Purpose is the animating force of life. Animals in the wild that no longer have purpose often are forsaken by their own or taken out by predators.
One of the most remarkable illustrations of the irreplaceable role of purpose in our lives is the cellular process of apoptosis – what biologists often refer to cell suicide. When a cell in your body ceases to have a purpose it literally ends its own life.
Jung’s sixth task of aging, is “determining the meaning of one’s life,” is about gaining conscious awareness of one’s purpose for being. It is a profound dimension of human behavior mostly ignored by marketers.
Search for life meaning actually begins in adolescence when people begin to continuously monitor their social environments for clues to behavior that best insures acceptance by others, especially peers. Life meaning among the young is framed by styles of appearance, language, material acquisitions, and social affiliations in the quest for a solid footing in the external world.
This worldly search for life meaning makes the young consumers easy targets for marketers because the criteria of life meaning are determined by social consensus, which isn’t to hard to figure out.
However, the search for life meaning undergoes a major shift in the second half of life. Whatever people’s material success, it often seems inadequate to give them an enduring sense of meaning. So, they begin to look inward rather than to the outer world in their search for life meaning. This substantially changes their consumer needs and alters their responses to marketers’ messages.
I’m astonished by the dearth of attention to Jung’s sixth task of aging in marketing aimed at people in the second half of life. While older faces may appear in ads, values projected more often than not are those of younger people who are still on a worldly quest for a sense of meaning in their lives.
Tomorrow: Rebirth – Dying with Life
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