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From the Archive: The Problem with "Purpose" with Nick Asbury
00:42:03
This week, we're resharing a favorite episode from the archive. Enjoy, and we'll be back with new content next week! Our hosts are joined by Nick Asbury, creative writer and author of The Road to Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing...
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- [00:00]
Nick Asbury
That's a good thing for society that we have this division between for profits and not for profits. Because I think if we did leave it to companies to highlight social issues and push for change on certain social issues, there's clearly a problem with that.
- [00:14]
Elena Jasifer
Marketing Architects hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasifer on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects and I'm joined by my co hosts and Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. And Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines. And we're joined by Nick Asbury. Nick is a writer, creative and 1/2 of Asbury and Asbury, his long running creative partnership in the uk. He's the author of the Road to How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing in a Worse World, a book that argues brand purpose often distracts from creativity and effectiveness. Nick publishes regularly on his substack and he's a leading voice challenging marketers to rethink the role of creativity, truth and craft in an industry too often distracted by hollow causes and award shows. So, Nick, welcome to the show.
- [01:03]
Nick Asbury
It's great to be here. I like the introduction as well. You've mentioned the substack and the book, so we could just end the conversation here if you like.
- [01:10]
Elena Jasifer
All right.
- [01:11]
Angela Voss
I actually want to talk about another book though, first. Nick. So people know you in marketing, right? The Road to Hell. Great book. But there's another book that you've written that that's actually a non marketing book that's an international bestseller on Amazon called Perpetual Disappointments Diary, which is filled with all kinds of pessimistic wisdom. Right. If ignorance is bliss, why are you so sad? Which made me laugh out loud. So it sounds like you're not just provocatively pessimistic in your professional life, but also in your personal life.
- [01:48]
Nick Asbury
I guess. I think it was 2013 that first came out this kind of downbeat journal. I did it just because I'm at heart I'm just a creative, I'm a copywriter. I like humor and that was a funny idea that I kind of made happen thinking it would be a small personal project and it turned into a bigger thing. Yeah, maybe there's some kind of link with, you know, clearly I'm skeptical about purpose and various other things. But I also like to think at heart I'm a kind of frustrated optimist rather than a pessimist. Ah, yeah. Maybe we can come back to that.
- [02:19]
Elena Jasifer
That's funny. I like that. A frustrated optimist. Well, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to read our opinions and data, research and what drives business results. And I always kick us off with some sort of research or an article and this one's easy to choose. It's one of my favorite Marketing Week articles, and I'm not just saying that because we've used it already on the show maybe twice already. It's called Good Intentions Lead to Bad Marketing, why Purpose is Missing the mark, and it's written by our guest. In the article, Nick argues that brand purpose, once celebrated as the future of marketing and business, hasn't lived up to the hype. Instead of elevating marketing, it often produces vague campaigns, weak claims, and sometimes even worse social outcomes. He points to how purpose became institutionalized after the 2008 financial crash and how it's held up by shaky research and often treats consumers as if we can't see through the spin. Nick questions whether purpose ever made sense for profit driven companies in the first place, and whether marketers have confused slogans with the real job of making effective, respectful advertising. And today we're going to unpack Brand Purpose and more with Nick himself, which I'm so excited about. So Nick, thanks again for joining. And I think you've become probably in my mind, one of the leading voices challenging the role of purpose in advertising. So could you walk us through the journey that led you to start questioning brand purpose in the first place?
