‘Purpose is going to have a gradual corrosive effect on the strength of brands’ /

‘On the surface, people instinctively think, “well, if purpose is just about trying to do good things in society, how could you possibly be against that?”, says Nick Asbury, a creative writer for branding and design. And yet Asbury has spent the past eight years or so pitching the very reasons why everyone should be against it. His argument, outlined in his recently released book The Road to Hell, is that for all the good intentions behind purpose, which are often sincerely held, it’s a fundamentally flawed idea that leads to bad marketing and, worse, to hazier and more complacent thinking around ethics.

He speaks to Contagious about the overclaim of purpose and how it sets up brands for a backlash, and why it’s time to consider the ethical and societal consequences of brands slapping their logo on important social causes.

Photo by James Ting on Unsplash

What do you mean when you talk about brand purpose?

It’s the right place to start, with definitions. Basically, I’m talking about social purpose, which is this idea that businesses should define themselves around a wider societal purpose that goes beyond just doing whatever it is they do in order to sell stuff and make a living. It’s in some way about making the world a better place and trying to show how your brand or product fits into that. Purpose really took off post the financial crash in 2008 — it was all about trying to rehabilitate the reputation of big business, to show that it wasn’t the enemy, that it was actually a very powerful ally to progressive causes, and that there was no tension necessarily between making a profit and doing good things in the world. And that’s summed up in the slogan of the purpose movement, which is ‘do well by doing good’.

It’s this idea that there’s no tough tradeoff between doing the right thing and making a profit. But I think the big misstep, or overclaim, was to say that that is somehow the purpose of business, that there’s somehow this easy alignment between businesses being profitable and continually growing, and also that through this semi-mystical idea of purpose they can also deliver good things. That was the overclaim, ‘We’re not here to sell washing powder. We’re actually driven by this higher purpose.’ I just think that’s too much. It’s not just a semantic difference, it is actually quite important. It changes the whole way you think and talk about all of these important ethical issues. 

How do you respond to the commercial gains brands like Hellmann’s and Dove have attributed to their purpose?

First of all, Hellmann’s is an enormous brand. It has absolute market dominance when it comes to mayonnaise. It’s existed for over 110 years. And this so-called ‘make taste, not waste’ purpose, only came along a couple of years ago. To attribute Hellmann’s success to what it’s done in the last couple of years is a stretch. The only reason it can actually afford the Super Bowl advertising slots and massive media spend is the preceding 110 years of good, honest commercial advertising which helped turn it into what it is.

I think it would be a different thing if 110 years ago, Hellmann’s was set up with this ‘make taste, not waste’ positioning and somehow grew into this global giant. It’s often the brands who are incredibly commercially successful and have been for decades, like Andrex or Dove or Hellmann’s, who having built on product-based commercial advertising over many decades, that are in this luxurious position where marketing people can sit around debating purpose. It’s almost a luxury form of advertising. 

Maybe mayonnaise does help you use up some of the leftover food in your fridge. But I think any average punter is going to look at that claim and think that it’s a bit of a stretch. Lots of brands build themselves on an overclaim — we’re probably the best lager in the world, or the world’s favourite airline, that kind of thing. But when you build yourself on an exaggerated ethical claim, that gets uncomfortable.

[Purpose-led growth is] not something that you’re going to see over the course of a six-month or two-year campaign, it’s where it sends the brand long term. These big brands that pivoted into purpose, it could be 10-20 years down the line that you really see what that’s doing [for] brands that have been around for over a century — and I think it’s going to have this gradual corrosive effect on the strength of the brand.

Why do you think it’ll have that corrosive effect on brands?

There’s that phrase, pride comes before a fall. When you set yourself up as an ethical brand, it means that when the next story comes along of your business inevitably doing something dodgy at some point, because most big businesses do, it leads to a much greater backlash. We’ve seen that with Unilever a lot. When Russia invaded Ukraine, there were lots of demands for businesses to pull out of Russia.

And quite a few were slow to do that — Unilever was one of them. It became the focal point for many of the protests because it counted itself as this purposeful company. That’s where it makes your brand very vulnerable over the long term. You’re building your reputation on a claim that you can’t really back up. You can donate to some waste recycling places and you can try everything you can to prove that mayonnaise is a positive force in the world, but I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to back that up in a serious way, and then you’ll eventually get found out. 

