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The Foster Letter —

Religious Market Update

The FOSTER Letter is a bi-weekly e-mail religious market intelligence report targeted to Christian market channel and ministry leaders.  Each issue reports on news, trends, events and research that will directly or indirectly impact your audiences and businesses in a convenient summary format  Better informed leaders make better choices!

Researched, Edited & Published by Gary D. Foster

Excerpts from the

June 25, 2010 edition of

The FOSTER Letter—Religious Market Update 

June 25, 2010

 Creativity—The New Leadership Competency According to an IBM Institute for Business Value survey, today’s CEOs identify “creativity” as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. IBM Sr. VP Frank Kern says, “That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude.” (Monday Morning Memo 6/7/10) 

Up Close And Personal The U.S. economic downturn is very up close and personal for many families. 96% personally know people that have lost their job in the last year, 44% know people that have had to move away to find employment, and 30% personally know people that have lost their home through foreclosure. (www.STATEofthePLATE.info) 

Happiness Increases & Stress Decreases After 50, finds a Gallup survey. Young adults experience negative emotions more frequently than those who are older. Stress and anger are similar in that they consistently decline with age, but worry holds steady until around 50, when it sharply drops. The study also found women report greater stress, worry and sadness than men at all ages. (USAToday.com) 

As Gen-Y Ages, women narrow their sphere of online communication, while men change their sphere of online communication. Social networks of friends and family are more likely to have an influence on women, while business networks are more likely to have an influence on men.(Engage Gen-Y 5/21/10) 

Are You Innovating Everywhere? When talk of innovation relates solely to products, it misses some of the most important elements of this critical business quality. The most effective strategies foster the discipline of innovation everywhere, including every component of a healthy brand: positioning, product, service or mission, pricing, marketing mix, sales channel strategy, supply chain, finance and management processes. Innovation across the board will do more than just spark top-line growth; it will serve as a catalyst to generate growth in many other critical areas, including finance, strategy and distribution. A comprehensive approach reduces risk to an acceptable level while providing the investment funds to support an aggressive overall business strategy. I can help you craft a comprehensive innovation strategy for your organization. Contact 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. (AdAge.com 6/20/07) 

Leverage Gen-Y’s Tech Savvy According to a ’08 study by Accenture, New-Generation Workers, 52% of those aged 14–27 said state-of-the-art technology is an important consideration in selecting an employer. In the same study, more than 20% (of those that had a job) said the technologies offered by their employer did not meet their expectations. It used to be that the most senior employees received the newest equipment, creating a waterfall of increasingly obsolete equipment down to the most junior staff. Turning this around to where each generation gets an appropriate level of technology based on their role and technological profile may be in order. (Engage Gen-Y 6/11/10) 

Teachers Skeptical Just 36% of school teachers say they believe that all of their students have the ability to succeed academically, and only 13% believe that all their students are motivated to succeed academically. (Trends & Tudes 5/10) 

What Christians Give To 98% of people give to their local church, but they also generously support many other Christian and charitable causes. Here are the top-10 places people gave in the past 12 months in addition to their local church: 60% Missions/Missionaries, 45% Crisis/Relief/-Natural Disasters/Refugees, 33% Unemployed people they knew, 28% Local Community/Cultural/Sports/School Groups, 26% Denominations, 25% Homeless Persons, 24% Media/Radio/TV Ministries, 24% Evangelism/Evangelistic Crusades, 23% Students/Military Ministries and 23% to Rescue Missions/Homeless Ministries. (www.STATEofthePLATE.info) 

Reputation Is Everything The Internet and search make all information easily accessible and capable of becoming viral and ubiquitous in a millisecond. The Web is the new central nervous system of the marketplace. It’s introduced unprecedented speed and efficiency in synchronizing the core truth about who you really are with your actual reputation in the marketplace. The Web is driving expectations and sensitivity around brands higher than ever. As a result, marketing and brand-building is no longer about creating a desirable façade, but about driving all that is desired into the product in the first place. It’s living by the philosophy that the sum of all your actions equals your brand equity—including the experience of even mundane things like invoicing and returns. Are you really what you say you are? Contact 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. (Online Spin 4/11/08) 

Millennials in the Workplace Neil Howe has updated our understanding of this generation with his latest book, Millennials in the Workplace (co-written by Reena Nadler). What Howe reveals is a continuation of the same generational characteristics that he and William Strauss outlined as early as ’91. The 7 core traits that underlie their description of this generation are: Special, Sheltered, Confident, Team-Oriented, Conventional, Pressured and Achieving. These traits have followed this generation as they have progressed through each stage of their lives to date and are essential as employers seek to understand what makes their newest and youngest contributors tick. (Engage Gen-Y 6/11/10) 

