Music, Branding and Consumer Culture in Church

Hillsong in Focus

Tom Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429018879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Rituels et pratiques chrétiens

Starting as a single congregation in Australia, Hillsong Church now has campuses worldwide, releases worship music that sells millions of albums and its ministers regularly appear in mainstream media. So, how has a single church gained such international prominence? This book offers an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which music and marketing have been utilised in the pursuit and production of spiritual experience for members of Hillsong Church. An experience that has proven to be incredibly popular.

The main theme of this book is that marketing, specifically branding, is not just a way to "sell" religion, but rather an integral part of spiritual experience in consumer society. Focussing on the London Hillsong church as a case study, the use of its own music in tandem with strong branding is shown to be a co- and re-productive method of organizing, patterning, and communicating information. The church provides the branded material and cultural context in which participants' sacred experience of self unfolds. However, this requires participants to "do the work" to properly understand, and ultimately embody, the values associated with the brand.

This book raises important questions about the role of branding and music in forming modern scared identities. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Ethnomusicology and Media Studies.

1 Hillsong in its socio-historical context

Introduction

This chapter provides the socio-historical and political-economic contexts for this study. It suggests that the communicative strategies and organizational forms of transnational New Paradigm churches, such as Hillsong, developed concomitantly with the emerging consumer culture centred in the United States and the United Kingdom. The first part of this chapter traces the evolution of the brand and branding from a mark of ownership to an array of sophisticated marketing techniques that are deployed in an increasing number of social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. The cultural role of the brand has expanded from a descriptive mark to an associational gestalt, media object, postmodern identity marker, and belief/value system. Yet although the uses of branding have increased, the brand has retained its primary function as a mark of identity. The second part of this chapter traces the development of a ‘Religious Experience Economy’ and the related emergence of Christian Popular Music (CPM) and New Paradigm churches. It outlines the concomitant rise of a religious marketplace, CPM, and the New Paradigm church, emphasizing the role of marketing in the process. The processes outlined in the first two parts of this chapter take place in a context of increasing globalization and concomitant political-economic change. While these are important to understanding the global context, we also must understand how they manifest on the local level. The third part of this chapter, then, discusses the changes in the Australian religious and political-economic landscape that provided the foundation for the ‘rise and rise’ (Power 2004) of Australian Pentecostalism and Hillsong’s Iconic Brand.

Part I – the evolving social function of brands and branding

Brands, branding, and the value of values

Brands are common currency in consumer culture, not only as markers of the things we buy and sell but also as organizational frameworks for ideas and practices. As Jane Pavitt notes:

From cornflakes to cars, our daily lives are increasingly dominated by branded goods and brand names; the brand is a prefix, the qualifier of character. The symbolic associations of the brand name are often used in preference to the pragmatic description of a useful object. We speak of ‘the old Hoover’, ‘my new Audi’ or ‘my favourite Levi’s’—not needing to qualify them with an object description. The brand is at the heart of this process for many of the goods we buy and sell.

(Pavitt 2000, 16)

Brands serve a metonymic function in our cultural discourse. As Pavitt notes above, they act as stand-ins for product categories; for example, in the United States, one often orders a ‘Coke’ instead of a ‘cola’. Brand names are also used as verb: we are probably more likely to ‘Google’ information on the internet than we are to ‘search’ for it. Brands are proxies not only for products and actions but also for places and people; branding is increasingly a central consideration in the making of cultural policy for towns, cities, and even countries (e.g., Pratt 2011; Ulldemolins and Zamorano 2015), and an entire industry has developed around ‘Brand You’ (e.g., Lair et al. 2005; Gandini 2016). They are furthermore icons around which communities form and values are contested (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001). With the terms ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ applied to such a variety of objects, places, people, and activities, one might think that the terms’ meanings would be diluted (Murphy 1998, 1). However, their ubiquitous presence in the discourse of consumer culture suggests instead a concentration with profound cultural, social, political, and economic implications.

