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Beliefnet Brand Study
As a follow-up to my study of the Disinformation brand, I thought it would be interesting to launch a series exploring the brands of other popular companies that make their money through blending spirituality with pop culture. I’m doing these studies because they are both interesting on their own, but also to help me further refine where I want to take Pop Occulture as a brand. I guess this is what they call competitive analysis in “the biz”, and if anybody has suggestions for other successful companies to do studies of, I’m open to suggestions.
In any event, this study focuses on the popular website Beliefnet.
I know they say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you really can. In this case, it all starts with their name and logo. I’m not sure what year they got started, but based on their name, I would guess maybe 1996 or 97, back when everybody thought all they had to do was throw the word “net” after their name and they had themselves a world-class brand. Their logo is really no better. It’s just this totally non-descript little swirl, and exudes a sense of bland pleasantness.
And that’s just what you’ll find on their site. From their company profile we find that they are committed to not being committed:
We are a multi-faith e-community designed to help you meet your own religious and spiritual needs — in an interesting, captivating and engaging way.
We are independent. We are not affiliated with a particular religion or spiritual movement. We are not out to convert you to a particular approach, but rather to help you find your own. Fundamental to our mission is a deep respect for a wide variety of faiths and traditions.
We try to achieve our mission by providing information and inspiration. […]
Yaaaaawwn… They also offer a statement of principles which reads:
1) Beliefnet hopes to help people meet their own religious, spiritual and moral needs by providing information, inspiration, community, stimulation and products.
2) Beliefnet will be respectful of the wide range of religions and spiritual approaches.
3) Beliefnet will not exclusively promote one particular religion or belief system.
Their approach doesn’t particularly appeal to me, mainly because I like a healthy dose of fire in the belly when it comes to the discussion and exploration of religion. I don’t want people to set aside their differences, I want people to confront them head on! But then, I’m clearly outside their target market. Based on several ad banners they have interspersed throughout their site, I’m guessing the biggest segment of their target market is made up of middle aged women who want to lose weight or retirees who want to buy auto insurance. They also have lots of stuff geared towards parents, which I also can’t relate to at this point.
More than that though, the thing that gets me about Beliefnet is that they are all about the major mainstream religions. Sure they have small pagan (whoops, I mean astrology) sections (and an abysmally tiny forum for gnosticism - with no actual articles), but the overwhelming mass of the site is devoted to straight over the plate discussions of Christianity (angels), Judaism (and by Judaism I mean Britney Spears’ Kabbalah), Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Actually, strike that, they don’t talk about Hinduism so much as they talk about Westernized yoga, which is the closest most people get to Hinduism. Serious spiritual seekers may dabble in Beliefnet’s many tools and quizzes such as the Belief-O-Matic (the name and character of which seems to encapsulate the whole brand). Or you can get daily words of inspiration emailed to you.
But really, I’m not here to criticize them. I’m hear to learn from them. They’re a hugely successful company, quite possibly the leader online when it comes to religious and spiritual websites. It seems to me though that the thing that makes them successful is the same thing that makes them totally bland. Everything on this site seems to me to be too soft, too easy, too distant, too uninvolved. Even their invitations to users to interact are so fucking timid. Check this out from one of their forum pages:
Have a question about religion you were always too embarrassed to ask? Now you can post your question anonymously, and other Beliefnet members who follow that faith will help you figure out the answer.
You know what I call people who are too embarrassed to ask questions? FUCKING LOSERS! Seriously people, grow some balls (or ovaries) and get back to me. Whoops, see, my problem as well as my strength is that I like to just come right out and say what I mean. Why dance around and encourage people to be embarrassed about it? Everybody wants to know about this stuff. Everybody’s interested and everybody wants to talk. So let’s just talk! And let’s not be worried about whether or not it fits perfectly into the pre-packaged store-bought religions available. Cause life doesn’t work like that. People don’t fit neatly into little categories like that. Or at least they shouldn’t. I like to encourage them not to.
The thing that Beliefnet makes me wonder is whether or not it’s a necessity to be so bland in order to reach such a huge audience. My instincts tell me no, and my experiences running this site tell me an even bigger no. So what are the lessons for me to take away from this? I think the biggest one is that there is a great wide open space when it comes to talking about spirituality. We’ve all been lead by big publishers and marketers that the conversation has to be bland, respectful and fit within certain narrow parameters. But you and I are proof that there’s so much more possible, so many other avenues of exploration and discussion available to us. So we’ve just got to build them, or rather keep building them. From where I’m sitting, it looks like we’re doing a great job so far.
