The “brand” of the Catholic Church in England and Wales: Challenges and opportunities for communications

• Date: 01 February 2019
• Author: Shirley Beresford,Dominic Baster,Brian Jones
• Published date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1881

PRACTITIONER PAPER

The “brand”of the Catholic Church in England and Wales:

Challenges and opportunities for communications

Dominic Baster

1

|Shirley Beresford

2

|Brian Jones

3

1

Internal Communications Manager,

Dimensions (UK) Ltd., Sheffield, U.K.

2

Marketing and Public Relations, Leeds

Business School, Leeds Beckett University,

Leeds, U.K.

3

Marketing, Leeds Business School, Leeds

Beckett University, Leeds, U.K.

Correspondence

Brian Jones, Senior Lecturer in Marketing,

Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett

University, The Rose Bowl, Leeds LS1 3HB,

U.K.

Email: b.t.jones@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

This paper considers the concept of “brand”in relation to religious organisations and,

in particular, the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It explores the application of

marketing and branding concepts to the Church and reports on perceptions of the

Church's brand and identity. The findings show that the Catholic Church in England

and Wales has very strong brand equity and high levels of brand loyalty among its

members, although conventional marketing language should be avoided due to the

sensitivities involved. The findings suggest that the Church could usefully be regarded

as a “brand community,”akin in many key respects to brand communities in the com-

mercial sphere. It recommends that Church communications could be enhanced by

leveraging the brand more effectively as within a true “brand community”for the pur-

pose of encouraging brand loyalty and energising Church members.

1|INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT

The present era has been described as the “golden age of brands”

(Twitchell, 1999) and yet, to many active members of religious organi-

sations such as the Roman Catholic Church, the idea of applying terms

such as “brand”to their organisation seems inappropriate or even

absurd (Cooke, 2008). Nevertheless, as Abreu (2006, p. 141) writes,

A religious organisation is perceived by its constituents as

a brand, a heterogeneous set of characteristics including

its key message, the people who work for it, the place

where the services take place, its equipment and all the

associations of its offer.

Given this fact, it is entirely reasonable for religious organisations

to engage with their brand and utilise secular techniques and insights

to ensure that it is harnessed as effectively as possible for the pur-

poses for which the organisation exists.

Religious organisations are not entirely theological or “other‐

worldly”concepts for which brand is an alien concept. The Catholic

Church in England and Wales is a distinct entity with its own unique

historical and cultural influences. It has a central administrative hub

(the Bishops' Conference Secretariat in London) as well as regional

(diocesan) organisation and structures. Barth (2010, p. 782) points

out, the Catholic Church “is an organisation with an established tradi-

tion and legitimacy grounded in public support that provides structure,

offers guidelines for behaviour, and shapes human interaction.”The

aim of the paper is to apply the concept of brand to the Catholic

Church so as to better understand how the Church presents itself

through its communications, and how its stakeholder groups perceive

it and its message. One crucial question for the Church is, how can it

express its message effectively in a media‐dominated and largely sec-

ular culture? In seeking to address this question and the aforemen-

tioned aim, this paper, while aimed at practitioners, operates at the

theory‐practise interface and is theoretically underpinned with extant

literature as well as being informed and shaped by Kapferer's (2008)

“Brand Identity Prism Model.”

It used to be the case that an organisation would seek to commu-

nicate its brand to its stakeholders in what might be termed a “top‐

down”approach. However, the media landscape and the way in which

brand is perceived have been transformed with the arrival of the inter-

net and social media (Dietrich, 2014). Brands are no longer the prop-

erty of the organisation seeking to communicate them, if indeed

they ever were (Phillips & Young, 2009), but are cocreated by all of

an organisation's stakeholders or publics. In this sense, the brand of

the Catholic Church in England and Wales is not just its message,

but the whole mix of its message, its identity, the way in which it is

perceived by different stakeholder groups, and its personality.

If brands are about giving meaning to a product, a company or

some other entity, then it should follow that discussion of how the

concept of brand applies to religion should have received a good deal

of scholarly attention because religion gives meaning to countless mil-

lions around the world. However, it fails to register in almost any

Received: 17 August 2018 Accepted: 29 September 2018

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1881

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1881.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1881

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of12