It is important to understand the distinction between a brand and branding. Simply put: the brand is the result of a branding process. A brand is the condensation of meanings from which a brand identity—an identity that maps onto both the brand and its stakeholders—emerges.¹ Branding is the process through which the brand is realized.

Digging deeper, a brand’s purpose is to add value to the experience of a product or service. It does this by binding consumers to the organization and its products through ‘interactive consumer experience[s]’ (Klingman 2007, 8). For consumers, the value added is primarily the result of emotional associations. For organizations, the ‘ultimate’ value of a brand is usually calculated in economic terms, but a brand’s profits are a function of its affective value. Branding is therefore, at its core, a set of non-economic activities: it is an integrated communications (or marketing) strategy that synthesizes the physical, aesthetic, rational, and emotional elements of a brand into a consumable affective gestalt (Murphy 1998, 3).

A brand represents the values that an organization is built upon and that its employees (ideally) hold and promote. A brand also reflects the consumer’s values. When a consumer associates her values with those of the brand, the resultant affect ‘adds value’ to the consumption experience. In consumer societies, economic benefits often follow from this. Consumers who have developed affective ties to the brand are more likely to be ‘repeat customers’ and are more likely to recommend the brand to others. They are also more likely to pay a premium for the branded experience. To paraphrase the film A Field of Dreams: build it and they will come; brand it, and they will come back, and pay more when they do. This condensation of affective value, individual values, and economic value is referred to as brand equity.

The yearly ‘most valuable brands’ lists pioneered by the brand consultancy Interbrand reflect this conflation of different types of value (Interbrand 2018). Although brands are ‘intangible assets’, Interbrand assigns a monetary value to them. This valuation is derived from an analysis of an organization’s tangible assets, such as physical infrastructure and available cash flow, balanced against factors such as debt and current sales figures. The added brand valuation is based on the view of ‘brand loyalty’ discussed in the previous paragraph: that consumers’ emotional associations with a brand will engender future sales. The relative weighting of tangible and intangible assets in the valuation of brands reflects the increasing importance of branding in consumer culture. For example, in 2018 Interbrand valued Coca-Cola’s brand at $66.3 billion (ibid). At the end of 2018, the company’s stock market capitalization was approximately $210 billion.² In other words, almost a third of Coca-Cola’s monetary value was derived from its name alone.

Sixty-six billion dollars is a lot of money for a name. The best way to understand why Coca-Cola and other brand names are so ‘valuable’ is to examine how they function in modern consumer culture. This may be done by tracing the evolution of the brand and branding from a method of denoting ownership and content to one of connoting different types of values, meanings, reputations, and identities for a range of stakeholders. As with other social phenomena, branding’s evolution is inextricable from the changes in technology and communication that have accompanied it. However, although the cultural contexts of the brand and the modes of branding have changed over time (Room 1998, 13–23; Olins 2003, 46–69; Moor 2007, 15–38), the brand’s basic function of distinguishing the offerings of one producer from those of another has arguably remained unaltered (Murphy 1998, 1).

The origins of branding: distinguishing products

The terms ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ are used to describe a diverse set of phenomena that can be contextualized within multiple histories and frameworks (Lury 2011, 139). Most accounts of brands suggest that branding emerged as an organizational force for production and consumption in industrializing countries during the second half of the nineteenth century (e.g., Olins 2003, 46–69; Lury 2004, 17–47; Moor 2007, 15–38). Yet, branding as a method of communicating identity and difference has a much longer history. The origins of product branding can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, where marks indicated the ownership and origin of vessels as well as their content (Room 1998, 13–14; Moor 2007, 16; see also Mollerup 1997). Over time, the informational content of these marks increased as they were used to denote the distinctive qualities of a product. For example, in Britain watermarks described the size and weight of paper. Similarly, hallmarks for precious metals indicated their composition, the assay office where they were tested, the date of issue, and the name of their manufacturer. Brands thus became not only descriptors of content but also guarantors of quality by linking products to reputable sources (Moor 2007, 16).

