Religions have the best marketing strategies.

It sounds a little strange, I know, but if you’re looking for time-tested methods, you won’t find a David Ogilvy example containing a few thousand years of repeat customers, so - to the shoulders of giants we go.

One of the best marketing jobs ever, hands down, has to be the story of Marduk.

The Babylonians looked at their neighbors in Mesopotamia and decided they should take them over. However, being smart for their time, they realized that without an overlapping religion to help exert political control, even if they won, they couldn’t consolidate the populations.

In what must have been a fascinating strategy session, the council of Babylon finally surmised that the main detail they had to get right before attempting to subsume the city was an overhaul of their god.

Marduk was fine, but in the pantheon of gods of the time, he was a minor player. There was no way any Mesopotamian was taking up Marduk over the other options. It’d be like Cleveland taking over Boston in the Bill Belichik era and forcing New Englanders to become Cleveland fans, even though the Patriots still existed.

Marduk was the kind of detail that left unchecked could unravel the whole thing.

So, pen to paper, or chisel to stone or whatever they were using, they started to work out a NEW version of Marduk.

In the update, Marduk became a cosmic superhero. They said he slayed a primal monster, ripped the body in two, and chucked one half up to make the heavens, and the other half down to make the earth. Then, because he was just warming up, he goes to the other gods, takes fifty of their names, absorbs their powers, and crowns himself the number one god in the area.

The priests re-wrote everything. They started telling the new myth. People LOVED it.

It was like they were rolling out the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Everybody wanted to pray to Marduk. He was the coolest god on the block.

The Mesopotamians caught word and started converting. Marduk was just too cool to resist. And this is why it’s a brilliant marketing move.

A good marketing story is specific.

A good marketing story has a call to action.

And, a good market story gets results.

The Marduk move had excellent details, even if they invented and added them to convey them as truth, contained a call-to-action to join the religion, and it worked on the populace.

Even if most of us don’t worship Marduk today, you have to respect the audacity and the lengths they went to get the story across.

Looking at my own work, the killer-story framing through line is something I obsess with. Luckily I’m not cleaning up god images to overtake neighboring cities, but the lessons still hold. If you want to convince people to believe in your story, don’t be afraid to draw a lesson or two from the greatest examples in the history of humanity.

ps. h/t to Jason Buck and Jim O’Shaughnessy for flagging this story in their Infinite Loops episode.

Full episode here:

And if you want more Buck and O'Shaughnessy backstories, I've got you covered via BOTH of their Intentional Investor appearances: