The Hidden Idolatry of Marketing

How we've been taught to worship the works of our own hands – and why it matters.

Let’s face it, marketing is all around us. One big feature of today’s marketing? The testimonial, or user “success story”.

These stories tend to be inspiring and trust-building. They make us want to buy.

But have you ever stopped to think about what’s not being said in these stories?

These ads often follow a formula that goes something like this: “Do you want to achieve  [insert transformational goal here]? Sally was struggling until she discovered this formula for success! She followed our process and now she’s [achieving goal] and will likely be doing more!”

Okay, let’s stop there for a minute and rewind. Assuming the story is true and Sally has seen these great results, what details to this story are we missing?

For one, there’s Sally’s personal journey. Sally has probably made some important choices or done important inner work that led her to pursue this ambition so doggedly. 

For another, Sally might say there was a force of serendipity or synchronicity which helped things work out. If you ask her honestly, she may not believe the service is really a magic bullet (as the marketing would make you think), but maybe she found it uniquely suited to her needs. (Dare we say that *God* was with her?)

The business or service contributed to Sally’s success also, mind you. 

But let’s look back at the ad. Any mention of Sally and her individual effort? Of Divine Providence assisting her? *Snort with laughter…of course not! 

It’s like an eight-year-old coming home from school and telling an incredible tale of having saved a fellow student from falling into a deep pit! By the way the story’s told, you would think the kid’s a hero! You’re practically ready to worship him! 

But as you uncover more of the details…the help he got along the way, how dangerous the danger really was (the pit was two feet deep), and what the fellow student did to protect herself…suddenly, you’re not nearly as enamored.

Marketing tells these heroic stories all the time. It intentionally obscures any force in a process outside the product or service it's trying to sell. 

The result? We get bombarded by messages that present products and services as being able to change our lives. All I need is this course, or that product, and my problems will be solved.

Even if you’re wise enough to know that this sort of magic-bullet, hero-worship thinking isn’t true, or you’ve seen what’s behind the marketing enough times to filter out the artifice, do you think it doesn’t influence us all on some level?

We live in a world that is saturated with what I call the idolatry of marketing. Because of the way marketing has evolved over the past few decades, we’ve been taught to literally worship the works of our own hands – our businesses, our services, our products. We talk about them like they, in and of themselves, have this transformative power over our lives. And we start to trust in them, while we overlook the deeper realities at play – the reality of destiny, of trust in a higher Power, of the importance of our own personal transformation or the deeper qualities of the services that we use.

Am I saying all marketing is bad? Can businesses not show the transformations they have played a role in effecting in the lives of their users? And why does this matter? All these questions, my friends, for another post.

The secular world tends to dismiss faith, overemphasizing human power and control. The religious world sometimes oversimplifies faith, rendering it impractical in the process.

This blog unpacks this misunderstood subject, providing guidance for living with practical faith in your life. If you know someone who might appreciate these posts, please share.

No machine assistance was used to write this blog. (Divine assistance? Of course.)

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