What Happened to Brand Names?
By: Lyle E. Schaller

Once a month, 29-year-old Dave Harris picked up his widowed 77-year-old grandmother, Agnes, and they drove downtown for her favorite shopping trip. Born back in 1880, Agnes never learned to drive. They parked in a five-story parking garage that the city had constructed to help preserve retail trade in the central business district of this Midwestern city with a population of 120,000.

The year was 1957. Dave deposited three nickels in the parking meter. That was good for three hours of parking. The Consumer Price Index in 2007 is more than seven times what it was in 1957. Dave and Agnes took the elevator down to the first floor of the parking garage and walked the two short blocks to the department store that dominated the downtown business district. Two hours later, Agnes had completed her shopping. Her purchases included an accessory for David’s five-year-old son’s electric train set from the toy department, two books from the book department, a new pair of shoes, a sweater for herself, a bottle of perfume for Dave’s wife, and an electric toaster to replace her worn-out appliance. They returned to the parking garage and drove home.

Fifty years later, Dave’s widowed wife, now 77 years old, checked her list before getting into her car to run that day’s errands. The first stop was her 9 a.m. appointment with her ophthalmologist. That was followed by a stop at the local supermarket for toys, an hour at a Wal-Mart store, two hours with her weekly luncheon group at a restaurant that specializes in hosting small groups for lunch, a visit to a big-box store specializing in electronic goods to price television sets, and, finally, a stop at a pharmacy to pick up a 30-day supply of prescription drugs.

What Else Happened?
During the past five decades, a national chain, Federated Department Stores, Inc., has acquired more than three dozen regional department stores. That list includes such famous regional names as Burdine’s, Dayton’s, Famous-Barr, Filene’s, Hecht’s, Macy’s, Marshall Field’s, Meier, and Frank and Wanamaker.

In addition to mature women becoming comfortable driving their own car, the post-half century brought the decline of the big department store, the numerical decline or the disappearance of scores of "First Church Downtown" Protestant congregations, the emergence of a rapidly growing number of nondenominational megachurches, the suburbanization of half of the urban population, and the disappearance of most of the five-and-dime variety stores located on Main Street as recently as the 1970s. Four other related changes since 1957 merit mention here. The most significant for this discussion has been the deaths of most of the 82 million American adults who were age 30 or older in 1957. The “age 30 and over” slice of today’s population numbers approximately 177 million. Most of that age group in 1957 had experienced the Great Depression of the 1930s. They had been reared in an era of scarcity. By contrast, most of today’s adult Americans were reared in an era of abundance.

That introduces a second relevant change. After adjusting for inflation, the median per-capita personal income in America has jumped from nearly $16,000 in 1957 to well over $36,000 in 2007. The actual per-capita buying power of Americans has more than doubled.

That has generated a third change that has undermined the role of the big department store. Back in 1957, most of the adults in America had been reared in a culture that taught them the world offers you two choices--take it or leave it. One operational assumption was if that big department store downtown did not stock it, then that item probably was not available. Department stores of that era were relatively huge, ranging from 50,000 square feet of floor space up to 2.2 million for Macy’s in New York. For comparison purposes, the contemporary Wal-Mart Supercenter is about 200,000 square feet.

Most of today’s American adults have been reared in a culture that has taught them the world offers them a huge variety of attractive choices, including motor vehicles, restaurants, telephones, jeans, entertainment, and potential spouses.

That means the single-screen motion picture theater, the typical department store, the old five-and-dime variety store, the Protestant congregation offering one worship service every weekend, the retail store or church that owns a half dozen off-street parking spaces, and the mom-and-pop corner grocery have a far more difficult challenge to win and retain the loyalty of younger adults today than was true in 1957.

One more generational change must be mentioned here because it has undermined the future of thousands of retail stores and tens of thousands of Protestant congregations. As recently as the 1950s, the Christian driving to a specific destination who arrived to find an attractive, accessible, convenient, safe and vacant parking space often assumed that God was not only alive and well, but also looking after this particular believer. Most of today’s drivers assume that attractive, convenient and vacant parking space is not a gift; it is an entitlement.

What Are the Lessons for Today’s Leaders?
That rapidly growing recognition of the economic obsolescence of the traditional department store provides a dozen lessons for both congregational leaders and denominational officials.

1. Brand names do not carry the appeal they once did in America. That generalization applies to denominational affiliation, groceries, department stores, motor vehicles, passenger airlines, religious congregations, and institutions of higher education. The No. 1 example on the American religious scene consists of the millions of "cradle Catholics"

who are now active members of a Protestant congregation. Attractive choices and satisfaction have replaced loyalty to brand names.

2. The producer-driven world of the 1950s has been replaced by what the critics often call "consumerism." Institutions of higher education, major league baseball games played at night, airline travel, home schooling, the delivery of healthcare services, and the delivery of religious services are among the most highly visible.

