I’m talking at this conference and I’ve chosen what I hope is a provocative title:
2.50–3.10: ‘Where’s the purple cow? A marketing perspective on union membership decline’, Trevor Cook, Department of Government, University of Sydney.
The ‘purple cow’ is, of course, a reference to Seth Godin’s book in which he argues that success in marketing is all about being remarkable. I intend to argue that unions are respected, liked, thought to be important by many more Australians than actually join them and that part of the reason they don’t join is that unions have become brown cows, in Godin’s analogy, and we quickly lose interest in them. Unions used to be remarkable but they no longer are. They need to find ways of being remarkable again.
