Our guest this week is Nick Asbury, one of the UK’s most-awarded copywriters, discussing his new book, “The Road to Hell, How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World.” We explore the history of purpose in business, its detrimental impact on advertising effectiveness over the past 15 years, and the potential risks for brands aligning with causes. Nick shares fresh insights on shifting from purpose-led branding towards more effective, humor-based advertising.

Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:

Nick Asbury: The purpose debate is where what I do and what we all do as designers, writers, strategists, it’s where our industry kind of connects with bigger questions of politics and ethics. And I think those are really interesting questions, so it’s fertile ground to write about.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Over the past 15 years or so, brand purpose has taken the marketing world by storm. Many companies have fully embraced the idea of doing well by doing good, claiming to prioritize social and environmental goals alongside profit. But while the intentions behind this purpose movement may be admirable, some argue that it has led to misguided marketing efforts and unintended consequences for society as a whole. Today’s guest is the author of a new book that offers a thought-provoking take on the dangers of corporate purpose. Nick Asbury is a multifaceted creative professional known for his work as a writer, poet, and branding expert. He’s the co-author of the book A Smile in the Mind, Witty Thinking in Graphic Design, a contributor to Creative Review, The Guardian, and Marketing Week, and has a popular newsletter called Thoughts on Writing, which covers topics related to copywriting, poetry, advertising, design, language, and culture. including the ethics and politics of marketing. Nick’s new book is titled, “The Road to Hell, How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World, *and How Human Creativity is the Way Out.” In the book, Nick presents the case against purposeful business, drawing on many examples and insights from his own career. To discuss key arguments in his book and the future of purpose in marketing, I’m delighted that Nick is joining us today from my old college town, Manchester, England. Nick, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Nick Asbury: It’s very good to be here, Adrian. Thank you.

Adrian Tennant: Can you tell us a little about your creative career and how your interest in purpose developed?

Nick Asbury: Yes, I can. I mean, I’m a writer. I have been a writer, I guess, for about 25 years now, professionally. Started out in the kind of charity, direct response world. That’s how I learned my trade, really. Gradually broadened out from there. I mean, I ran a little agency in London for a while with a couple of other people, a couple of other writers. And then went solo, broadened out into the general branding, design, creativity kind of world. I have quite a lot of fun there really, and I’ve always tried to mix it with other things like poetry and humorous writing and various personal projects. And one of those side things, if you like, has been writing about the industry, which I did for a few years quite regularly for creative review magazines. And one of those articles in 2017 was about this thing called purpose, which is where I first, I guess, entered this debate. Yeah, so that’s the basic backstory.

Adrian Tennant: Well, you mentioned it started with an article, but what inspired you to write this book?

Nick Asbury: Yes, well, I think what initially sparked me to write that article was, it was two things really. One was just this sense that something strange was going on in the industry. The immediate trigger was, you may remember, the Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad that came out in early 2017 and was withdrawn the next day after a major outcry. But it was really Pepsi trying to cast itself as a kind of social brand and it met with a pretty withering response. And it was part of a wave of adverts that were doing that kind of thing. It felt like it had all moved away from maybe humor or product focus kind of stuff, and it was all quite a lot more worthy, socially purposeful. And I felt that was strange because it felt like the people casting themselves as the kind of moral heroes were all the wrong people. So I thought there was something to write about. And then more deeply, I just feel like the purpose debate is where what I do and what we all do as designers, writers, strategists. It’s where our industry kind of connects with bigger questions of politics and ethics and I think those are really interesting questions so it’s fertile ground to write about.

Adrian Tennant: Can you explain the origins of the book’s title, “The Road to Hell”?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, it’s a provocative title, I guess. It comes from an English proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And I think it’s a good way into the argument of the book, because I start by first of all just acknowledging that this argument does strike a lot of people as counterintuitive because I think a lot of people just think, “Well, purpose basically means trying to do good things and being well intended as a person, as a business. So how can you actually be against it? It sounds like you’re just against puppies or something, or just against nice things.” And yeah, I think that proverb kind of captures the dynamic in a way where you can acknowledge that a lot of the intentions are good, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to good outcomes. And I think purpose just fundamentally is an idea ever since it came along. I would say post-2008. I think it’s always been based on this kind of flawed logic and slightly false way of looking at businesses and their real ethical responsibilities.