- [03:31]
Nick Asbury
I first wrote about it in 2017, which seems like an age ago now, and funnily enough, I wrote an article for Creative Review magazine and I called it Is this the End for Brand Purpose? Because even at that time I felt like I was writing about the kind of tail end of a trend in the industry which I'd seen over the previous years, where brands were embracing these social causes and doing it in a different way to anything I'd seen previously, really. And the immediate trigger for the article was an ad that many people still talk about today, which was the Pepsi Kendall Jenner Adam, I'm sure you remember the kind of protest march that's diffused by her handing a can of Pepsi to the police. It was released in April 2017 and then withdrawn a day later. It was one of the early examples of a social media outcry, the Sydney Sweeney of its day, I guess you could say. But it wasn't the only example. There were lots of other brands around, I think McDonald's and Heineken and Dove was doing its kind of Purpose stuff. There were things like Fearless Girl winning all the top awards at Canon D? Nad. You may remember that I was established statue that was erected next to the Wall street bull on behalf of an investment company on Wall Street. But yeah, there was all this weird stuff going on of these big corporate brands embracing these social causes. And I just felt, as I say, I mainly come from a creative background and purely on a creative level, I thought it was leading to some quite formulaic, not very interesting ads, really quite serious, not very amusing or entertaining. So on that level, I didn't like it much. But I also just on a kind of moral and political kind of level, I just felt uncomfortable with it, really. I thought there's something weird here about all these consumer goods companies presenting themselves as moral heroes and political leaders. So, yeah, that's when I first wrote the article. And it clearly wasn't the end because we're still talking about it now.
- [05:35]
Elena Jasifer
Yeah, maybe it's just still the beginning, but. So you published that in 2017, so that was your first commentary on it. But I know you've traced its start to 2008 in the financial crash. It was like a reputational rehab for some corporations. Could you explain how you think that origin has shaped where it is today?
- [05:52]
Nick Asbury
I had a slight kind of front row seat on this because just in my day job as a copywriter, I did some work. It was actually only a brief project I was involved in, but it was on behalf of one of the big four management consultancies. And this is in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. And they were preparing a kind of pitch to put to all of their corporate clients around the world. They'd built this narrative around businesses facing a huge reputational crisis because of what's gone wrong in 2008. And business needs to kind of rehabilitate itself. It needs a new narrative to tell the world. And I was reading this narrative because my job was to edit it and make it sound a bit better. And I thought that so far I agreed with it when they were saying, yes, you need to remind people of kind of business's positive role in the world and the fact that it does do some useful things. But then it got to this point where it says, therefore, we need to remind people of the true purpose of business, which is to make the world a better place. And I remember actually slightly wincing at that word purpose, because I thought, well, that sounds like a bit of an over claim. It's like business definitely does have very good side effects in terms of Employing people and bringing communities together and that kind of thing. But it's not really its purpose. And it just sounded to me like a kind of hubris was creeping in about, hey guys, were actually, we're not the villains, we're actually the heroes who can lead societal change. So I remember that happening and this was all in the context of Occupy Wall street and all these kind of anti business protests that were gaining some traction around the world. And I think purpose did come as a kind of a conscious attempt to change the narrative from that kind of Occupy Wall street narrative to something more positive. And it was about repositioning business and saying, look, were not the villains. We're actually your most powerful allies. We can push all the causes you care about. So yeah, that would be the story I would tell about where it came from.
- [08:01]
Elena Jasifer
So if we fast forward to today, you maybe thought it was dying in 2017, but it seems to be pretty alive and well. And what I've seen is defenders of purpose. They're often pointing to data or research, stuff that comes from the ipa. Everybody loves to reference Dove's Real Beauty study. But you've argued that a lot of that evidence is shaky. Why do you think the marketing industry still leans so heavily on it? And could you share an example or two of how you think it's led to misguided campaigns or misguided, I suppose, perceptions of how purpose has worked for brands?