3. The department store that in the 1950s was organized with a score or more of departments to meet the needs of everyone has discovered that the word "wants" has replaced the word "needs." One consequence is the expectations potential customers bring greatly exceeds their resources or their space. The "big box" retail stores with an abundance of off-street parking that specialize in electronic goods or books or home supplies or office supplies have become powerful competitors to the department store designed to meet everyone’s needs.

4. Customer loyalty rarely is inherited today. It must be earned, re-earned, and re-earned. One example is the regular churchgoer who has lived at the same address for 15 or more years and has switched church affiliation at least twice.

5. The couple who came from two different religious heritages in the 1950s usually agreed on a common choice before marriage. Today, they often affirm, "You go your way, and I’ll go my way."

6. An abundance of attractive, convenient, safe and vacant off-street parking spaces will not guarantee the arrival of a continuing parade of church shoppers, but the absence of adequate off-street parking can (a) kill a department store and (b) place a low ceiling on the future of a church.

7. The competition for future constituents has never been more intense than it is today among (a) retail stores and (b) American Protestant congregations.

8. Institutional mergers may not be the most productive approach to raising the ceiling on the future for (a) department stores, (b) Protestant denominations, and (c) Protestant congregations.

9. The Internet has replaced the newspaper as the best channel for communicating to potential future clientele "what we have to offer you."

10. The arrival in recent years of millions of immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, Mexico and the Pacific Rim has produced (a) tens of thousands of new retail stores that specialize in reaching and serving recent immigrants and their American-born children and (b) new Protestant congregations. In both cases, it usually is easier to create a new institution to serve a new constituency than it is to transform what was founded as an Anglo institution to serve a new ethnic minority group.

11. Whether the provider of goods or services is a restaurant, a grocery store, a Protestant congregation, a clothing store, a used car dealer, a florist shop, or a department store, the old road to success was marked by the slogan, "You are welcome here." The new road to success is, "Know your customers."

12. From the perspective of policy makers in American Protestantism, both congregational and denominational, the most important lesson is the time has come to affirm that next year will not be a carbon copy of 1957. One example is most younger Americans display a very low degree of loyalty to institutions. They find it easy to switch from one retail store to another, from one college or university to another, and from one church to another. That generalization applies even more clearly to denominational expressions of the Christian church than to congregations.

Another example is one way to understand tomorrow is to utilize a new system of dividing reality into smaller components. The most widely used system of classification consists of three categories--past, present, and future. Another classification system was widely used in the 1950s to describe department stores. Most fell into one of three categories. A few were owned and operated by the family that founded it. Many more were part of a regional chain such as Dayton’s or Weinstock’s or Foley’s. A growing number were owned by a national chain such as Sears, Roebuck and Company or J. C. Penney.

Likewise, on the Christian religious scene, most congregations in the first half of the 20th century were still classified by nationality, language and race. After World War II, Christian bodies in the United States enjoyed a brief wave of allegiance to a denominational identity. This was soon offset, however, by the ecumenical movement, a series of denominational mergers, and the emergence in the 1960s of an unprecedented culture trend called individualism. By 1980, a new classification system was beginning to replace denominational labels as the most useful way to describe Protestant churches. Fundamentalist, evangelical and liberal became a familiar three-part system.

A few years later, the culture wars motivated the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life to launch a research project designed to encourage every respondent to describe their own religious identity. The first national survey was completed in early 1992 and followed by new ones in 1996, 2000 and 2004.

In 2004, this project identified the four religious groups in America as evangelical Protestants (26.3 percent of the total adult population plus 2.8 percent Latino Protestant), mainline Protestant (16.0 percent), Black Protestants (9.6 percent), and Catholic (22 percent including Latino Catholic). Another 8 percent identified themselves as either unaffiliated believers or as "other" Christian faiths, 1.9 percent as Jews, while 7.5 percent described themselves as "Secularists" and 3.2 percent as atheists or agnostics. The remaining 2.7 percent described themselves as affiliated with another religious faith.

Instead of using denominational affiliation as the next subcategory in this classification system for both Protestants and Catholics, the respondents were divided among three groups--"traditionalists," "centrist" and "modernists." Traditionalist and centrist accounted for 91 percent of the evangelical Protestants, while centrist and modernist accounted for 70 percent of the mainline Protestants. Among the Catholics who trace their ancestry back to western Europe or Africa, nearly one-fourth were traditionalist Catholics in 2004, one-half were centrist and slightly more than one-fourth were modernists.

As your congregation designs a ministry plan for the next five to 10 years, what group do you expect will represent the largest proportion of your next 100 new constituents? Is it realistic to expect a traditionalist evangelical Protestant will switch denominations rather than go to a modernist congregation of the same denomination? How large is the umbrella over the congregations in your denominational tradition?

For more than four decades, Lyle E. Schaller has served as a parish consultant to hundreds of congregations and scores of denominational agencies. His recent books include From Geography to Affinity, The Ice Cube Is Melting, and A Mainline Turnaround.

Copyright © 2006 Lyle Schaller