Adrian Tennant: Well, Nick, you start the book with some corporate histories. Can you give us an overview of the origins of purpose in business?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, well I try and skip fairly lightly over the two or three-thousand-year history of business. So a guy called Jesus Christ enters the debate. I tell the story of him driving the traders from the temple. I see him as a kind of, well obviously I would, but I see him as a kind of anti-purpose guy of his age where he’s trying to drive the businessmen out of the moral and spiritual realm. But yes, I fast forward over all that, linger for quite a while on the 19th-century history because there are lots of interesting stories to be told there about the kind of Quaker businesses and businesses like Cadbury and Unilever started out at that kind of time. And then I fast forward through various economic debates in the 20th century, and yes, eventually land in 2008, where I think that was really where the word purpose entered the room. And it was very briefly, I see it as a response to the crash of kind of 2007 to 2009, or the ongoing crisis. And I think it was a way to reframe business as kind of the good guy, rather than the bad guy. And it’s actually been very successful in doing that.

Adrian Tennant: You mentioned Cadbury, the founder was George Cadbury. In the book, you’ll talk about the town that he built, which is Bourneville, near Birmingham, or actually probably part of Birmingham. Here in the US, Milton Hershey of the Hershey Chocolate Company founded the town of Hershey in Pennsylvania in 1903. Hershey’s benevolence was reflected in well-equipped houses for workers, free education, and various amenities such as a zoo and an amusement park. Earlier in 1880, George Pullman of the Pullman Palace Car Company established the town of Pullman in Illinois to house workers at his rail car manufacturing company. That didn’t turn out so well, but you’d need to look at the history books to find out why.

Nick Asbury: I can actually recommend a history book there’s one called “The Enlightened Capitalists,” which is by a guy called James O’Toole. It’s the best pro-purpose book that I’ve read, in the sense that it’s written from the perspective of someone who wants to find a way that business can be genuinely purposeful and serve a higher social good. And he analyses all of these stories, including Hershey and Cadbury and so on. It’s mainly a 19th-century history kind of book. And it’s brilliantly written and brilliantly interesting. I mean, Milton Hershey, for example, I think he was a fascinating character. A total workaholic, apparently. He was utterly obsessed with his product and developing the product. You know, he was mixing different forms of caramel, trying to find one that would be soft enough that it wouldn’t pull out your fillings when you were chewing on it, because so many people had fillings at this point because of eating previous caramel. And like the Quakers in the UK, he had fairly high moral values in the sense he was against alcohol, and that’s why they were actually developing these sugar projects, because it was seen as an acceptable vice. Yes, as you say, he built this massive town of Hershey in Lancaster County, I think. And apparently he was genuinely a philanthropic, upstanding kind of guy. He was also reportedly quite schizophrenic in the sense that he would also fire employees on a whim. He built this whole town where they could live but said if anyone was caught drinking they would be fired even though he himself was actually a keen drinker. And there are stories about him having this kind of patriarchal relationship to his employees where he was this kind of benevolent dictator running his little kingdom. Stories about him union busting and discriminating against Italian-American employees and all this kind of thing. So he was a complex character. And I don’t say any of that to detract from the actual good he did, because actually more than George Pullman, whose record I think is actually a lot worse, I think Hershey was genuinely driven by trying to do good things. But I think for me what comes out of that book, and I’m sorry this is a long answer but I’m getting to the end, “The Enlightened Capitalist”’s subtitle is “Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good.” And the framing is that despite his wanting to believe in this stuff, the author keeps finding that these tales tend not to end very well. And Hershey’s is one of them. You know, he ends up dying and fairly sick and lonely and broken because his company wasn’t doing so well by the 1920s. But yeah, they tend not to outlast their founders, these businesses. If you have a charismatic founder who can take things in a certain direction, that you can do unusual things, but it’s very hard to create an actual model of a purposeful business that locks that in for generations. And for me, this will sound like a fairly philosophical point, I think, but For me, the key way to think about business ethics and the lesson from these stories is you should see human purpose, which I actually believe in, as being the essential counterbalance to the natural momentum of corporations. At the end of the day, businesses want to make money. They’re for-profit entities. And one counterbalance to that is the kind of personal ethics and struggles of founders and employees and so on. But as soon as you start thinking about purpose and, oh, our company is purposeful, that’s where it starts to go wrong.

