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Episode 131

The Problem with "Purpose" with Nick Asbury

A German professor compiled a list of 55 questionable Cannes award entries. And he’s far from the only one. Yet the industry keeps creating marketing to win awards over actual performance.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by Nick Asbury, creative writer and author of The Road to Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World. Nick challenges brand purpose, arguing it produces formulaic campaigns while the research supporting it is fundamentally flawed.

Topics Covered

• [04:00] How the 2008 financial crash sparked the purpose movement

• [12:00] The real story behind Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign data

• [18:00] Why for-profit companies lack social license to lead causes

• [21:00] Nick's crowdsourced fact-checking of Cannes award entries

• [26:00] Debunking the Gen Z purpose myth after the 2024 election

• [29:00] What respectful marketing looks like without purpose

Resources:

2024 MarketingWeek Article

Nick Asbury’s LinkedIn

Nick's Substack

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Nick Asbury

Writer at Asbury & Asbury

Transcript

Nick: 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.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects. Rob DeMar is the chief product architect of Misfits and Machines, and we're joined by Nick Asbury. Nick is a writer, creative and one half of Asbury and Asbury, his long running creative partnership in the UK. He's the author of The Road To Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and 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.

Nick: It is 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.

Elena: Great. Nailed it.

Rob: 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'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? Like "If ignorance is bliss, why are you so sad?" 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.

Nick: I guess so. 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 one. But 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. We can come back to that.

Elena: That's funny. I like that. A frustrated optimist. Well, we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. We're always trying to root our opinions in 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 companies in the first place, and whether marketers have confused slogans with the real job of making effective, respectful advertising. And today we're gonna 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?

Nick: 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 where 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 ad. I'm sure you remember the protest march that's diffused by her handing a 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 Sidney 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 purpose stuff. There were things like Fearless Girl winning all the top awards at Cannes D&AD. You may remember that it was a 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, you know, 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 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.

Elena: 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 and the financial crash as a reputational rehab for some corporations. Could you explain how you think that origin has shaped where it is today?

Nick: I had a slight 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 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 went wrong in 2008. And business needs to 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 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 hubris was creeping in about, hey guys, 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 anti-business protests that were gaining some traction around the world. And I think purpose did come as a conscious attempt to change the narrative from that Occupy Wall Street narrative to something more positive. And it was about repositioning business and saying, look, we're not the villains. We're actually your most powerful allies. We can push all the causes you care about. So yeah, but that would be the story I would tell about where it came from.

Elena: 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 perceptions of how purpose has worked for brands?

Nick: I think partly because of that backstory that I've just told, I think it began as a 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 & Gamble marketer. He wrote Grow, which was one of the first books that was one of the first 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 there were 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 is 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 Stengel because he wasn't the only one bringing evidence forward, but it really was extremely thin evidence, kind of non-evidence, really. Byron Sharp, who I'm sure you know, 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 criticism of Jim Stengel'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, well it must be because they have this purpose. And the circularity is that, well, 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 never 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 - Moët & Chandon champagne was described as having a purpose of turning occasions into celebrations, which is extremely vacuous idea of what a purpose is, I think. So there was something very self-fulfilling about the whole thing. Richard Shotton was another critic who came on 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.

Elena: I think that's really interesting, just the research and data behind it. The way that 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 because Dove's real beauty campaign is something everybody tends to bring up as 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.

Nick: Yeah, 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 some kind of lifetime achievements award or something at Cannes for their 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 major social purpose brand. And that is far from the full story. So 2004 was when the campaign for Real Beauty started. Dove was already the market leader in the US in terms of hand soap, and it was already, it had been a company, I think it had been around since 1957 or something. A huge player in the market. It wanted to broaden out beyond soap into various other things. It actually started doing that 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 signatories who were from academia and Dove have always been very good at working harder than most purpose brands when it comes to presenting a 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 was an 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 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 relate it more to family, professional achievement, all sorts of other areas of life, beauty just being one 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 an older woman and it had one tick box said wrinkled or one tick box said wonderful. And you were meant to, as people walking past the poster, you were meant to decide which option was the right one. So actually you are 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 cruel response rather than the one that Dove wanted. So that was rapidly taken down, but they gradually got more sophisticated over the years and did these almost like popular science experiment type ads, which I'm sure you know. 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 problem, the evidence isn't good. We seem to have more mental health problems among young women now than ever 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 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. 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.

Angela: I think the work you're doing is so crucial. When you talk about 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. But when I think of Dove, when I think of the Always Run Like a Girl campaign, you can see how 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?

