Marketing is Dead. Long Live Purposing: How to connect with your audience in the new, intuitive way

By Justin JG Cooper

Marketing is Dead – it died peacefully in its sleep a few years ago. Yet we are still trying to market ourselves in the old way, with disappointing results.

As marketing dies, Purposing takes its place. This book defines a new, intuitive, and authentic approach.  It’s about discovering who you really are and what makes you

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marmite PTY Ltd
• Release date: Nov 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648444510

Book preview

Chapter 1

Boiling Hot Tea

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Picture the scene. I’m sitting back in my camping chair. It’s top-of-the-line, so it’s really comfortable – having paid $10 more than your bog-standard chair. I’m savouring the meal we’ve just enjoyed around the camp fire. The kids are sleeping soundly tucked into their sleeping bags in the tent behind us.  All is well.  All is very well.

We’ve enjoyed beers and glasses of wine. This is glamping at it’s finest. My wife, in an effort to ensure I am in supreme comfort, offers me a cup of tea. To ensure we’re not taking in too much caffeine, she suggests a peppermint tea, which nicely compliments the glass of Australian Shiraz that is perched delicately in the glass stem holder of my top-of-the-range camping chair. This elegant chair has all the features you’d expect – a zip-up pocket on the side, a wide cup holder, to top of the elegant wine glass holder. 

With all its wondrous features, my souped-up chair had no facility for the handle of the cup I was handed. It was after all a very elegant Italian-designed affair. The perfect match for my chair in fact. However the generous cup holder on my formula-1 chair simply wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the handle on this formula-1 cup. I tried placing it in the spacious zip bag pocket – but it wasn’t very stable. I thought about putting it on the floor, but the ground was far too dirty for such as elegant cup.

So I did the only thing a logical person would do in this situation – I placed the cup of boiling hot water containing the peppermint tea bag on the chair between my thighs. A good temporary staging point I felt, as I decided how to rearrange the gaggle of drinking vessels that now surrounded me.  As I pondered this problem my weight shifted on the chair and the inevitable happened. The cup fell backwards and distributed every last drop of boiling hot water onto my rear end – narrowly missing my ‘twig and berries.’

I shot out of my chair like a champagne cork, uttering expletives, and hopping around doing a sort of ‘Irish jig.’ I then spotted the industrial-sized Eski cooler we had with us, that contained the dozens of beer bottles that any serious camper knows is needed on these expeditions. There was a sizzling sound as I lowered my rear end into the ice container, probably accompanied by a little steam. The pain started almost immediately, but the ice was containing it to bearable levels.

My wife and friends fell about laughing at this rather dramatic exit from my top-of-the-line camping chair, until they noticed the pale look of pain and anguish on my face. That’s when they realised that I had actually done myself some damage. Fortunately my wife and I had managed to produce two children already, so securing her lineage wasn’t one of my wife’s concerns at that particularly moment. My grey, sweating face was another matter entirely, and she could tell that I wasn’t in a particularly good state. A quick phone call to my friend’s mother (a retired nurse) confirmed that the best place for me right now was with my rump securely placed in the ice bucket. So that’s where it stayed for the next hour or so – sipping Australian Shiraz, for medicinal purposes.

My wife eventually carted me back to the tent to inspect the damage to my posterior. Apparently it looked even less pretty than normal, and was later confirmed as second-degree burns. My loving wife generously volunteered to apply ice packs to the affected area to keep down the pain and discomfort. As I knelt facedown in my tent trying to hold it together and avoid blubbing, I had time to reflect on the error of my judgement. I also started to wonder why on earth the universe had decided to impart this amount of pain on me.

It wasn’t until the morning when I woke up – the extreme pain gone, replaced by a throbbing ache – that I had a moment of blinding clarity. And the message from the universe was this:

Get up off your arse and tell your story, or you’ll get burned.

You see the lead up to this event in March 2013 was a shift in my thinking – in fact in my very being. It was an awakening to my Purpose on this planet, and a realisation that to continue doing my work as a marketer, which had occupied me for the previous 25 years, just wasn’t going to cut it any more. I had woken up to what I was supposed to be doing with my life; yet I hadn’t done much to get started on my mission. There clearly wasn’t enough urgency within me to start sharing my newfound gift with the people that needed it most. Which is presumably why the universe had decided to turn up the heat on me. Literally.

And in that moment of realisation, I started laughing. There I was, face down in my tent, bum in the air, with the prospect of a trip to the medical centre looming, unable to even sit down in my car.  Yet I could see how brilliantly the universe had delivered its simple, sharp message; ‘Get up off your arse!’ 

And that’s why I wrote this book. Marketing is Dead Long Live Purposing is about standing up and telling your story – the true story behind why you’re here. It doesn’t matter if you work for someone, run your own business, or you manage a brand. It’s really important to understand ‘Why,’ and to act on that instinct that lies deep within you.

Because if you don’t, you’re going to get your arse burned. It might not happen in the same visceral way that it did for me, but it will happen none-the-less. I believe the world has shifted in the last few years, and just going through the motions at work isn’t good enough any more. If you are not working ‘on Purpose,’ sooner of later you are going to start feeling lost, frustrated, and depressed. All because you are not focusing on the thing you are supposed to be working on.

This isn’t a typical business book. Nor is it a self-help manual. It’s a practical, step-by-step guide to defining the Purpose of your work, and explaining how it makes a difference to your customers and business partners. You don’t need to be a new age hippy to appreciate the message it brings. All you have to be is curious about what might happen if you focused on working on the things you love doing most, rather than just working for the money.

It’s a book to encourage you to ignore the peer pressure that says you need to get on with the work you are currently doing, keep your head down, and keep going - even though you have come to hate it.

It is a practical book designed to give you the tools to help you identify your Purpose and connect it to the work you do. It’s simple to follow and doesn’t require any prior training as a Buddhist monk or South American shaman.

It’s designed to give you insights to identify the work you are supposed to be doing – work which will help the people out there who need you most. It may mean focusing on a particular aspect of your current work, business, or brand – or it might mean finding completely new work, starting a new business, or launching/managing a new brand.

My objective is to help you become happier, more productive, and more effective at what you do. And ultimately that means being more successful. It’s written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, with plenty of personal stories to keep you entertained.

And if that means avoiding getting second-degree burns on your nether regions; that’s a good thing, right?

Chapter 2

The Illusion

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Chantelle was hot – smoking hot. Ken was a God. Together they were mesmerising.

They