- [08:31]
Nick Asbury
I think partly because of that kind of backstory that I've just told. I think it began as a kind of narrative and then it went in search of evidence, if you like. So in those early years, you had people like Jim Stengel, for example, former Procter and Gamble marketer, he wrote Grow a book. That was one of the first kind of attempts to produce some evidence for purpose. And the idea that the best companies, the most successful companies, were those that embraced some kind of higher purpose or ideal, as he called it back then. And that was one of several attempts to bring forward some data to back up this way of looking at marketing. And I think a lot of people took it at face value because it's such a seductive story. It's something you want to believe. It's nice to think that not only can you sell soap or cans of Coke or whatever it is, but you could also be making this really positive difference in the world. So I think a lot of people liked that story and were therefore inclined to believe the evidence. And maybe it's harsh to single out Jim Stegnil because he wasn't the only one kind of bringing evidence forward, but it really was extremely thin evidence, kind of non evidence really. Byron Sharp, he was onto it very early, I think in 2013 he wrote a reasonably obscure blog post. This was before Byron Sharp was quite the name he is now. But he wrote a very astute kind of criticism of Jim Sengle's research, which was essentially circular in its logic. He picked the 50 most successful companies from the previous, I think, five years. He then went looking for something they had in common. He decided it was that they all had something that you could describe as a purpose. And then he tracked those companies, I think, for the following year and found that they'd all continued to do well. And he said, oh, it must be because they have this purpose. And the circularity is that you only picked those companies in the first place because they were performing well. And all that's happened is they've continued to perform well. And he never went looking for counter evidence. He then looked at less successful companies to see if they also had something you could call a purpose. And he used an extremely hazy definition of the word purpose, where I think there was one. Moet Chandon Champagne was described as having a purpose of turning occasions into celebrations, which is an extremely vacuous idea of what a purpose is, I think. So there was something very kind of self fulfilling about the whole thing. Richard Shottam was another critic who came along a couple of years later after the Byron Sharp article and he did this really masterful takedown of the Jim Stengel research, which is worth looking up if you can find it. But he actually tracked those 50 companies for the next three years to see what would happen after that. And actually they all fell off quite sharply. The difference in their performance was extremely counter to what you would expect from the Stengel data. So it was never built on any solid argument really. And that's why I think it's always struggled to justify itself.
- [11:50]
Elena Jasifer
I think that's really interesting, just the research and data behind it. The way that the people get to that is maybe not always honest, but I'm also curious about some of the brands, the way they get to purpose. And you mentioned this a little bit, but I'd love for you to talk about Dove and because Dove's Real Beauty campaign is something everybody tends to bring up, is a great example of purpose. And I know you've talked about where their data comes from and I think people would be really surprised to learn about the background behind it.
- [12:14]
Nick Asbury
It's a really interesting story once you get into it. And I actually dedicate an extended section to Dove in the book. And I see they recently won, I think it was like some kind of lifetime achievement award or something at Cannes for. I forget the actual name of the award, but it was for their kind of effectiveness over the last 20 years. And I think the case study talked about how a humble soap, as they described it, had been transformed into this kind of major social purpose brand. And it is, that is far from the full story. So 2004 was when the Campaign for Real Beauty started, this kind of purpose repositioning. Dove was already the market leader in the US in terms of hand soap. It had been a company, I think it had been around since 1957 or something, a huge player in the market. It wanted to kind of broaden out beyond Soap into various other things. It actually started doing that before, about a year before the Campaign for Real Beauty started. And it produced this report which had a very scientific veneer to it. It was described as a white paper. It had some co signatories who were from academia. And Dove have always been very good at working harder than most purpose brands when it comes to presenting the kind of credible looking exterior. But as data it was very shaky. So the headline conclusion they came up with was that only 2% of women describe themselves as beautiful or think that they're beautiful, which is a shocking claim. It suggests that there's a huge problem of self esteem to be solved. But when you actually looked at the data, and when I say data, I'm using that word slightly broadly because actually all it was a opinion survey by a PR company. It's not like these were academics following some rigorous process. And actually I think it was something like only 13% of women saw themselves as below average when it came to beauty. That was one of the other kind of less reported claims. And also it found quite reassuringly in a way, it found that most women didn't see physical beauty being one of the most important things in life when it came to their self esteem. Most would related more to family, professional achievements, all sorts of other areas of life, beauty just being one kind of aspect of it. But from all that, Dove managed to construct this story that basically there's a crisis of self esteem and the word beauty needs to be redefined to mean more than just physical appearance. And yet at the same time they're trying to sell products that are about on some level improving or maintaining your physical appearance. So it was always a bit of a constructed narrative really and it was very clumsy at first. One of the first campaigns they did, I believe, was they put up these giant billboards. I think one of them featured a, a kind of older woman. And it's one tick box said wrinkled and one tick box said wonderful. And you are meant to, as people walking past the poster, you were meant to decide which option was the right one. You're kind of sticking a big picture of this poor woman up on a billboard and asking everyone to judge her appearance. And I believe there was even one that was an interactive billboard, some kind of digital billboard. And predictably, people piled in with the kind of cruel response rather than the one that wanted. So that was rapidly taken down. But they gradually got more sophisticated over the years and did these kind of almost like popular science experiment type ads, which I'm sure you remember. But they've had lots of criticism over the years, despite being hailed as great marketing. And I think actually commercially they've been perfectly successful. But in terms of what they're actually doing for women and what they're doing for this social cause of solving a so called self esteem crisis, the evidence isn't good. We seem to have more mental health problems among young women now than we've ever had before. Really. And many women journalists, critics, commentators have written against Dove and its campaign. I quote a lot of them in the book, but many of them raise an eyebrow at this kind of commercialization of female insecurity, if you like. And I think Dove is, in the guise of trying to solve these problems. Dove is constantly prodding young women and saying, hey, you must be really worried about this. Let us sell you something that can make you feel better. And none of this takes away from it being commercially successful necessarily. But I think if it's truly a social purpose campaign, it should be judged on whether it's delivering against that social purpose. I'm definitely a skeptic on that.
