From the last post:

What brands now have to do is say, ‘I’m recognizing you as the complete and incredible being that you are.

We have to be careful about this. Amongst our early attempts to develop slideshows there were efforts which tried to show the “miseries of material life”. What we realized when we ran them is that a common perception of this message can be summed up in two words: “You Suck”.

When the public sees a slide presentation like this, it comes across like a direct attack on them. Practitioners of Krishna Consciousness may look at each other knowingly and nod their heads, but when you show pictures of Joe or Jane Public and say something like: “Just see how much he is suffering. Just see how meaningless her life is”, the audience hears: “You Suck”. Why? Because that’s them you have up on the screen. Joe and Jane Public.

When you show natural disasters and talk about how unstable the material world is and how at any moment we can be thrown head over heels, or killed, people say (or at least think): “Those poor people. How dare you try to profit from their suffering by using it to try to guilt trip / scare us into buying your religion”.

So we’ve been working on some different angles, which communicate the same essential truth, but in a more palatable way.

Instead of “material life is suffering!”, we say: “Modern life is too complicated” (people all nod their heads - “simplicity, yeah!”)

Instead of “wasting your life”, we say: “losing time”

Instead of “look at these people suffering”, we say “stress related disorders are superseding all other forms of physical ailment”.

Instead of “working like asses”, we say “many people are obligated to spend long hours commuting to and from work” (they recognize: “yeah - that’s me!”)

It’s all about recognizing that people r0ck, and they just have a few details that they need to align to fix those niggling discrepancies. As Prabhupada begins his Bhagavatam commentary: “You r0ck, but… there is a pinprick in your otherwise awesome existence, and the Bhagavatam is here to help you address that”.

We can help with those details. After all, religion means proper adjustment.

Of course, if the only audience we’re after is one that consists of people who are completely materially exhausted, then another presentation will be appropriate, but this way of doing it seems so far to have the widest appeal.