Keeping Up With The Times
The Great Singapore Sale is half over. Another 2 more weeks and we’ll have to wait another year for the mother of all sales.
This year, the organisers came up with a catchy slogan – “this item is not on sale…but just about everything else is.”
Well, yes, almost everything is on sale…Now how brilliant a marketing strategy is that?
Interestingly, this same slogan has now been adopted by another organisation with no links whatsoever with fashion or shopping.
Enter the church.
I was walking around town this afternoon when I caught sight of the cousin of this catchy slogan. Upon closer inspection, it’s just a linguistic choice of substituting ‘on’ with ‘for’. Look, even the choice of colours is the same!
“This is not for sale”. Catchy indeed. And it’s mounted on such a huge banner staring at you in the face along Orchard Road. How can one not notice it?
The church, one of the most revered and sacred institutions going hip? Yes! Yes! Yes!
In an attempt to reinvent itself and its image to catch up in the new media age, both institutions and people are changing with the times. And that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Imagine the church continues to preach in a certain way that appeals only to a segment of the population. Not anymore. Churches, and to a larger extent, mosques and temples, have reinvented themselves with such success that some pastors and religious leaders are being elevated to pop star celebrity status and having prayer sessions in different languages, including dialect!
Similarly, parents and schools are constantly reinventing themselves to keep up with the times and maintain their relevance.
Parents must now speak ‘youth language’ to bond with their kids and come across more as hip and cool, rather than old and out-of-touch. Schools are jumping on the virtual bandwagon and are rolling out more lesson packages in the form of e-modules in this cyberstage. I know of some teacher friends who even go to the extent of handing out their msn email to their students for them to contact them and ask questions online.
Indeed, in this new world economy, the stubborn are the ones who become obsolete. Only when we reinvent, transform and metamorphosise ourseleves can we continue to be relevant (by societal standards).