Nick: I think it is a pretty deep, fundamental problem really that 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 are a publicly listed company. You don't have the liberty to say, we're gonna put this social cause ahead of profit or ahead of delivering for shareholders. Logically your self-interest is always gonna win out when it comes to a 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 gonna push certain social issues that are less threatening to them. So it might be talking about gender or mental health or those kind of issues that feel more palatable to that company. But from society's point of view, we may 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, and very few companies are gonna 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. Again in elections and polling around elections, people say that really it is economic issues that are at the top of mind for most of them. And 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?

Angela: It does. And many of these purpose campaigns that we've talked about, we mentioned this earlier, have won awards and got accolades, especially at Cannes. So you went viral recently. You publicly called out for a crowdsourced hashtag CanFactCheck 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 Cannes look like in your view?

Nick: Yeah, evidence-based Cannes, that's an interesting idea. I didn't really start the whole Cannes pushback this year. It was happening well before I got involved, and it's always been a group pushback really. 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 clear is it is 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 original incident that started it all was this agency DM9 in Brazil, who one of their awarded case studies, it turned out featured an AI doctored clip of some CNN news coverage, I think, which they fessed up to. And they withdrew, they came to an agreement with Cannes to withdraw that entry. They also withdrew two other entries at the same time. Never explained what was wrong with those? Cannes never explained what was wrong with them either. They just quietly disappeared. So that was the thing that started it going, I think. But then there were flare ups around the world. In India, there was a very active conversation about, there was one entry in particular that got a lot of attention. It was turning train tickets into a lottery system to encourage to tackle fare dodging. And people did a lot of digging to find out that 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've now got a list of about, well, 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. I just think why, even though it is old news in a way, and you get some old timers rolling their eyes and saying, Hey, this is just the way it is, you 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 award entries. And I think what frustrates me about it is, and this 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. Everything from mental health to self-esteem, whatever it is. And yet when we have an ethical issue in our own industry, which is widespread fraud in award schemes, there's a rolling of the eyes and saying, oh, well, 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 surely there's a disconnect there. Surely, if we can't tackle a very solvable problem in our own industry, how can we claim any authority to tackle other issues? And I have to say, while I'm on my hobby horse, it frustrates me a bit that a lot of the purpose activists on LinkedIn and elsewhere who were very vocal about tackling all sorts of issues in the world, none of them have joined in this crowdsourced fact checking effort that's been going on with me and other people around the world. And I think, it does make me question how committed they are.

Angela: Yeah. It's a bit of a tell.

Nick: Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. As an observer of all this, do you feel it's been different with Cannes this year?

Angela: 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 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 in terms of time being spent over the years on this topic?

Nick: Yeah, I think it definitely has 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 are very quickly gonna be left behind because they're this new generation that in a different way to all previous generations, really thinks about social issues when they're buying toothpaste or soap or whatever it is. That's always been a huge claim. And it's been backed up by various research from people like Edelman and various other PR companies, Deloitte is another one, McKinsey, where they do, they ask these leading questions in research, like, do the ethics of a company matter to you when you are 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. It's like, well, yeah, ethics matter to me. Sure. But it doesn't actually mean you are 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 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 not welcoming that as amazingly good news necessarily, but just observing it as 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. It's just, 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 Dreams 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.

Angela: I was just gonna bring that up.

Rob: I remember as a Gen Xer, we were supposed to be the warm, fuzzy generation.

Nick: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Rob: Just kicking the can.

Angela: Yeah,

Nick: Yeah,

Angela: 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 wanna respect their consumers and potentially be inspirational, but what does it look like in your view?

Nick: You partly become a successful marketer by respecting your customers. I think, and I actually think fundamentally purpose doesn't respect people's intelligence very much. I think as a marketer you can, 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 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 in a world that's divided into Trump voters, Harris voters, Brexit voters, whatever. You can be the one thing that maybe people can agree on. It's like, well, we don't agree on politics, but we both like Diet Coke. And not everything has to be politically charged and divisive. But 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 gonna think of me for having this logo on my t-shirt? And I think brands can just be, it's very unfashionable these days to say, stay out of politics, 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, you 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.

Rob: 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?

Nick: Most of the reaction it's been encouragingly positive. I think, even from people who disagree with me, I think there's a sense of it's still, it's good to talk about it. It's good to hear the counterargument because there's a bit of a 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 say things. And so that's all been really interesting. I'm UK based. I did find when the book blew up a bit more after the book came out and I was getting a bit more attention from the US on LinkedIn and I thought, wow, the culture war 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 I got drawn into some arguments. I maybe should have found a way to extricate myself sooner. But 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.