PS. Am I being too hard on Beliefnet, or is anybody else as bored by that type of approach as I am?
September 26th, 2005 at 2:04 am
I agree, it’s boring. I must have signed up there once because I get their email newsletters and even the subject line is usually boring, I never open them. The whole concept of an embarrassing religious question seems very weird.
ps I think you should be a guest on Coast to Coast AM.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:09 am
Thanks! I’d like to have a product to promote before I try to get on there though. I’m currently working on something though and hopefully will be ready in a month or so to try for it.
While we’re on the subject though, I’ll put together a brand study of them as well.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:15 am
Slightly hard, yes. I’m not sure there’s anything inherently wrong with Beliefnet’s approach, however bland it may be. (And yes, trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible almost invariably does involve some degree of blanding out to avoid frightening people off. Just look at Hollywood movies.)
September 26th, 2005 at 2:22 am
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with their approach. They can do what they want. They’re obviously quite successful. My analysis is based on my own personal preferences and trends which I see developing in the field that I want to capitalize on. This isn’t supposed to be a blanket condemnation, but a competitive analysis and side-by-side comparison to help me focus my own goals.
September 26th, 2005 at 3:29 am
But the idea of networking heretofore “disparate” belief systems is a pretty bold concept in and of itself don’t you think? Even if you were to get somebody to apprehend the notion of an “Internet” 30 years ago, don’t you think they would have found it a little unbelievable that there would be a site where “all” religions are treated the same? You’d have to cover the history from ARPANET and the shaking out of all the dotcom startups and and onto this new gnostic use of the medium.
Which is why one must wonder what the true charter of beliefnet is. But that brings in questions of conspiracy and that of course has the ability to start a whole new belief that one day beliefnet can include in its categories.
Irony upon irony. We’re in the singularity now.
September 26th, 2005 at 6:32 am
I don’t think logos or a distinct brand, in the classical sense of print, has anything to do with a site’s success. It’s all about content, as I know your well aware. The best looking design never means anything - and most visitors could care less about that sort of thing. Consistency is good, but anything more elaborate than that isn’t warranted. I don’t frequent the site myself but just looking over it for awhile, and doing the old internet archive check, I think the main appeal and contributing factor toward their success is probably the columnists.
Their target audience, from the very beginning, seems to be adherents of what was once called - in the 70s and 80s - the “new age movement”: those people who regularly go to the bookstore to purchase bubble gum enlightenment bestsellers. They are now, for the most part, the establishment. That’s their audience, I think. They have mellowed out a bit. A lot of them now have cushy university professorships and/or have started their own NGOs and are part of the whole UN behemoth that ostensibly tries to bridge politics and spirituality, everyday, into some sort of consensus.
September 26th, 2005 at 8:50 am
I lost my original post to a glitch in one of the nightly builds of firefox. So, to summerize what I had written, “me2!!11″. I quite agree with almost everything you brought up here. Most especially the dislike for the whitewashed approach to religion. It reminds me of how well public schools seem able to take even the most bloody and inspiring of topics, such as history, and turn them into a snorefest. I’ll second the frustration on the state of hinduism on the internet. I was looking for some information a while back, and was fairly overwhelmed trying to weed out what westerners wanted the religion to be, and what it actually is.
Oh, and bravo to the Coast to Coast AM idea. I listen to it on a fairly regular basis, and one of my pet-peeves is that every single speaker on gnostisicm that I’ve heard lumps all the groups into a single unified whole. Even if not the main topic of discussion, it’d be refreshing to hear the subject brought up by someone less eager to push gnosticism as a backing of whatever their own school of thought is.
September 26th, 2005 at 11:41 am
i agree with you in general, as pretains to your interests (and mine), but you are being way too hard on Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a soft cuddly, squishy surface, and a contentious, roiling interior. The articles, advice and features are bland, but the real action is in the discussion groups, There are designated areas for debate and challenge of various religions, but the heretics tend to bust into the religious forums and wreak havoc. As we all know, religious dogmatists can get really, really angry.
A close friend of mine is one of the monitors on Beliefnet - these folks are paid well, given much discretion, and are largely, i think, atheists or agnostics. i don’t see how you could do their job if you were religious, and as it is, they are not loved by the posters in general. They’re always suspected of being stealth advocates of the ‘other’ religion. If you sometimes enjoy watching primates square off over unsupportable abstractions, Beliefnet discussions can be fun.