Brands were further linked to identity during colonial expansion as marks not only for goods and livestock but also for people; during the transatlantic slave trade, slaves were routinely branded. These marks connoted identity on multiple levels by simultaneously identifying the slave owner and conferring the social status of ‘permanent marginal’ upon the slave (ibid, 17). However, the brands were also appropriated as badges of honour by successful runaway slaves and as symbols of resistance and solidarity (Patterson 1982, 59, in Moor 2007, 17). In branding’s nascent stages, then, the contested, multiple meanings of the brand were already evident.

In the 1870s and 1880s, concomitant developments in communication, transportation, and manufacturing technologies ushered in the first ‘great’ period of branding in the United States and Europe (Olins 2003, 51). Manufacturers were increasingly able to standardize, and thus regulate, the size and consistency of their products. Also, developments in printing allowed the packaging itself to communicate a greater array of images and meanings, which helped create distinct identities for products (Moor 2007, 18–19). The development of a product-based ‘corporate personality’ allowed the producers to speak ‘directly’ to the consumer, usurping the retailer’s role as the trusted intermediary between the two (Lury 2011, 139).

Concomitant with the technical advances of the late nineteenth century was an explosion in population, which provided a market for an ever-widening range of goods. This increased both the need for the meanings of a brand to be communicated and the ways through which this could be done. For example, the first great branders in post–Civil War America were the makers of patent medicines. Patent medicine makers took advantage of a market in which there were few trained doctors but a relatively high proportion of literate people, expanding newspaper circulation, and growing transportation and distribution networks. Because of the competitive environment (not to mention the dubious nature of many of their products), the makers of patent medicines were ‘the first to sell image rather than product’ (Olins 2003, 50).

A move towards corporate identity

The period from the end of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century saw an increase in the competition between similar products. This led to a more systematic use of advertising, and particularly a shift away from emphasizing the functionality of goods to imbuing them with emotional significance. Advertisers’ shift of interest to consumer psychology is often credited to Edward Bernays, who (by no coincidence) was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Bernays was one of the pioneers of market segmentation; he organized focus groups in order to gain insight into the lives of different kinds of consumers and then used those insights to influence those consumers through marketing (Tye 2002).

As the twentieth century progressed, consumer psychology became more nuanced; it moved away from an emphasis on wants, needs, and desires towards a focus on communal and personal identity. Simultaneously, the idea that corporations had identities and should be understood as ‘pseudo-people’ was making headway in both theory and law.³ Initially, corporate identity was viewed as a design coordination problem. In the post-war period, corporations increasingly recognized the importance of building a corporate image through an integrated media strategy that used multiple kinds of media. Speaking from a design perspective, Henrion and Parkin (1967) wrote in Design Coordination and Public Image:

A corporation has many points of contact with various groups of people. It has premises, works, products, packaging, stationery, forms, vehicles, publications and uniforms, as well as the usual kinds of promotional activities. These things are seen by customers, agents, suppliers, financers, shareholders, competitors, the press and the general public, as well as its own staff. The people in these groups build up their idea of the corporation from what they see and experience of it. An image is therefore an intangible and essentially complicated thing, involving the effect of many and varied factors on many and varied people with many and varied interests.

(Henrion and Parkin 1967, 7, cited in Moor 2007, 30–33)

Henrion and Parkin’s work showed that a brand is multifaceted and that different actors encounter different elements of it in different contexts and thus understand it in different ways. For them, the challenge was to coordinate those disparate encounters in a way that communicated a single concept.

In contrast to Henrion and Parkin’s visual focus, James Pilditch’s Communication by Design: A Study in Corporate Identity (1970) drew its inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the interconnectedness of media and identity. Pilditch argued that companies needed to understand the ‘total situation…of information movement’:

[F]ar from being an adjunct of advertising, corporate communications have become the new total…. Advertising, like public relations, architecture, merchandising materials, and any part of a company’s outpourings, must be coordinated with the rest so that each contributes to one appropriate whole.

(Pilditch 1970, 9, cited in Moor 2007, 32)

The acknowledgement that all of a brand’s offerings are potential semiotic material in identity design (or assemblag...