Adrian Tennant: Bringing us back into the 21st century, what are the origins of our contemporary idea of purpose?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, well, I think it’s really a contemporary incarnation of the old stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism debate, which has been going for many decades. I think the actual word purpose, I would trace it to 2008. But I think before that, even after like the dotcom crash of year 2000, I think there was a kind of yearning. That’s when you start to see a few mentions of the word purpose in marketing articles and books and so on. I’ve actually fairly nerdily gone back through the history of all this. But yeah, I think there was a yearning among ad agencies, marketing people, to actually market something a bit more substantial, because so many of these dotcoms had turned out to be mirages that just disappeared overnight. You know, obviously a few stayed, Amazon and so on, but, you know, I actually lived through that era, and there were so many dotcoms that were going to be the next Amazon and never were. So I think there was this yearning for marketing to be more substantial and relevant, and I think when financial crisis hit, two trillion dollars wiped off the global economy and the reputation of global business in real crisis. I think purpose was floating in the ether and business grabbed hold of it as the savior, if you like, and I think it was a way to change the kind of Occupy Wall Street narrative which was essentially anti-business, it was an economic protest, it was the 99% against the 1%, and it was a way to shift that conversation and say, look, we’re not your enemies, we’re actually your most powerful allies, and as long as we can talk about more identity-based causes rather than economic ones, then we’re happy to be your ally and all that stuff, because economic ones are quite tricky, things like minimum wage or supply chain fairness or not, you know, paying decent amounts of corporation tax and all that kind of stuff. All of those things actually hit businesses pretty hard if you take them seriously. But some of the other identity issues, they’re essentially important to society, extremely important issues, but they tend to be less fundamentally threatening to the economic status of businesses. So I think a lot of businesses found it easier to kind of attach themselves to those causes rather than anything that Occupy Wall Street would have been shouting about.

Adrian Tennant: Well, we both work in advertising. How do you think purpose-led campaigns have impacted the effectiveness of advertising?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, well, I argue in the book that it’s not that I necessarily argue that purpose will always lead to bad advertising, but I think it vastly increases the probability of that happening. And I go through various reasons of principle, why that might be the case, and also I look in practice at the way things have actually panned out. Just recently, actually, there was an article in The Drum by Andrew Tindall, who works at System One, and he was talking about the creativity crisis, the fact that the work that wins the highest level of creative awards has actually become less and less effective if you trace it over the last 10 years. And that’s backed up by Peter Field did some research, which he called the, I think, “The Crisis of Creativity,” which showed the same kind of pattern around 2010, things start to decline in terms of the awarded work not delivering actual commercial results. And I think that’s interesting, but what’s frustrating is that in both of those cases I mentioned, it’s creativity that somehow gets blamed. Whereas I think what’s actually happened in the last 10 years is that creative awards have started awarding purpose rather than creativity. And that’s just definitively been the case, particularly in the last three years where the decline has been even greater. You know, I often cite this high point of 2022 where there were 17 of 21 allegedly creative Grand Prix awards given out at Cannes. 17 of 21 went to kind of obviously purpose-led projects where there was a big kind of social cause that would sway the judges and the same at D&AD and other award schemes and all of this tracks pretty much exactly with the rise of purpose and for me we should be talking about the purpose crisis not the creativity crisis and yeah I could say plenty more about that.