Rob: Right.

Nick: But yeah, there were some people who were contacting organizers of conferences and things like that and suggesting that maybe I shouldn't have been invited to say this. So that's, and I don't wanna overstate that there, there was definitely some of that.

Rob: 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, how the advertising conversation has followed that a bit. Do you think we're entering, since we're definitely sort of on the other side right now, do you think that we're entering a post purpose era for marketers? Or do you think that lever's still gonna get pulled quite frequently?

Nick: 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 purpose era and 2024 maybe being seen as the end in the sense of, and particularly the election of Trump. I think there was just a sense at that moment that there was a finality about, not the end of purpose, but the end of a certain phase of its preeminence. I do think we've shifted somewhere different but I definitely hesitate to say post purpose, full stop. I think that it's definitely still very much out there. And we're seeing now a different dynamic with things like American Eagle and Cracker Barrel and all these things. They're not exactly purpose stories, but I think I see them almost as a hangover from the purpose years where I think for years, brands wanted us to think of them as political.

Rob: Yeah, when we're debating Cracker Barrel, it feels like it's a slow news day.

Nick: Yeah. Well maybe it's been a slow news month or something. Yeah. But yeah, I think brands are.

Angela: Yeah, though, the marketing world 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.

Nick: For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I have complex feelings about it because I do think it's valid to look at any ad or logo or anything and read it in a cultural and political context and do an almost academic reading of these things and say, what do these suggest about the way culture is going? And 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 jeans, how has this become so heated? And you see the heat coming from both sides in a way. So, yeah, it is interesting times and I think we're still gonna see how it pans out. Is this post purpose or is this purpose moving into some new form? I'm not sure the answer yet.

Rob: 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?

Nick: Yeah, it's funny in a way, my meta contrarian opinion is that I'm not the bloody contrarian here it is everyone else. Because I think my strongest beliefs, or the things I'm most known for 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 awards entries shouldn't be allowed. Whoa. But 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. Yeah, I think that might be the best. I'm sure I've got 10 other contrarian opinions, yeah, I'm gonna be contrarian about being called a contrarian.

Elena: Love it. It's a new take on that question. I like it. I wanna 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?

Nick: Yeah, I'd love to hear yours actually. The 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 copy and usually what it means is we're making something cheaper.

Elena: Right?

Nick: But instead it sounds much more noble 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 their business model is really is finding a product that's trending and is quite expensive. And then they do a dupe of it, a riff off of it and then sell it a bit cheaper and they call it democratizing beauty. And yeah, I just think it's a bit of a tell that word for something something going on. But yeah. What are yours?

Angela: I would say mine is probably where you see a brand doing social tallying versus having real commitments. If you're really behind something, donate a set amount, right? And go. Versus the one like equals a donation or share this to support, it's a hashtag for change. It just feels very, 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.

Rob: 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 get a pat on the back. But at the same time, they're admitting, well, our parts aren't from America. 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. Don't just say, oh, we assembled it in America.

Elena: 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.

Rob: Yeah. We've actually proven that. People will say they want it.

Elena: But it won't change sales results,

Rob: They don't care. They care about the price. Sorry, that's again, probably gonna get us in trouble, but it's just data.

Elena: Yeah. Mine is when brands post for every holiday, not just the main ones, when they're posting for 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 gonna piss off 50% of your audience. No one's waiting, Ooh. I wonder what Marketing Architects thinks about this whole. No one really cares. So no one cares. 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 point to it.

Nick: Yeah. I have to say, sometimes I feel sorry for brands in this 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 are very noticeable by your silence. And you know, 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, I think.

Elena: 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?

Nick: The best place, I'm most active in terms of social media, most active on LinkedIn. So you'll find me there, Nick Asbury. And then I have a Substack nickasbury.substack.com, where I post long essays about various topics. I've not been as active on there lately because I'm in the throes of working on a book. I have no idea when I might finish it, but it's a book about creativity and copywriting, what makes it good and what maybe makes it better than what AI can do, which is an interesting area of its own. So yeah, hopefully I'll have something to say about that in the next few months.

Elena: Great. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Nick: Yeah, thank you. It was really nice to be on a podcast that I also watch and listen to, so thanks again.

Angela: So great to have you.

Rob: Thanks Nick.