Morals Make a Difference From ’06 to’08, 42% of U.S. female teens and 43% of U.S. male teens said they have had sex, down from 51% in ’88 among females and 55% in ’95 among males, says a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. Among teens that have remained virgins, the most common reason is that it is “against religion or morals.” Other common reasons listed were “don’t want to get pregnant” and “haven’t found the right person yet.” Among the sexually experienced, the majority first had sex with someone with whom they were going steady, while 14% of female and 25% of male teens had first sex with someone they had just met or with a friend. (Christian Post 6/3/10) 

Alone Together “Over and over, kids raised the same 3 examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events,” says MIT’s Dr. Sherry Turkle. There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world. Turkle talked to children who tried to get their parents to stop texting while driving, and they get resistance. Smartphone and laptop use by parents is not necessarily a bad thing. Parents have always had to divide their attention, and researchers point out that there’s a difference between quantity and quality when it comes to conversations between parents and children. Distracted time is not high-quality time, whether parents are checking the newspaper or their BlackBerry. (NY Times 6/9/10) 

Breaking The Curse Of Knowledge We all tend to forget that the knowledge we possess is not common to everybody. We automatically assume everyone knows the same things we do. When we fall prey to the Curse of Knowledge, we phrase ideas as they exist in our own mind instead of expressing them in a way that appeals to the minds of others. The ‘Curse’ leads us to abstraction and separates us from our audience. I can help you communicate in a way that will connect with and appeal to your audience. Contact 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath, Random House, ’07) 

Words Children Hear Children in higher socioeconomic homes hear an average of 2,153 words per hour, whereas those in working-class households hear only about 1,251; children whose parents are on welfare heard an average of 616 words per hour. (Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Paul H Brookes Pub Co 1995) 

Digital Music 70% of all music consumed in the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany came through digital channels while accounting for just 35% of music revenues, finds a recent Capgemini report. According to the Recording Assoc. Industry of America, digital music sales account for about 40% of total U.S. music sales. Despite all this, last year more than 72% of U.S. Christian music sales were physical products and 27% were digital. (CBA Retailers+Resources 7/10) 

WOM A recent study from Yahoo finds the best vehicles for influencing word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing come from consumers who play in social networks. These “Conversation Catalysts” drive a disproportionately higher percentage of WOM activity. Although only 7% of all brand-WOM conversations occur online, 38% of people have brand-WOM conversations both online or offline influenced by the Internet, which Yahoo estimates at 74 million people. Among the media channels influencing WOM, the Internet has grown while others like television and print remain flat.  (Online Media Daily 6/14/10) 

Coffee & Email 58% of U.S. online consumers begin their day interacting with companies on Email vs. 20% who start their day on search engines and 11% on Facebook. (Marketing Daily 6/15/10) 

Volunteerism Up According to a new federal report, Americans spent 100 million more hours helping their communities last year, and the number of volunteers rose by 1.6 million. This is the biggest single-year volunteer increase since ’03. States with high rates of unemployment and foreclosure have lower volunteer rates. In all, Americans spent 8.1 million hours volunteering in ’09, with the typical volunteer giving about 52 hours. People primarily served through religious organizations or social and community groups. (Yahoo! News 6/15/10) 

Media & Consumers The Council for Research Excellence has released a new study that finds 62% of shoppers were listening to the radio an average of 14 minutes prior to shopping, with 90% of shoppers doing so in cars 5 minutes on average, before shopping. 48% of shoppers viewed TV and 36% watched a commercial within 42 minutes of shopping.  Only 17% were engaged with their mobile phones while shopping; 16% of mobile users were watching live TV; 7% some other form of video.  (Media Daily News 6/17/10) 

Youth Violence 67% of U.S. adults say gang violence among youth is on the rise due to the current economic crisis, says a new World Vision survey. 46% of adults believe the main cause for gang violence among youth is “a lack of adult supervision” vs. 41% in ’09. According to the U.S. Justice Department, in ’08 there were more than one million “criminally active” gang members in the U.S. Between ’04 and ’08, state, local and federal law enforcement reported a 13% increase in gang activity. The number of gang members has risen by 42,500 members since ’02 to the current total of 774,000. (PR Newswire, World Vision 6/10/10) 

Divorce 80% of Americans believe it’s “very important” for children to grow up in a home with both their parents. 15% consider it “somewhat important,” and 4% think it’s “not important.” 72% of adults agree children who grow up in a home with both parents have an advantage over those whose parents are divorced. 15% disagree, and another 13% are not sure. Among adults who grew up with both parents, 82% rate this kind of home as very important for children, and 74% say this gives a child an advantage over those whose parents are divorced. By comparison, among those who did not grow up in a home with both parents, 73% think a two-parent home is “very important,” and 64% say it gives children an advantage. Despite the strong support for a two-parent home, only 46% of all Americans say it is too easy to get a divorce, 8% say it’s too hard and 38% think the level of difficulty is about right. (Rasmussen Reports 6/16/10)

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