Adrian Tennant: Appreciating that you have many examples to pick from, could you share one campaign that typifies the problems you see with being so purpose-led?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, I guess the one I will pick is one that I think purpose people would consider one of the strongest cases on their side, which would be Cadbury, which, in the UK, I guess it’s the Hershey’s of the UK, it’s still an extremely big brand. They won the Best in Show at the IPA Effectiveness Awards, known for their rigorous focus on actual results. The IPA Effectiveness Awards that year, I think this was 2022, had introduced a new purpose category with slightly less commercially focused criteria. and Cadbury won that category and went on to win Best in Show. You know, it’s seen as a case in point of how purpose can actually work and deliver commercial results. I write at length about the case in the book, but the key thing for me is when you dig into it, yes, there was a five-year, very successful commercial campaign. The ads are actually very nice, very creatively well-produced, nice scripts. I would be all in favor of it winning creative awards-winning commercial results awards. But as soon as you call it purpose and give it purpose awards, I think something really problematic is happening because Cadbury’s has been through a hell of a time over the last 10, 20 years in the UK. It’s been the subject of repeated stories about tax avoidance. This purposeful campaign is built around the idea of generosity, which is drawn from the early Cadbury days when it was founded. But it’s certainly no reflection of what’s been going on in the last two decades, where it’s been a sustained… I mean, it was still going on when this campaign launched. the tax avoidance and Cadbury’s is also the subject of HFSS food advertising restrictions which means high in fat, salt and sugar and very briefly that’s just it’s with cross-party support that we have this legislation in the UK that we want people to eat a bit less chocolate because creating a kind of obesity crisis it’s leading to costs for the NHS and stuff and whether you agree with that or not that’s the kind of consensus of society is that We could actually do with selling less of this stuff, not more of it. And for me, when you see Cadbury, as I say, I don’t mind Cadbury going on stage and celebrating its commercial success or its creative excellence. When it goes on stage and receives a Purpose Award for serving society, when society itself is saying, we want you to sell less of this and we’d like you to pay more taxes. I think that’s really typical of the dissonance that you get with so much of this purpose stuff. You know, we use it as an industry to feel better about ourselves, but I think society has a right to look on from the outside and just think, what are you doing?

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message. 

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Nick Asbury, the author of a new book, “The Road to Hell, How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World.” According to an Axios Harris poll conducted in March of this year, American consumers see twice as many brands as left-leaning as they do right-leaning. Companies like Target, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company are perceived as left-leaning, while Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-A, Dollar Tree, and X, formerly Twitter, are perceived as right-leaning. Now, according to the poll, consumers who identify as Republican are five times more likely than Democrats to think less of a company for focusing on societal issues. Nick, what are the potential risks for brands aligning with progressive or conservative causes?

Nick Asbury: Yes, well, in many ways, I think the answer is in the question, which is if you do align yourself with one side of the political divide, whether it’s in America or the UK or anywhere else, then, yeah, just by its very nature you’re going to alienate, whether it’s to a small or larger degree, the people who are on the other side of that divide. And I think one of the really interesting things about what you could loosely call the Purpose Decade is that we have actually been more divided than ever, in the sense of being split pretty much 50-50 down the middle on Trump versus Clinton, on the Brexit vote in the UK and even Trump-Biden. Biden wins but Trump gets 74 million votes. That’s 74 million people who buy beer and washing powder and chocolate and watch films and these are all, whether you lament this fact or not, these are all American consumers, and when you do identify yourself strongly with a more progressive position, you may feel ethically that’s a noble thing to do, but I think commercially it’s hard to make a case for why that would be better. And just as an important extension to that, I think, the justification often given is that yes, but we’re targeting more of a younger audience, a kind of Gen Z audience, And we all know that they are much more progressive and left-leaning, so it’s fine, we can do it, and we’re getting future-proof and future-ready. And for me, this is one of the big misconceptions at the heart of the whole purpose debate, really, is that Gen Z is united in this clamor for companies to embrace progressive causes. Recently I’ve been citing this, a couple of polls in America, you probably know them better than I do, but it was towards the end of last year, there was a New York Times poll and a follow-up NBC one. They both found it was extremely close. One, the NBC one, found I think it was 46% Trump and 42% Biden among 18 to 34-year-old voters. Now, no matter how those numbers shake out, even if it ends up being the other way around, that’s a hell of a lot of Gen Z consumers who presumably aren’t clamoring for your company to embrace the left side of the debate. So I think, yeah, there’s just a reality check needed there, I think. And I’m pretty sure what I’ve just outlined wouldn’t be known by a lot of chief marketing officers or chief executives or anything. I think there is just this assumption that, oh no, of course, young people, they’re all woke and they all want this kind of advertising. And yeah, I think it’s not true.

