspect of a holistic lifestyle – integral to one’s mode of being in the world. I focus on the publications and social media dialogue of Deepak Chopra, Devdutt Pattanaik, and Vishen Lakhiani. I highlight the invocation of classical Hindu ideals as well as Indian Sanskrit texts such as the Arthashastra in the service of reinforcing free-market capitalist ideology as an example of the instrumentalization of ancient knowledge in service of the expectations of the 21st century market economy. I conclude with reflections on continuities and departures in the attitudes of these present-day corporate lifestyle gurus from related, antecedent discourse in the Human Potential Movement, suggesting ways in which the heirs to this movement have accommodated their message to what Kathryn Tanner and others have deemed “the new spirit of capitalism.”
This multimedia presentation will explore the rhetoric of “freedom through fashion” in the marketing materials of LuLaRoe, and the ways the company targeted stay-at-home mothers in particular with its promises of unlimited “blessings” and opportunity contingent on individual action. The company’s messaging defines women’s “freedom” in terms of individual feeling (happy, sexy, beautiful) and consumption (having it all), while also framing the actual labor involved in building the business as well as the labor of reproduction and childcare as a matter of individual women’s responsibility, psychological strength, and “hustle,” as opposed to being conditioned or constrained by broader structural, political, or economic issues. LuLaRoe promises an almost messianic vision of bringing “life more abundantly,” to paraphrase John 10:10. I argue that attention to these elements in LuLaRoe’s marketing helps us better understand the uses and power of religious language as a driver of MLM recruitment and sales.
This presentation examines yarmulkes as platforms for marketing in American presidential campaigns since World War II. Most visible since 2000, these items have served as political accoutrements by the Jewish supporters of candidates, most of whom are not Jewish. Designed and sold with little input from candidates, campaign yarmulkes have brought free media attention to the candidates to whom they are devoted. They may be the first item used in American religious ritual that also advertises political preference in sacred liturgical spaces. What might the manufacture, sale, and use of such items mean in such circumstances? What does it reflect about American Judaism, or the relationship of religion, commercialization, and presidential campaign politics in the United States? This presentation argues that the case study of the campaign yarmulke offers a unique, rich, and overlooked window into the complex convergences of religion, media, marketing, material culture, and American politics.