- [17:10]
Rob Demar
I think the work you're doing is so crucial. You know, when you talk about a Dove, just this constructive rigor that you're bringing to this topic because you can see how there's a dichotomy that you're calling out there. For sure. But when I think of Dove, when I think of the always run like a girl campaign, you can see how the, the market goes, gosh, that's just so great. There is this crisis of self esteem and yet is it doing what they're claiming it's doing on the pod here? We, I don't know that it's our purpose, but I would say a mission that we have is to infuse our listeners with marketing effectiveness insight and give marketers a real license to guide their organization on how to drive real brand growth. And I think this purpose topic for sure has a place in the conversation. Now you've said, Nick, that for profits don't really have the social license to lead social causes. Why do you see that as such a problem for brand purpose?
- [18:09]
Nick Asbury
I think it's a pretty deep fundamental problem really, that I. I think when you set up an organization to begin with, you get a bunch of people together, you incorporate as an organization and your first choice is should we be a for profit or not for profit? That is one of the first decisions you make. And I think once you say you're a for profit company, it does mean that your license is limited. It's partly why we talk about limited companies. You don't fundamentally have the liberty, particularly if you're a kind of a publicly listed company, you don't have the liberty to say we're going to put this social cause ahead of profit or ahead of delivering for shareholders. Logically, your self interest is always going to win out when it comes to a kind of tough choice. And I think as a society that's a good thing for society that we have this division between for profits and not for profits. Because I think if we did leave it to companies to highlight social issues and push for change on certain social issues, there's clearly a problem with that because it would mean, and I think this is partly what we've seen in recent years, big powerful companies with big budgets, big marketing budgets are always going to push certain social issues that are less threatening to them, I think. So it might be that talking about gender or mental health or those kind of issues feels more palatable to that company. But from society's point of view, we obviously may think those issues are important. But we may also think actually the priority right now is, for example, reducing the wealth gap or increasing corporation tax or cracking down on tax avoidance by multinational companies and that kind of thing. Very few companies are going to make that their brand purpose. So we end up with this thing where the social issues that get elevated and given more salience in the world are not necessarily the issues that people out there prioritize and care about. Elections and polling around elections. People say that really it is economic issues that are at the top of mind for most of them. I do think there's been this weird dynamic in recent years where because for profit companies keep centering these other issues. It does have a distracting effect from things we might otherwise be talking about. Does that answer your question?
- [20:38]
Rob Demar
It does. And many of these purpose campaigns that we've talked about, we mentioned this earlier, have won awards and gotten accolades, especially at Cannes. So you know you went viral recently. You publicly called out for kind of a crowdsourced hashtag can fact check to verify these claims and award case studies, et cetera. What pushed you to speak up? Was there one specific thing you saw? Was it just a growing bubbling within you and what would a more evidence based can look like in your view?
