Rick Warren & Purpose Driven Hardball

Way back on June 13, I wrote this article about the marketing strategy for "The Purpose Driven Life." The "pyro-marketing technique" is a type of so-called "viral marketing" as it is based on passing information from one person to the next. This is in opposition to marketing that relies on mass media advertising such as television commercials.

Greg Stielstra has also studied the success of The Purpose Driven Life as well as other modern phenomena such as The Passion of the Christ. Stielstra is Senior Marketing Director for Zondervan, the company that published Warren's book, and was a member of the team that handled some aspects of the marketing for The Purpose Driven Life.

Stielstra has now written PyroMarketing : The Four-Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep Them for Life and Rick Warren doesn't like it. Tim Challies, a blogger of great renown, writes more about this. You can go to his site to read more about it.

At that time the publication date for the book was June 15 of 2005, a date which has long-since passed. I was eager to read more about PyroMarketing, so when the date passed and it was still not available I began to wonder what had happened. Only a small amount of investigation showed that not only was the book still unreleased, but there was no mention of the book or its author on the web site of HarperCollins, the company that was to publish it. Neither was it listed as one of their "Upcoming Books." A web site dedicated to the book, pyromarketing.com, which is registered to DDM Marketing & Communications now says simply "Coming this July." Information that had at one time been available, such as PowerPoint presentations and Adobe Acrobat documents, as well as what appeared to be an early draft of the book's introduction, had been removed.