Adrian Tennant: Well, your book also discusses Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s decision to give away the company, something he described not as going public, but “going purpose.” Nick, can you explain the implications of his decision and what you think it reveals about the Purpose movement?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, that was a fascinating episode that I wrote about at the time because, as you say, he described it as going purpose, which you would think, gosh, this is a kind of crowning moment for the purpose movement. written up with great, you know, glowing reviews in the New York Times when this story broke. But the strange thing was, when you looked at Srinath’s letter at the time, his open letter that he wrote, he talked about the various options that they could have taken as a company. And one of them was to go public in the kind of conventional way. And he said it would have been a disaster. He said it’s impossible for a PLC to be purpose-driven. The incentives are such and the pressures are such that you will never be able to deliver on it. And then he moved on in the letter, but really in that sentence, he delivered a kind of death blow to the kind of big corporate purpose movement, the kind of Unilever’s and Procter and Gamble’s and so on. Because by his account, it can’t be possible for them to be as purpose-driven as they think they are, or as they claim to be. And that was kind of slightly buried, I think, in all the reporting at the time. Maybe, you know, I’ve tried to highlight that at the time, and I also talk a bit more about Patagonia’s new structure, which I think is slightly more concerning than it was reported to be, because I think it represents companies elbowing in as lobbying organizations on politics in a way that We tend to feel good about when it’s companies on the left, but we tend to think it’s very sinister when it’s companies on the right. And, you know, there are companies on both sides doing this. And I think you could say, great, fight fire with fire. Let’s have the left doing this as well as the right. But for me, it’s better to try and put the fire out and actually try and reassert the difference between politics and commerce. And I think we keep on pushing business and politics closer together. So yeah, the Patagonia thing was a really interesting kind of case study, I think.

Adrian Tennant: Absolutely. Well, I heard you say in a recent podcast interview that we might already be in a pre-post-purpose era. Nick, can you unpack that for us?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, it’s a slightly Inception-like line, I think. But yeah, I think there was a definite tipping point around or just after 2022 when we reached that high point in terms of creative awards and so on. you could feel the kind of tectonic plate shifting in the corporate world, because purpose is actually a much bigger deal in the corporate world than it is in kind of ad agencies and marketing departments. It’s been a huge center of debate since 2018, really, when Larry Fink, the boss of BlackRock, which steers so much money into companies around the world, $10 trillion at its peak, and he became the most powerful advocate for purpose, said it’s all about purpose now, and every CEO around the world said, right, we get the message and started towing that line as well. The US Business Roundtable, 181 big companies, they all signed this statement on the purpose of a corporation, which was basically a social purpose manifesto. That was 2019. So it really was reaching this high point But I think recently we’ve seen this shift where there have been problems. Larry Fink has stopped writing about Purpose, it didn’t get mentioned once in his most recent letter, because he’s received a lot of criticism for it. Unilever have moved away, they’re one of the big champions. Alan Jope has left now, he was their big champion of Purpose. The new Chief Exec has said explicitly that he thinks they’ve kind of overdone it on Purpose, that they were force-fitting every brand into it. So the mood music there has really changed, same at Procter & Gamble. Mark Pritchard has said that they went too far with purpose and need to pull back. And I think just because of the economic times that we live in, there’s been this kind of reality check of companies having to fight harder for customers, and that tends to focus minds a bit. So I think there has been a return to slightly more effective, humor-based, classic kind of advertising. which I think is no bad thing.