- [21:09]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, evidence based can. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, I mean I, I didn't really start the whole can pushback this year. It was happening before I got involved and it's always been a kind of group pushb. There's people in Brazil and India and all over the place who have been very active on this. I guess the role I've played is keeping it fairly visible on LinkedIn. But I keep returning to the topic in various ways. But yeah, what's. Clearly it's not a new story to say that some slightly dodgy stuff goes on at Cannes and other award schemes. I think people have complained for years that some of these campaigns don't look entirely legit. There have been awards controversies. You can go back to 2015, 2005, even earlier than that. So that part of it isn't new. I guess I got involved because I felt actually there's a bit of momentum building here partly because of this. The original incident that started it all was this agency, DM9 in Brazil who. One of their awarded case studies, it turned out, featured a kind of AI doctored clip of some CNN news coverage, I think, which they fessed up to. And they came to an agreement with CAN to withdraw that entry. They also withdrew two other entries at the same time. Never explained what was wrong with those. CAN never explain what was wrong with them either. They just quietly disappeared. So that was the thing that kind of started it going, I think. But then there were flare ups around the world. In India there was very active conversation about. There was one entry in particular that got a lot of attention. It was kind of a turning train tickets into a kind of lottery system to encourage to tackle fare dodging. People did a lot of digging to find out that, you know, most of the claims in that case study video were just miles from being true. There were other cases as far afield as Brazil and the Netherlands. And I know that there's an academic, a professor in Germany who's got a list of about 55 cases. I think for my part, I've got a list of about 15 that I've looked into in great detail. And there were just such huge questions about all these things and I just found myself. And it is related to the purpose topic, I think, and I think that's partly why I'm interested in it. I just think why, even though it is kind of old news in a way and you get some old timers kind of rolling their eyes and saying, hey, this is just the way it is, you kind of think, yeah, but does it have to be this way? I think clearly it's possible to crack down on just blatant lying really, in a war tentories. I think what kind of frustrates me about it is maybe this comes back to being a frustrated optimist. But I think partly because of this purpose movement in the industry, we're constantly talking about changing the world, tackling these big societal problems, you know, everything from mental health to self esteem, whatever it is. And yet when we have a kind of ethical issue in our own industry, which is widespread fraud in award schemes, there's a kind of rolling of the eyes and saying, oh, what could be done? It's just, that's just the way it is. And maybe it doesn't matter that much. And I just find, and surely there's a disconnect there. Surely if we can't tackle a very solvable problem in our own industry, how could we claim any authority to tackle any other issues? And I have to say, while I'm on my hobby horse, it frustrates me a bit that a lot of the kind of purpose activists on LinkedIn and elsewhere who are very vocal about tackling all sorts of issues in the world, none of them have joined in this kind of crowdsourced, fact checking kind of effort that's been going on with me and other people around the world. And I kind of think, you know, that's. It does make me question how committed.
- [24:59]
Rob Demar
Yeah, it's a bit of a sign.
- [25:00]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, yeah. I don't know what, as a kind of observer of all this, do you, do you feel it's been different with Cannes this year?
- [25:08]
Rob Demar
Yeah, I think there's definitely an evolution going on. And I also, you know, you talk about purpose and changing the world and this big notion of can even businesses be part of a larger mission? I also think that marketers are constantly assessing how is the world changing? It's to some degree a marketer's job to be consumer minded. And I think we've all seen a Fair amount of Gen Z being thrown under the bus as the reason purpose has to take the main stage even for profit businesses. You've said that's a myth. What do you think this tells us about how marketers are viewing Gen Z and is that the reason this is showing up in awards or is there any consistency there, terms of time being spent over the years on this topic?
