Trend Toward Spirituality Widening

Some describe a spiritual yearning. Others see nostalgia for the bedrock values of a simpler past. Still others trace a pendulum swing away from the materialism of the 1980s and early ‘90s.

Whatever you call it, interest in matters of the soul - from evangelical Christianity to new-age pundits - is on the upswing.

And marketers are paying close attention.

“I would not use the word religious, but I’d say there’s definitely a trend toward the spiritual-based, and I’d say it’s widespread,” said Glenna Salsbury, a trainer and keynote speaker who is president of the National Speakers Association.

She estimates that 75 to 80 percent of the association’s professional speakers incorporate an ethical or spiritual message into their talks.

Marketing maven Faith Popcorn names the trend “anchoring” and lists it among the top movements that advertisers or product designers should “click” into if they want to tap a consumer response.

“Collectively, we’re digging deep into our memory, searching for some leap of faith … to help us cut through the chaos, or maybe to prepare us for the Big 2000,” Popcorn says in her recent book “Clicking.”

In Manhattan, Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam is responding with a new book that publisher Joel Fotinos believes is on the cutting edge of the spirituality movement - “Sweat Your Prayers,” which teaches author Gabrielle Roth’s approach to self-awareness and meditation through dance.

In California, a minister is trying to break into the newly deregulated public utility business with a start-up called Christian Energy Electrical Corp. He’s targeting church congregations as customers with a promise to plow some profits back into urban communities.

And Atlanta-based Peter Lowe is convinced that the personal integrity message in his success seminars is the crucial factor bringing about 400,000 people and $25 million in revenues to the nonprofit organization this year.

“I decided I wanted my events to teach people to have integrity and character. I’ve since found it’s one of the greatest marketing tools around,” Lowe said.

Stephen Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic,” was a pioneer who built a training industry around his 1989 best seller.

The new Franklin Covey Co. - formed last summer in a merger of Covey’s organization with the Franklin Quest day-planner company - should have $600 million in revenues this fiscal year, said chairman Hyrum Smith.

Smith, who like Covey is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said the Franklin Covey stores and seminars take pains not to advocate any religion.

“If we called them ‘The Seven Habits of Effective Christians’ we’d lose half the world,” he said. “You can find threads of Mormonism in what we say, you can find threads of Hinduism. .. If you look at the heart of our seminars, we teach you to identify your core values and order your life around them.”

The market for such a message is huge, Smith believes. Corporate training alone is a $65 billion market. “We’re confident we’re just scratching the surface,” he said. The aging of the huge baby-boom generation, now entering its 50s, is a leading factor behind the recent boom in sales of ethical, religious and spiritual books, said Lynn Garrett, religion editor of Publishers Weekly.

“The baby boomers have dominated cultural conversations in this country for a long time, and they still do,” she said. Now, boomers are watching their parents age and die. “These experiences cause people to look beyond the material.”

Sales in the adult religion and spiritual books category rose 8.3 percent last year, while overall book sales dropped by 4.4 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers.

The hottest new sub-category? “The whole body, mind, spirit nexus,” said Garrett - including Christian diet books and titles such as Roth’s “Sweating Your Prayers.”

But this category remains eclectic - as witness Doubleday’s large national ad last month for a new book by conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. The title: “Nearer My God: An Autobiography of Faith,” described as “a very personal book, an exploration of the faith that has ruled his life.”

While Doubleday and Putnam create new products to meet this market, other firms - from grocery stores to telephone companies - are marketing mainstream products by promising donations to a cause.

Daniel J. Howard, chairman of marketing at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, sees a pendulum-swing back to the values-driven consumer of the ‘60s - with the difference that the “Christian right” is now more part of the picture than it was 40 years ago.

“You ask people what is important to them … in the ‘60s, 90 percent of the answers were very value-driven - concern for society, the environment, the poor. Then you got into the ‘70s, and it started going down, and it went way down in the ‘80s. Now what you’re seeing is a resurgence,” he said.

Working Assets, a San Francisco-based long-distance telephone service provider, has taken advantage of the new cycle to make the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing small companies for five years in a row.

“The underlying notion (behind Working Assets) is to use all of what a person does to accomplish some good,” said president Michael Kieschnick. This year, the $104 million company will give about $3 million to causes that get the most votes from its customers. In past years, those have included Habitat for Humanity and International Planned Parenthood.

LifeLine, an Oklahoma-based long-distance carrier, advertises contributions to evangelical Christian causes. So does Christian Telecom Network of California, which tells callers “Thank you for calling Christian Telecom Network, where every call supports God’s work.”

Religious imagery is cropping up in mainstream advertising, albeit with a subtle and humorous touch that suggests some edginess about the subject.

Nuns chatter in French about their computers in a recent IBM ad. A Southwestern Bell customer in a recent television spot is chided by St. Peter for not giving during his life. The customer counter that he gave to Ronald McDonald House. “Oh yes, the phone thing,” says the saint - referring to a seasonal promotion by Southwestern Bell that donates to the charity in return for each new mobile service customer.

Advertisers need to be cautious, warned Stan Richards, president of The Richards Group advertising agency in Dallas.

“When you’re dealing with values that are essentially universal, we’re all on comfortable ground,” he said. “The moment an advertiser takes what might be read as an advocacy position, he takes the risk of offending some other subset.

“Advertising isn’t in the business of offending people. Or it shouldn’t be.”

Does the blending of marketplace and morality trouble theologians?

“It isn’t troubling to me, in that I expect companies to act in self-interest,” said Dr. Robert Pyne, associate professor of systematic theology at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Dr. Robert Wuthnow, director of the Center for Religion and Society at Princeton University, said it’s important to look at the source.

“There are groups of people who are interested, let’s say, in value-based investing, who are really quite serious about putting their values first. … There are those who are seriously meeting the needs of certain groups of people. And there are others for whom you’d have to look harder to say what’s really driving this.

“I guess I’d want to raise a skeptical voice about some of what passes as values-based marketing,” Wuthnow said.

There could be, he said, “very little values and quite a lot of marketing.”