A History of Marketing / Episode 53

Nick Asbury is a creative writer, one half of the design partnership Asbury & Asbury, and the marketing industry’s most persistent critic of brand purpose.

He’s the author of The Road to Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World (And How Human Creativity Is the Way Out). It’s a title that tells you exactly where Nick stands.

For 15 years, “Purpose” was an idea marketers weren’t supposed to question. It dominated creative briefs, advertising awards, and TED Talk stages. Brands from chocolate bars to social networks climbed what Nick calls “the ladder of abstraction” until they settled on something like: “we’re here to make the world a better place.”

The Road to Hell is a rarity: most marketing books tell you how to do something right. Nick wrote one about why a whole movement got it wrong. He also argues there’s a way out: human creativity, lateral thinking, and humor.

In this conversation, we cover:

* How the 2008 financial crisis kicked off the capital-P Purpose era, and why the 2024 election may have ended it

* Why even Dove’s Real Beauty, the most celebrated purpose campaign ever, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny

* Why the most prominent purpose advocates are late-career marketing legends

* Why AI can’t make the lateral leap behind slogans like “Just Do It,” and why that’s good news for human creativity

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Why Write a Whole Book Against Purpose?

Andrew Mitrak: Nick Asbury, we’re here to talk about your excellent book, The Road to Hell. I love this book, I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, and I hope marketers everywhere read it. And it’s all about how purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world, and how human creativity is the way out. And I wanted to ask you about this because most books about marketing focus on how to do marketing the right way versus why a certain approach is wrong. And so I’m wondering, why focus on why the purpose movement was a mistake? Why write a whole book about this?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, that’s a really good question and first of all, yeah, thanks, thanks for reading it, thanks for having me on to talk about it. Yeah, I think, I think first of all, there is a, I hope, a kind of noble tradition of books that argue against something rather than for something. Like, I know Bob Hoffman has done some brilliant stuff against ad tech and advertising. You can even look at books like No Logo by Naomi Klein—books that are kind of polemics against prevailing wisdom. And I, I guess I would put this book in that category. I mean, it is arguing ultimately for something, in that the last of the five sections is arguing for creativity and humor and humanity. But yes, most of the book is an argument against purpose.

And I guess it’s just been a kind of, you could almost say a kind of unfortunate fact of my career, I think, that I happen to be working at a time where I do think this huge idea of purpose has dominated the industry for, well, you know, 15, maybe even 20 years. I think you could say that period is, is waning now. But, yeah, I just found it was a very omnipresent idea that was affecting almost every kind of brief coming across my desk and was dominating industry awards, industry conversations. So, it felt like a—and I guess, one thing I’d add is it also felt like something you weren’t meant to question that much. There was a slightly taboo feeling about, you know, how could anyone be against this? And I guess when I sense that taboo, I do almost feel drawn to challenging it. Not for its own sake, but just because—

The Risks of Challenging the “Purpose” Orthodoxy

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it still somehow, to me, it feels a little bit riskier than something like No Logo, which was sort of like punching up. It’s sort of like taking aim at the brand bullies, or something that is anti-tech. Like there’s so much anti-tech, or is sort of more consensus to, like I feel like there’s more people to nod along. This one somehow feels almost a little bit riskier because how could you, how could you have an argument against purpose? Purpose sounds so nice. And did you worry at all that this might alienate potential clients or colleagues who had embraced the purpose-driven marketing?

Nick Asbury: I guess, maybe on one level, I think I am, I’m maybe fortunate in that it’s fairly low risk for me because I’m basically a lone traveler in the industry. I’m a self-employed writer. So, it’s not like I work for a big employer who might be unhappy with it. I, ultimately, as a writer, only need enough work to keep one person busy. So, if a few clients don’t call me because of the purpose position that I have, then, you know, there will equally be clients who do call me because they like the arguments being made.

But I didn’t really write it as a, as a kind of strategic business career move for myself, really. I just felt the urge to write it because I felt there were important things to say. I guess on that kind of punching up, punching down thing, which, you know, I, I would definitely think of it in my own mind as a kind of punching up exercise in that—and this kind of brings us on to the whole subject—but I see purpose actually as quite a big corporate, top-down kind of movement. I kind of consider myself, I guess, arguing for the smaller businesses and the consumer who kind of often gets slightly patronized by some of this stuff, I think. So, yeah, I would see it as kind of challenging an orthodoxy imposed by powerful people.

The Origins of Capital-P Purpose

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, fair enough. And let’s, I think that is how it comes across, it’s just that at a high level, it seems like such a sacred thing. But as you’re saying, let’s get right into it because I think that, taking this sort of historical lens, you start with a moment as you’re seeing purpose and typing it out. And I’m wondering, when in your mind does this, does purpose become a movement? When does it become sort of the big behemoth omnipresent thing that you’ve experienced?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, well, I think the simple answer is I see the kind of purpose with a capital P movement, I think, started after the financial crisis of around 2008. So, I think—and that’s not to say that none of these questions ever existed before that, I think you can see purpose as the latest manifestation of very old arguments about kind of stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism arguments that Milton Friedman was having back in the 1960s. You can basically take it as far back as business itself, really. People have always argued about the ethics of business and, you know, how they relate to the—can capitalism be ethical? You know, there’s all these big philosophical questions that have been debated for a long time.

But I think the purpose movement in advertising, and in the kind of corporate boardroom, really did take off post-2008 when, I think, the story I would tell was there was kind of a reputational crisis for big business. A lot of people were turning against business, kind of blamed them for the excesses that led to the crash. And, you know, you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, kind of quite a large, widespread, anti-corporate kind of feeling in the world. And I think, I definitely sensed this at the time, even in some of the clients I was working for, was there was this sense that, oh, we need to tell a better story about business. Rather than people thinking of us as the enemy, we need to kind of tell a story about how we can actually be a powerful ally to important social causes.

And I think that became a really persuasive, powerful thing that people wanted to believe in. There was this whole mantra of “do well by doing good,” which was kind of the slogan of the purpose movement, I guess. But this idea that you could, yeah, do good things in society, and that would, through a kind of virtuous circle, it would lead more consumers to buy from you because consumers, so the argument went, consumers are more concerned about ethical issues these days than they have been before. And therefore,...