- [25:55]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, I think it's definitely been a big part of the argument for purpose is that this is what Gen Z demands and if you don't get with the program now, then you're very quickly going to be left behind because they're this kind of new generation that in a different way to all previous generations really thinks about social issues when they're buying toothpaste or buying, you know, soap or whatever it is. That's always been a huge claim and it's been backed up by various research from people like Adelman and various other kind of PR companies. Deloitte, I think it's another one, McKinsey, where they, do they ask these kind of leading questions in research. Do the ethics of a company matter to you when you're buying something and you'd have to be a bit of a cold hearted villain or something to say no to a question like that? Yeah, ethics matter to me, sure, but it doesn't actually mean you're going to be thinking that when you've finished doing the survey and you're in the supermarket a few hours later. Most of us just buy stuff, as you guys know, for all sorts of reasons, mental availability, fame, salience, all these kind of processes that go on in people's minds when they're making purchasing decisions. And very few of us truly consider the ethics and politics of a company with everything we buy. But yeah, somehow Gen Z was supposed to be different. I think it was never true. But it's been really put to rest I think by particularly the last election in the US where I think it was 56% of Gen Z males voted Trump and 41% of Gen Z females, which was up from 33% in 2020. So trending in his direction, I'm just observing it as like, you can't on that basis say that therefore Gen Z is somehow this uniquely progressive generation, that they're all united behind these social issues that companies are embracing. And I know in the week after the election Newsweek ran a headline saying Democrats Gen Z Dream just died. And I think that was right. But it could just as well have read Marketers, Gen Z Dream has just died. Because I think it did. It finally made it unsustainable to continue saying. And I've actually. I've already noticed some purpose people saying, oh, it's Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha was just gonna bring that up.
- [28:17]
Angela Voss
I remember the Gen Xer. We were supposed to be the. The warm fuzzy.
- [28:21]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, totally.
- [28:22]
Elena Jasifer
Yeah.
- [28:23]
Angela Voss
We just keep kicking the can.
- [28:24]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [28:27]
Rob Demar
So if I'm a marketer, then, and I'm like, all right, purpose isn't the answer. What, in your view, is the better path for marketers who want to drive effectiveness and they still want to respect their consumers and, yeah, potentially be inspirational. But what does it look like, in
- [28:42]
Nick Asbury
your view, you partly become a successful marketer by respecting your customers? I actually think fundamentally, purpose doesn't respect people's intelligence very much. I think one aspect of respecting your customers is respecting the fact that they have a very wide range of political views, a very wide range of values. They usually have far more important things to think about than your brand. You play a fairly small role in their lives. But I think what you can do is make one tiny aspect of life easier for someone that day. If you can make it easy to pick up a toothpaste from the shelf in the supermarket, feeling kind of confident. Yeah, this is a good one. I've heard of this one. I like this one. I recognize the packaging, the logo, whatever. You've actually done something minutely useful for that person. And also, if you can do it with marketing, that is funny. Non. Divisive introduces maybe a moment of entertainment into life in some way. You could actually be a small bit of common ground for people in a world that's divided into Trump voters, Paris voters, Brexit voters, whatever. You can be kind of the one thing that maybe people can agree on. It's like, we don't agree on politics, but, yeah, we both like Diet Coke. And not everything has to be politically charged and divisive. I think it's been. One of the unfortunate effects of purpose is that it's pushed brands to take up these political positions in a way that actually just adds stress to life. You end up having to think, what's someone going to think of me for, like, having this logo on my T shirt? It's very unfashionable these days to say, stay out of politics, or, you know, because people like to say, oh, well, everything's political and there's no escaping it. But actually, I think in an everyday sense, no, not everything is political and not everything has to be. And I think you can be a very useful part of life by doing some funny ads for a good product. And of course you do all the things that good businesses are meant to do. You treat your people well, you pay them fairly, you pay your taxes, create a nice working environment. I think if you can do all those things and sell whatever it is you're selling, I think that's you could go home satisfied every day that you're doing some good in the world.
- [31:04]
Angela Voss
So as the person though, that's really instigated this topic, right, really elevated it, put a spotlight on it and you've seen a lot of positive reactions, you've seen a lot of probably critical reactions. What has been the biggest shocker in terms of reactions that you've seen come across your desk?