As to the weakness of the Pagan groups on Beliefnet, i think that has more to do with the way Pagans network and use the web than maginalization on the site. We’re not big proselytizers, and have our own discussion groups. At one time i had a SubGenius topic on Beliefnet, but there wasn’t enough participation, for the same reason. i was only hanging out there because i enjoy religious debate in the same way i enjoy professional wrestling.
September 26th, 2005 at 11:58 am
“Grow some ovaries” - can I borrow that beautiful new expression?
September 26th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
I don’t think you could be more wrong. Why then do we even have design or marketing at all? Surely international companies aren’t dumping billions of dollars and man-hours of research and development for nothing.
Having good and consistent content IS part of how you build a brand online.
September 26th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
i like this brand study thing…
i agree that design & marketing is important. really, the internet is basically the only place where design & marketing arent AS important, but its essential nontheless IMO to have good design & marketing.
on the internet, content can BE your design & marketing, unlike pretty much everything else (except books i suppose) where design & marketing ARE your content…
i disagree though with your assesment of the beliefnet logo….
its either a oroboros or a golden mean spiral IMO, both have some deep implications…
one
human?
September 26th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
btw, did you check their “traffic & demographic” page:
http://www.beliefnet.com/mediakit/audience.htm
interesting.
how the hell do they add 15,000 email subscribers daily????
ahhhh, i see….
“AOL Religious Content provider”
now thats a company with a logo, lol…
did you check out the management? :
http://www.beliefnet.com/about/management.asp
this guy is weird:
September 26th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
weird:
http://tinyurl.com/9svzw
sorry for the multiple post, beliefnet has temporarily caught my attention…
one
human?
September 26th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
oh no problem. yeah, its all pretty fascinating, i think.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
lol, the guy in charge of technology at possibly the worlds largest multifaith internet site is a specialist in Artificial Intelligence!!!!
definitly fascinating…… i wonder what his beliefs are..
September 26th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
I was a few years off in my estimate of when they began. Turns out they started in 1999, but then went bankrupt in 2002 thanks to the dotcom bubble bursting
September 26th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
From that same article, very interesting:
I think that figure’s from a few years back, but I wonder where it’s at now.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Looks like they’ve also got a few book offerings with major publishers like Randomhouse.
Here’s another more recent article about Beliefnet landing $7million in funding this year with a little more about their business model
http://www.bcvc.com/news/index_detail.lasso?id=204
September 26th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
The more I read about the actual goals and ideas of the company’s founders, the more I end up liking them.
Found here: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9770.htm
September 26th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
from beliefnet’s media & information page:
http://www.beliefnet.com/mediakit/media.htm
lol, still though, more people online for porn i bet…
September 26th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
Another pretty good article about them from 2001 from Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/003/2.36.html
September 26th, 2005 at 3:07 pm
I have to say, I’m actually learning a TON of stuff from this brand study. Obviously they are doing some things really right, and I’d love to figure out how to adapt elements of it for my own use.
September 26th, 2005 at 3:07 pm
lol, Steve Waldman i bet….
corporate institutions that is…. whats the difference really?
i dunno, seems like spiritual warfare to me….. “Lets destroy Relgion and increase Ad Revenue!!!”
is beliefnet actually good for anything besides banner space?
September 26th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Yeah, I don’t know. I still think that their content is absolutely boring as all get out. Check out this review of the new Reese Witherspoon ghost romance movie. So stupid! Actually, I’ll post about this by itself later, cause I think it’s really funny the way they reviewed it.
September 26th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
Now that we’re on the topic of data-mining, I’m also very curious as to what extent Beliefnet engages in activities related to companies like BuzzMetrics and Umbria Communications. They could be developing very accurate depictions of how all different types of people talk and think about religion, and then developing very particular tailored items to suit those market segments.
September 26th, 2005 at 7:21 pm
beliefnet`s logo looks like a cross between a stirred ying/yang symbol and the nutrasweet logo. a mixing-blending and sweetening of religions? sounds a bit like multi-culturalism(socialism).
branding is a mark left in the flesh from a fire-heated iron in the shape of letters, numbers and symbols to mark cattle. the corporate logo is is designed to burn into the consciousness in a similar way. the methods are certainly occult. even the ad agencies have little clue 9or they`re not telling.). it is fascinating to see the emergence of some actual data on the subject compared to the hyperbole in the traditional media.
i am eager to build a brand for tools4change and have spent many hours searching for real advice on how to do it. the consistant advice i get is repitition. the more times a person sees your thing the more they want it. other than that it seems to be pay to play. large corporations have big budgets for ad campaigns and when they fail they just don`t pay a shareholder dividend. we have to get it right the first time.