Adrian Tennant: Well, a reminder for listeners that the full title of your book is “The Road to Hell, How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World *and How Human Creativity is the Way Out.” Nick, let’s focus on the last part of the title. How is human creativity the best alternative to purpose?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, it’s a great question because I was very conscious with the book that quite often you can get books that make a long case against something and then they have two pages at the end where they do a few gestures towards an answer. In this book it’s the fifth of five chapters and it’s really quite a long case for a different way of thinking about things and the creativity is the main one. I’ll come to that in one moment but I offer three pillars that I think people and companies can look at which are humor, humility and humanity. It’s not just a coincidence really that they all happen to begin with HU, they’re kind of related, but I think when you approach things with humility rather than grandiosity, with humor rather than po-faced preachiness, and with a focus on humanity rather than on corporations and their values, I think that leads you in a better direction. And all of that really leads you towards creativity rather than purpose. And I’ve been criticized recently for saying that creativity is the opposite of purpose, which kind of sounds a bit hyperbolic maybe, but I think actually in a deep sense it kind of is. I think purpose by its nature is a closed mindset. That’s not meant as a kind of negative description, it’s just meant as a kind of neutral description. It’s a closed mindset in the sense that you’re narrowing down on, you’re defining a certain goal which you’re going to move towards. It’s a, as philosophers would say, it’s a teleological system that’s driven by the end goal, the telos. Creativity is an open mindset and I think it doesn’t set the goal in advance, it looks out for kind of lateral leaps It looks out for mistakes and why they might be interesting, and it often doesn’t know where it’s going until it gets there. And then you can tell a post-rationalised story about, oh yeah, well it was all about this or that. But I think not just in advertising and branding, but in business generally, that’s actually a really important mindset to be in, that kind of open mindset of not setting the goal in advance, not defining who you are in advance, but actually discovering who you are as you go along. Just to give one tangible example of that, I like telling the story of a vacuum cleaner sales conference in Portugal in the late 1970s. which sounds like a fairly dull conference, but I think it was, and there was a British company there, you know, they were a recent start-up selling their vacuum cleaners, mainly to a kind of office corporate audience, had a very dull day at the conference, they were messing about at the end when they should have been tidying up, and one of them got out a marker pen and drew a couple of eyes on one of the vacuum cleaners, which made the kind of hose on the vacuum cleaner look a bit like a nose, kind of added a mouth as well. And, you know, they had a bit of fun, pushed that vacuum cleaner back into the corner, got back to work the next day. And during the conference the next day, the trade show, all of these punters were looking at this vacuum cleaner in the corner and laughing at it and asking about it. So the guy at the conference phoned back to the office and said, look, we should just put a face on all of our vacuum cleaners. And that’s what they did. And that’s how Henry Hoover, as we call him in the UK, was invented. It’s become one of the most loved brands in the UK. There’s Henry, and Hetty is the female version, but they’re these little smiling characters that sit in the corner of your home or your office, and it just turns this really mundane, boring product into a really charming, human thing. And for me, it’s a little kind of parable, in a way, of how creativity is what leads to these things and not purpose, because they were explicitly not following their purpose at the time. They were doing what they shouldn’t be doing. They were messing around. They were playing. And then it led to this breakthrough, and it has actually led to some social good effects. You know, it’s become a much-loved brand. Apparently, children particularly love it, and they’ve had Make-A-Wish Foundation fly one sadly terminally ill child to come and visit the home of Henry Hoover. But none of that was the purpose, and there’s no purpose statement if you go to the website. But it’s just a very successful brand that has humor, has humility because it’s taking the mick out of its own product and has humanity, literally, in the sense of drawing a face on the product. So, yeah, I just think that’s my briefcase for creativity.

Adrian Tennant: Love that story. Over the past few weeks, you’ve written articles and appeared on podcasts to promote “The Road to Hell.” Nick, what’s been the most surprising reaction or feedback you’ve received so far?

Nick Asbury: Yeah, it’s already been an interesting ride. I wrote my first article in 2017. I then started a substack where I’ve been writing about it. quite frequently and deeply for the last few years. And the thing about that is you gradually build an audience on Substack, but it’s a self-selecting audience where it’s naturally going to be people who are interested in these arguments. Not that they necessarily agree. In fact, I know they don’t because I quite often get pushback in the comments or on LinkedIn and so on. But they are definitely open to a conversation about it and they’re aware that there is a wider debate to be had. And I think since naturally bringing a book out, your profile rises a bit and suddenly your arguments are being seen by people who’ve never heard of you. And I think it has struck me how shocking these arguments can be on first sight to other people. And, you know, I’ve had some of that on LinkedIn. really quite heated calls for me to be effectively de-platformed from various podcasts and things without going too deeply into it. But I think it comes from this place of, you know, the only way you could possibly be against purpose, surely, is if you’re a pretty nefarious person. So there’s a lot of just kind of knee-jerk suspicion of it, I think, and I guess the level of that… I mean, I don’t want to overdo it because I’m thinking of one case in particular, really, but there are rumbles of it elsewhere as well, where you think there’s something a bit I can’t think of a better word than taboo, because I think that’s slightly overdoing it, but there’s something a bit kind of taboo about making these arguments sometimes, and I think that’s a shame, because I think these are really important arguments to have, and it’s not as simple as purpose is right and anti-purpose is some kind of evil right-wing capitalist pushback or something. It really isn’t like that, and I think a lot of the arguments I make are what I would consider to be from the left, really, this idea that big business shouldn’t be running our politics. That used to be a pretty standard idea on the left. And so I see myself pushing for a fairly humanist, broadly leftist kind of perspective on all this. And yeah, I guess I’ve just had reminders of quite how steep a hill that is to climb when it comes to convincing people.

