COP 03 / Developing Question

On reflection and following a conduction of mostly unsuccessful succinct research I discovered that my original question was not the most fitting to the course - it was difficult to find visual examples of religious propaganda, in addition, the links to graphic design were fairly weak.

However I knew that Religion was something I would still like to concentrate on, but begin to consider a strategy in strengthening the link to design, whilst remaining true to my interests.

I am interested in brand identity and theory and so I wondered if this could be applied to religion, especially in contemporary society. I questioned whether religion is now an institution that is marketed towards the masses in contrary to it being majorly esoteric.

In effect, my question then evolved into:

It will be important to do research into brands and the methods they use to engage their consumers, and investigate whether these techniques are applied within Religion which could now be considered a 'religious marketplace' due to the competition each religious institution faces - much like brands face with their products e.g Apple Mac vs Windows PC.

This will be discussed in my tutorial scheduled next week, but I thought I would begin to look into this by reading some key texts including:

EINSTEIN, M (2008). Brands Of Faith. Oxfordshire, Routledge

HOOVER, S (2006). Religion in the Media Age. Routledge

OLINS, W. (2003). Wally Olins on brand. London, Thames & Hudson

Planning the Project 

I constructed a rough idea of how the dissertation structure may pan out, which could change but until then offers organisation to my project:

• Introduction
• Brand theory & examples
• Religious definitions
• Religion as a product
• Methods
• Relate to theory

Following an email from Ben, who will be my mentor for COP, he suggested I now think about the following bullet points:

• Can you give me some specific examples of this?
• Which example of branding theory have been used, or will you use to analyse? 
• Is branding theory self-consciously used by religions and explicitly stated as such, or is this something you are 'imposing form the outside'?