September 26th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
[…] t Like Heaven
A few people thought I was being needlessly harsh in my recent brand analysis of the popular spiritual website, Beliefnet. So for those skep […]
September 27th, 2005 at 5:08 pm
Sorry, Tim, your “FUCKING LOSERS!” comment is causing me to distance myself from you once again. I thought with the new spiffy web site your discourse had changed, but what originally turned me off about your site, how you “rail against the dumbasses,” and flame anyone/anything that disagrees with you or you find disagreeable, is still present. I came back to your site because of the Ran interview and felt hopeful to see that things had changed. I have always liked your content, which I still think is excellent (I even contributed my two cents on the Santisima Muerte thread). You will probably dismiss me as yet another “dumbass” but take it from someone who is much older than you, “railing” against these people/things gets you nowhere. What is accomplished? I am not a Christian but I find it helpful to take the advice of Jesus in Matthew when he says “shake the dust off your feet” and move on to others who want to hear what you have to say when you are confronted with the disagreeable. Too much energy is wasted by flaming. Keep up your content. Shouldn’t that be enough? Laying people to waste doesn’t help anyone. Good luck with your new digs.
September 27th, 2005 at 5:12 pm
Whatever works for you, Robert. Everybody’s free to approach things their own way. I’m not interested in begging anybody to read my site.
September 27th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
i love it when people complain about something somebody does and are at the same time doing exactly what they are complaining about.
i probably do it myself even… it definitly weird though…
what i dont get is why people get so easily offended by i guess “harsh” language while eloquently dissing the shit out of somebody is acceptable… i dunno, arguments & insults that i know are bullshit but are worded “nicely” piss me off more… i mean, if you got a point, and it can be summed up nicely in “FUCKING LOSERS!” why not? i mean… what if Jesus said it? lol….
anyways, i suppose my point would be, wow your being easy on him Tim, thats nice of you……
i think you were right on the money, if you are to embaressed to ask questions about your OWN RELIGION!!! you are a fucking loser… and i think you described well why right after….
one
human?
September 27th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
Yeah, I mean, I thought I summed it up really well when I wrote in the original piece:
People can threaten me all they want about not reading my site anymore, but guess what! You’re not giving me money or supporting me. Instead I’m giving YOU something for free. And I’ve been doing it whether people like it or not for years now.
September 27th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
I returned to see what my comments had generated and I pretty much expected what was written. Your last post, Tim, was very telling. It’s not about begging people to read your site and what I am saying surely are not “threats”. It’s interesting that you would mention “money” and “support.” You allow us to share opinions, which are of some value to you or else you wouldn’t be letting us comment. If you want to look at give and take, you are not giving me something for free if I participate in it and add to the discourse where YOU learn. When I made comments about the Santisima Muerte, for example, you thanked me for my contribution. I was (your words) “giving YOU something for free,” too, if you want to look at it from the perspective of subjective worth. I took time to contribute (I didn’t have to) and you learned something about a posted topic from someone with a firsthand knowledge that you do not possess. We all learn from this Socratic process; we all give and take. I enjoy your postings, but when entire threads turn into just “flames,” what is accomplished? Please look at this carefully. It all really tends to demean the stellar content found here and your wonderful work.
I think in time, this all will change as you might not feel you have to prove anything to anyone.
“Human” please re-read my post. I’m certainly not calling names, trying to be “eloquently dissing” or “railing” against anyone.
Good luck, Tim, and I’m still a fan of what you do. I’m sure our paths will cross in the future… Respectfully, —Robert
September 27th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
you were coming back here hoping Tim had changed?
i cant stand that “older than you” comment…. as if “older” people have figured anything out either lol….
corny man.
and then when folks sugar coat their low blows with “I really respect what you do and blah blah blah” its sooooooooooo annoying..
and fans are usually the ones who expect you to conform to what their vision of you is… its a weird phenomena.
well, thats just my opinion….
one
human?
November 10th, 2005 at 12:54 am
[…] ir growth patterns. And now the same thing is poised to happen with religion. Whatever my dislikes for their approach, I consider Beliefnet to be bellwether of all thi […]
November 11th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
[…] , just like about 15,000 other people who join every 24 hours. I share Tim Bucher’s opinion that it is a bland, vanilla packaging and processing of spirituality. […]