Adrian Tennant: Nick, what key idea would you like readers to take away from your book?

Nick Asbury: Well, I think related to that, my main thing really would be it’s okay to talk about it. I think there’s a lot of people out there who share misgivings about just the general mood of the industry, maybe of the last 10 years. They maybe feel, and as I say, I don’t want to make out that, Oh God, this is, you know, a hundred percent taboo and no one ever criticizes purpose because of course, they do. And I’m not the only one out there doing it. But I do feel there’s this sense just generally within agencies that it’s, I don’t know, it’s either people think it’s a very tired argument that surely should have been over years ago, and actually incidentally I’ve met people in the kind of brand strategy world who in particular seem to think surely this is like a 2017 debate we were having and why are we still talking about it, which I think is missing the bigger picture of what’s been happening in the corporate world. So you have that kind of eye roll, why are we talking about purpose? But then you also have the kind of sense that it’s better to keep your head down and not really question the broad principles of purpose, because at the end of the day, it’s the industry mainstream, it’s where all the awards are, it’s where most of the mainstream industry press is, or where a lot of the big agencies are. it’s kind of easier to go along with the purpose thing and eventually it might change. But I think in the meantime, lots of people are frustrated that proper, excellent creative work isn’t being recognized, that creativity is actually being a bit sidelined. You know, you get this ridiculous thing of Cannes having a new humor category. I don’t know if you heard about this, the Cannes Awards, which just seems like this patronizing gesture of now that they’ve effectively become the purpose awards of saying, oh, here you go, have a little humor category, we’ll give you a prize as well. And it’s like, no, I would rather you created a separate purpose category and got the awards back to actually awarding creativity where humor is a huge part of it.

Adrian Tennant: Like it used to be.

Nick Asbury: Absolutely, yeah. Humor is many things. It doesn’t mean laugh out loud, comedy necessarily. It’s wit and lateral thinking and ask anyone to name their favorite ads from the last 50 years and they’ll probably be funny ads. So yeah, I would just like people to feel like you can talk about it, it doesn’t mark you as being on the left or the right or the centre. One of the best pieces of feedback I got was someone read the whole book and said, “I actually didn’t know your political position at the end of it in terms of how you would vote.” Which, you know, I was very gratified by that really because I see that. I think so much of this case actually doesn’t depend on whether you’re right or left. So yeah, that would be my main hope.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Nick, if listeners would like to learn more about your book, “The Road to Hell,” or your creative work, or subscribe to your Substack newsletter, what’s the best way to do so?

Nick Asbury: I would love people to subscribe at nickasbury.substack.com. It’s all free and sporadic, but when I do write stuff, it tends to go long, and it’s hopefully interesting. The book itself, you know, Amazon is the easiest place to find it, but hopefully it’s making its way to all sorts of places, independent stores as well. And then my work, if you look at nickasbury.com, that’s probably the best way in. And yeah, hopefully you’ll see that I actually talk about and do many other things besides ranting about purpose.

Adrian Tennant: Great conversation. Nick, thank you very much for being our guest on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Nick Asbury: Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks.

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Nick Asbury, the author of “The Road to Hell.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at bigeyeagency.com. Just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Introduction to the Purpose Debate

02:35 – Nick Asbury’s Creative Career

04:53 – Origins of the The Road To Hell’s Title

06:03 – Origins of Purpose in Business

07:11 – Historical Examples of Purpose in Business

11:28 – Origins of Contemporary Idea of Purpose

13:44 – Impact of Purpose-led Campaigns on Advertising

15:44 – Example of Problems with Purpose-led Campaigns

19:26 – Consumer Perception of Brands Aligning with Causes

22:58 – Patagonia Founder’s Decision to Give Away the Company

25:23 – Transition to a Pre-Post-Purpose Era

27:24 – Human Creativity as an Alternative to Purpose

32:08 – Surprising Reactions to the Book

34:40 – Key Takeaway from the Book

37:15 – How to Learn More about Nick Asbury’s Work