- [31:23]
Nick Asbury
Most of the reaction has been encouragingly positive, I think even from people who disagree with me. I think there's a sense of still, it's good to talk about it, it's good to hear the counter argument because this is a bit of a kind of monoculture sometimes I think around purpose. There's the one true way and no one shall question it. So I would say most of it has been very positive. I've also had private emails from people talking about the discomfort they felt in their own work environments around not really being able to question done things. And so that's all been really interesting. I'm UK based, kind of blew up a bit more after the book came out and I was getting a bit more attention from the US on LinkedIn and. And I thought, wow, the culture was fairly hot in the UK, but it's even hotter in the US. The most heated reaction I got was from the US really. And it kicked off a bit on LinkedIn for a while, I guess roughly a year ago now. I got drawn into some arguments. I maybe should have found a way to myself from sooner. That's all fine, but the worst aspect of it was there were a couple of moments where I felt people were actually questioning my right to even say some of this stuff, which I don't think is very controversial. But yeah, there's some people were contacting organizers of conferences and things like that and suggesting that maybe I shouldn't have been platformed to say this kind of. I don't want to overstate that. There was. There was definitely some.
- [32:51]
Angela Voss
It's amazing though how the pendulum swings, right? We've been talking about that earlier just in terms of politics and where we go from a very liberal point of view on certain things all the way to conservative and how the advertising conversation has followed that pendulum a bit. Do you think we're entering, since the pendulum's definitely sort of on the other side right now, do you think that we're entering kind of a post purpose era, that marketers are starting to follow suit, or do you think we're still that lever still going to get pulled quite frequently?
- [33:23]
Nick Asbury
I think there's definitely been a very noticeable shift and I think if you're looking at the broad sweep of history, my money would be on 2008 being seen as the start of the kind of purpose era and 2024 maybe being seen as the end in the sense and particularly at the election of Trump. I think the. There was just a sense at that moment that there was a kind of finality about not the end of purpose, but the end of a certain phase of its kind of preeminence in the world. I do think we've shifted somewhere different, but definitely hesitant to say post purpose, full stop. I think that it's definitely still very much out there and we're seeing now a different kind of dynamic with things like American Eagle and Cracker Barrel and all these kind of things. You know, they're not exactly purpose stories, but I think I see them almost as a kind of hangover from the purpose years where I think for years brands wanted us to think of them as political and being dissociated.
- [34:26]
Angela Voss
When we're debating Cracker Barrel, it feels like it's a slow news day, you know.
- [34:31]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, well, maybe it's been a slow news model or something. Yeah. But yeah, I think grams are always
- [34:36]
Rob Demar
so like the marketing rules just goes crazy. And I think it is that blend. I loved your point about like separate channels can do everyone good. Give us a break. Because it just feels like in life in general, politics is just seeping its way into everything.
- [34:52]
Nick Asbury
And I have kind of, I guess, complex feelings about it because I, on the one hand, I do think it's valid to look at any ad or logo or anything and read it in a kind of cultural and political context and do a kind of almost academic kind of reading of these things and say, what do these suggest about the way culture is going? I think that's an entirely valid thing to do. But yeah, at the same time you think, geez, this is a logo and this is an ad for genes. And how has this become so heated? And you see the heat coming from both sides in a way. So yeah, it's interesting times and I think, I guess we're still going to see how it pans out. Is this Is this post purpose or is this purpose moving into some new form? Yeah, I'm not sure the answer yet.
- [35:42]
Angela Voss
From controversy to contrarian. We love a good contrarian marketing philosophy, so we always like to ask our guests and it seems like you have several you could probably choose from. But what's your most contrarian marketing opinion?
- [36:06]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, it's funny in a way, my meta contrarian opinion is that I'm not the bloody contrarian here, it's everyone else. Because I kind of think my strongest beliefs or the things I'm most known for are arguing creative awards should be for creativity, which somehow is a contrarian opinion these days. I think purpose should be for charities and for profit should be for profit. I think lying in a war tentories shouldn't be allowed. Well, as I say, I almost feel like a contrarian making those arguments. I like to think there's a world where those are the accepted wisdom and everyone else is the contrarian. So yeah, I think that might be the best. I'm sure I've got 10 other kind of contrarian opinions. But yeah, I'm going to be contrary about being called a contrarian.
- [36:55]
Rob Demar
Love it.
- [36:55]
Elena Jasifer
It's a new take on that question. I like it. I want to wrap up with just a quick fun question here for all of us, but starting with you, Nick, Is there one brand, purpose, habit, maybe a trope that you see frequently and you just roll your eyes at every single time?
