Guerilla Marketing Strategies of Neochurches in Cameroon

摘要

The subject of this thesis is a phenomenon of guerrilla marketing, an innovative and unconventional form of marketing that emerged relatively recently and became a popular tool of marketing. In Cameroon there have been the opening of many new churches, especially the Pentecostal and evangelical churches who aim at the prosperity gospel. Neochurches are an offspring of the traditional churches with their leaders having a celebrity status and miracles, deliverance and prosperity their main market offerings. Most of these churches have not had significant growths in terms of membership as compared to the traditional churches. There are 89 religious denominations in Cameroon. Cameroon is you see so many churches opening and ending up w very poor membership growth and after 3 or 4 years they shut down. Also if new churches follow the various steps on how to attract a crowd and keep them as permanent members of their churches most new churches in Cameroon will excel in their numbers and membership. The main aim of this study to explore the marketing strategies used by these churches to win new members and keep existing ones and propose innovative marketing strategies to improve on their market position. The results from this exploratory study ahows that here is evidence to prove that all new churches need a good marketing plan to succeed and avoid stagnant growth or shutting down due to few membership in the churches. Marketing is necessary for all organizations both profit making and non profit making organizations and hence churches are not an exclusion. Most neochurches in Cameroon focus to pull a crowd to the Sunday services and special events like crusades and retain the existing members by overt signs of miracles, deliverance, testimonies of prosperity and inspiring massages. It is recommended that these Neochurches should exploit the social media as one of the simplest ways to win in members into their churches and also maintain a fragrant media presence.