Excuse me for not having written of late. Been busy working on the new book…More on that later.

Here’s a story you might have missed:

Kirstie Alley was the (as it turns out) short-term spokesperson for Jenny Craig. Unlike Valerie Bertinelli who continues to hawk for the weight-loss company, Kirsty Allen couldn’t keep the weight off.

Willing to try yet again, Ms. Alley created her own line of weight loss products and developed a reality show–Kirstie Alley’s Big Life–on A&E to launch them. (The show still appears on A&E’s web site, but it is not currently on their program schedule.)

When I tell you that this show is beyond bad (one critic’s headline was something along the lines of “Big Life has the makings of a Big Flop”), you know that’s saying something because I’ll watch a lot of programming others consider fairly awful. Suffice it to say, I couldn’t make it through more than one episode.

What does this have to do with religion and marketing? According to an article on Gawker, the line of diet products being sold have ties to the preachings of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. (Alley is well known as a Scientologist.) Anonymous, a group that is famous for investigating Scientology, claims that there are ties to the church itself, though that has not been verified.

Either way, it would behoove those who are concerned about their weight and fans of Kirstie Alley to not go blindly into purchasing this product–one that has a steep price tag of $139/month…wonder how that compares with Jenny Craig?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 5:29 am and is filed under Religion and Marketing, Religion and Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.