- [37:08]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, I'd love to hear yours. Actually, one that comes to mind for me, which I'd be interested to know if you've seen much of this, but the word democratizing, I've noticed this word comes up a lot in. Usually what it means is we're making something cheaper. But it sounds much more noticeable to say we're democratizing it. And I've noticed actually elf do this, you know, elf beauty. They say we're democratizing beauty. And actually what that business model is really is finding a product that's trending and is quite expensive and then they do a dupe of it, you know, a kind of a rip off of it and then sell it a bit cheaper. And they call it democratizing beauty. Yeah, I just think it's a bit of a tell that word for something. Something going on. But yeah, what are yours?
- [38:00]
Rob Demar
I would say mine is probably the. Where you see a brand doing kind of social tallying versus having real commitment. If you're really behind something, donate a set amount. Right. And go versus the one like equals a donation or share to this to support It's a hashtag for change. And I think now, in retrospect, behind a lot of what you've just talked about, us really getting into, what has purpose really been and is this virtue signaling that type of thing? So it's easy to see through that stuff now.
- [38:35]
Angela Voss
I feel like I'm gonna get myself in trouble for this one. I don't know. So you guys can be the judge. But first, I, personally, I love products that are made in America. I also love products that are made overseas. But when a company makes a point to say that our products are assembled in America, like it's an act of patriotism, that they should be get a pat on the back, but at the same time they're admitting, well, our parts aren't from America.
- [39:06]
Elena Jasifer
Yeah.
- [39:06]
Angela Voss
But we assemble it here. So the logic gets lost on me. If you're really gonna virtue signal, then do everything in America or don't talk about it. Let's just say, oh, we assembled it in America.
- [39:18]
Elena Jasifer
Yeah. What's funny about that one is, Nick, we've run tests on that. Does it help for TV commercials to say made in America? It doesn't make a difference, right, Rob? People don't really care.
- [39:26]
Angela Voss
Yeah, we've actually proven that. Yeah, yeah. So people will say they want it.
- [39:30]
Elena Jasifer
People will say, but it won't change sales results.
- [39:33]
Angela Voss
But they don't care. They care about the price. Sorry. Yes, again, probably going to get us in trouble. But it's just data.
- [39:39]
Elena Jasifer
Yeah. Mine is when brands post for every holiday, not just the main ones. When they're posting for like politicized holidays with nothing behind it. Their brand has nothing to do with that. It's literally just a social media manager's political opinion. And that bothers me because to me there's just no benefit. You're just going to piss off 50% of your audience. No one's waiting. Ooh, I wonder what marketing architects thinks about this. No one really cares. So your only risk is no one cares. Like your only risk is alienating people. And I'm proud to say that we don't do that as a company because there's just. No, there's no point to it.
- [40:14]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, yeah. I have to say, sometimes I feel sorry for brands in this kind of climate because if you do exactly what you just said of just not posting something, you will always get one or two people on social media saying, ah, you're very noticeable by your silence. Silence is complicity or something. You'll get pushback either way. But yeah, I think brands have to become a bit braver about just riding it out, ignoring it, not getting pulled around by it too much. These things blow over very fast.
- [40:47]
Elena Jasifer
Well, Nick, this is so great. I was so excited to have you on today, a big fan of your work. Before we wrap up, where can people follow you? Where can they learn more about your work?
- [40:55]
Nick Asbury
The best place I'm most active in terms of social media, Most active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. Nick Asbury. And then I have a substack, nickasbury.substack.com where I post cover long essays about various things. I've not been as active on there lately because I'm kind of in the throes of working on a book where I'm no idea when I might finish it, but it's a book about kind of creativity and copywriting and what makes it good and what maybe makes it better than what AI can manage, which is a whole interesting area of its own. So, yeah, hopefully I'll have something to say about that in the next few months.
- [41:33]
Elena Jasifer
Well, thanks so much for joining us.
- [41:34]
Nick Asbury
Yeah, thank you. It's really nice to be on a podcast that I also watch and listen to. So thanks again.
- [41:40]
Rob Demar
So great to have you.
- [41:41]
Angela Voss
Thanks, Nick.
- [41:43]
Elena Jasifer
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing Marketing Architects.