Church Marketing Sucks

A couple months back we shared a video about enforcing branding standards. If your church has ever tried to keep your brand consistent, you’ll get a kick out of this:

We talked to the man behind the video, Ambert Rodriguez. He’s been a designer for over 10 years and currently is the lead designer at Potential Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

What prompted you to create a video threatening bodily harm over branding standards? There’s got to be a good story there.

Ambert Rodriguez: The reason for the video was just a funny and creative way to keep brand awareness out there. Because, yes we did find some things that were not approved by the “brand police.” We do like to keep things funny here. Up front, but funny.

For those fearful of the bat, what are branding standards and why are they important?

Ambert: The cool thing about branding standards is that it makes you think twice or maybe five times before any communication goes out. If it does not fit the overall communication that we are running after, then we have to change it. It’s not just about the color of the logo, if you can use cheesy Photoshop effects on it or not, but it’s really about the culture of the company or church.

How do you realistically enforce branding standards?

Ambert: Really the only way we do it, is by teaching the importance of the “why” behind the standards. If for some reason there is a violation somewhere, it’s because there was some kind of miscommunication. So we investigate the details, find the culprit and teach.

Potential Church has a strong brand (apparently worth enforcing)—can you tell us how you developed it?

Ambert: Let me paint the picture—our church is about 32 years old. It started with the name Flamingo Road Church, which is the name of the street the original campus is located on. Because we now have six campuses, it was only logical that we had to rebrand the church. Our new name became Potential Church. The word “potential” was used a lot in our vocabulary. Our mission is “Partnering with people to reach their God potential,” and with a lot of back and forth, our lead pastor Troy Gramling and elders felt that was the name that best suited our culture and what we were running after.

So you can imagine, a 32-year-old brand changing its name and brand completely and how we had to communicate it to a church of over 12,500 people. Funny thing was we did it in one month, literally. We told no one the name. The communication was the vision on why we had to change it, and then come on Oct. 10, 2010 to find out the name. It was a lot of fun. One of the biggest things that we changed in the brand and communication of the church was sub-brands. If you are familiar at all with church communication, churches create logos for everything, and what happens is that people become more attached to that brand as opposed to the church brand. So what we said was we were going to be a “branded house” as opposed to a “house of brands.” We are really trying to guard that, by creating standards and a system that enforces that.

About the logo: The magenta seed is our defining symbol. The seed is a picture of potential, and we chose magenta as our color because it pulls from our history (flamingo) and it’s unexpected. And we like that. That’s our culture that our pastor has instilled in us.

You can see the reveal and story about the name change video here.