Dispensation And Marketing

By Xerex Faustino - Brand Designer/Consultant

One of the most famous books I’ve read is the Bible that introduced me to the spiritual way of living, coming from a very secular life as an atheist. Understanding spirituality gave me an empathetic view of this world that got me involved in a lot of church activities like praise and worship, fellowship and charitable community service which developed my social relationship, achieving the feeling of content and certainty that I truly and finally understand the message of God and my mission in life. The deeper I study the more it asked me questions in at the back of my head to my service like which tithes system suits me? is circumcision necessary? Are we saved by good deeds or law, these are few examples of contradictory statements between 2 great apostles named Peter and Paul which are considered great influencers to Christianity. These inconsistencies in no doubt led confusion, argument and disputes to people most especially from different religions and started doubting everything that I do.

Until I discovered dispensationalism that entirely rebooted and changed how I approach life and service to God upon reading exactly the-same book. Which also became a great discovery as an easier process to either old or new readers of the scripture. Dispensation is a type of theology or approach to study the Bible considering the time, place, and more importantly the characters involved in the conversation or story - compared to a generalized mainstream theology called covenant where the bible is considered a word of God which implies that all words in the book is relevant to us all. While dispensation tells that words in the Bible “is to us but not for us all” by following simple steps like understanding the characters and time of the conversation leads to identifying two different type of audiences called Jew and Gentiles. This discovery gave me an entirely different approach in service to both God and humanitarian works. I understand that I didn’t give enough justice to provide more interesting details to define what dispensation really means and how it simplifies everything in my study but this articulation is to arrive at an insight to explain the importance of marketing to any business.

This story metaphor became more relevant to me when I applied marketing into business. Business to me back then is a product thats gets sold to random people based on luck and so as your revenue or profit. This kind of surprises led to frustrations to business owners. However, marketing “strategy” (understanding goal and how to achieve the goal) provides an advantage towards business risks and competition. By providing a solution to a problem by truly understanding the product value (story) and identifying who the product really is for called (target audience) is simply like a process to focus only to lovers and eliminate the haters of the brand.

Understanding the core value of the product creates “relevance” that resonates with specific communities. Communication is becoming more focused towards specific group of audience by understanding their desire/hope for a product/service by providing a “promise” either by a tagline or future anticipated vision thru psychological analysis such as (demographic) which pertains to things that can be seen visibly, like their location, activities, and places they mostly go to, plus (Psychographic) where it identifies whats inside their head, dreams, ambition and goals in life which mainly affects consumer behavior and buying decisions. Understanding 4 basic marketing principles like “specialization, segmentation, differentiation and concentration” is similar to principles dispensation which simplifies structure that eliminates irrelevant datas to avoid generalizations that commoditizes our product/services due to lack of strong foundation such as branding or so called “reputation of the organization”.

Going back to dispensation as my inspiration to my new approach of great focus to share the idea to eliminate religious debate to sell not as a religion but an efficient approach to read or study the scripture - gave a more ear friendly approach to any Bible readers, regardless of religion or doctrine they came from. Resulted to a more agreeable swift conversation without having the impression of you attacking or violating the most difficult ground such as traditional belief or religion. Branding similarly creates the-same friendly impression to customers without changing the product/service idea by simply communicating or highlighting our “value” in a more persuasive tone of voice thru winning customers “trust”. Trust builds relation by initially making friends and ultimately converting friends to customers. Branding separates us against the rest of the competition by giving a specific answer to a question as to “why people buy it from you and not from them?”. This will provide a more precise trajectory or energy focused considering limited resources to communicate “unique value” or strength in that specific field of expertise or specialization.

The claim of being “good” in the industry is just an awaiting claim to be defeated by others by being (better, best, excellent) or any superlative word that can turn you into an inferior product or services. While the word “unique” remains an adjective that cannot be modified where no one is uniquer or uniquest. Each and every one is “unique” as long as one can brilliantly identify self unique value in the savage world of competition.

This metaphorical analogy means no intention of changing any organic idea or advocacy but hoping this story could inspire us to enhance or upgrade our traditional thinking that might change our approach in any of our product or big ideas from marketing and branding point of view.

Thanks and God bless us all.