In the early days it was relatively easy to market & sell the products & services of Scientology doing hats according to the posts of the Org board was more clear sailing than I believe it is today. A new star rises easier than how it continues to repeat itself always destined toward its capacity & potential for its peak of development before its eventual gradual decline as a falling star. How long it can mantain its peak of development depends on who steers its course. I know nothing of the current leadership of Scientology or how it manages the testament of the will of LRH. I can imagine though that they are in a chronic emergency condition requiring always to escape the dangers of how the Internet continues exposing the actual history of LRH & Scientology. This will continue requiring turnover of new people through Div 6 divisions & trying to keep old customers on board via Div 2 getting them urgently to buy new services. It can be chronically requiring delivering services via Div 4 functions that give good results so that satisfied customers will not be ill affected by adverse publicity. It can be a difficult job steering Scientology at these times. In any business however satisfied customers will continue staying a loyal consumer in the market place of the business. To the extent Scientology can continue to satisfy its customers will it continue remaining viable. This is a fact of the market place.
The marketing of Scientology is done mostly centrally and unsuccessfully.
While the individual on the ground that contacts people is the one that most likely gets them in, this is far from the viewpoint and approach that is taken at the top.
There used to be such things as localized marketing for areas that were under the org responsibility. This was changed by DM (and later denied that it was his idea) to a completely centralized marketing in CMU (Central Marketing Unit).
What happens in real life is that quite a lot of promo (written for no one in particular and targeted to no one in particular) goes out to a generic list of Trained and Processed. Apart from other problems (such as losing the names on the list as people move, with CoS having no methods of keeping the addres changes up to date) this results in one person getting promo for just about every service, whenever there is some campaign that calls for it.
Campaigns usually get launched in events, so most of the promo is for new releases. Anyways, this badly planned promo arrives to you whether you have done the service or bought the product or not, whether it has anything to do with your next service on the Bridge or not. So it goes to the garbage can.
That's the promo that goes out centrally.
The most effective marketing (apart from personal contact) is really the events. The events reach maybe 10,000 Scientologists (The official figure is over 20,000, but about 50% of the attendance is staff), with some of most dedicated ones attending the live event in the front seats.
The events make money. I estimate that something like a third of the Scientology income comes from events. That's why DM has a great interest in them.
The main problem with events, despite their monetary success, is that they get next to no new public in, so they are not effective in that way.
Some rather random efforts are made to promote Scientology or related matters (PR things, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Narconon). Random, because the reasons for these campaigns is not particularly thought out; frequently they come up as some sort of a stopgap handling, either because there was a flap in that particular area or because there has to be something to talk about at an event, especially at IAS, the biggest money-making event of the year with the "big campaigns" -- which mostly only exist in event visuals and die out rapidly until a few weeks before the next event when it is a flap that nothing has happened on that campaign to give an update.
That's a fairly sloppy but nevertheless factual description of the PR and marketing activities of the Church.
Bottom line: Most of the wealth and continued success of Scientology comes from milking the existing public for all they got. That is not very likely to last much longer.
Considering all of the strategic direction is done by one man based on his concept of what people think and LRH's ideas of how finances work, the end will be inevitable.
The only question is how much longer will it take.
V
PS. I read through this again. It is really pretty sloppy. Don't mind me -- it's got some information value as well.