Photo by Mike Kononov on Unsplash

What are the broader negative effects on society of purpose-led marketing?

The first one is if purpose [leads] to worse marketing, which I would argue it does. That in itself is a bad thing for society, if it means that businesses aren’t performing as well. If marketing isn’t doing the job that it should be doing to drive the economy and ensure that perfectly decent businesses can grow and pay people and treat their workers fairly, there are lots of economic effects tied up in that. 

But more widely than that, [brand purpose] creates a cynicism around causes that are genuinely important. Maltesers is all about maternal mental health. Vanish is all about autism. Hellmann’s is all about food waste. Every issue has a corporate brand trying to put its stamp on it. It has a subtle depressing effect on public life in general.

This is one of the grander arguments I make, but for me, it’s depressing to see a poster campaign during Covid where there were these giant portraits of nurses coming off a long shift looking exhausted, [with] a line superimposed on them saying ‘Courage is beautiful’ with a Dove logo next to it. That is a depressing thing to put out in the public realm on giant billboards. On the surface, you could say, ‘Well, why should anyone be unhappy with that — the nurses are happy to be featured, we’re honouring their work, and maybe Dove increases its brand awareness and sells some more soap as a result of it. So who loses?’

But society in general loses when you have this culture where socially worthwhile messages always come with a logo attached for some mundane product. What if those posters had a Royal College of Nursing logo on them or an NHS logo on them? And if it said in the small print, ‘Thanks to a donation by Unilever, for making this poster possible’? For me that’s a more civilised, wholesome way to go about celebrating nurses — not saying ‘Aren’t these nurses great, buy our deodorant.’ I think there’s something tasteless about it, fundamentally. 

Proponents of purpose point to the failure of governments, the loss of trust in institutions, and the fact that people demand brands to step in and solve the world’s problems. Do those arguments hold up to scrutiny?

It’s a really good point to raise because that is usually offered as the main justification for purpose. That there’s this grassroots clamour for corporations to do this is, for me, the biggest lie at the heart of [brand] purpose.

Let’s just go back over the last 10 years. That decade, certainly in the UK and US, has been characterised by being [politically] split right down the middle. We had Brexit, more or less 50/50. Right across Europe, we have the rise of populist movements. Even in 2020, Trump loses but he still gets 74 million votes. America is still largely split down the middle. And yet, the claim is that there is some universal demand for brands to embrace one side of the political space. I just think that doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. 

The further claim is that it’s the younger generation who are driving this, that Gen Z are demanding the corporations step up. But again, it just isn’t true when you look at the real data on what the younger generation think. There were a couple of polls in America, just recently, that said 46% of Gen Z plans to vote for Trump over 42% for Biden. There have been different polls that suggest it’s more the other way around. Either way, it’s not a sign of a generation that’s united in its desire for brands to embrace progressive politics. 

Going back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was an [IPA]  survey taken two or three weeks after that, asking people about whether brands and business should withdraw from Russia. It was over-55-year-olds who were in favour of that – about 80% of them. And then the 18- to 34-year-olds, the Gen Z people, weren’t bothered. It was more like 33% of them in favour of brands pulling out. And only about 15% of them wanted brands to actually say anything in response to the Ukraine crisis. Most of them seemed far less bothered than the older people. 

When you look at trends like quiet quitting, or the TikTok trend of lazy girl jobs — this idea that you just find a job that involves the least work possible and you get paid and you go home and do more interesting things — there’s been lots of talk about that within Gen Z, and for me, it’s a sign of sanity. It’s a sign of people resisting the purpose narrative where you’re meant to regard your workplace as the most purposeful thing in your life and the brands you buy from as socially important.

I think it’s a pushback against that. Quite rightly, they’re looking for purpose elsewhere, which is where you usually find it. Most of our purposes in life have nothing to do with the corporation we work for or what the CEO happens to announce as his new purpose.

Photo by Taylor Nicole on Unsplash

You talk about these corporate brands stepping in to solve problems that they themselves have created. What if Dove didn’t do anything, would the situation be worse?

Dove is a particularly interesting case. I think there’s a strong case to be made that Dove has made all these problems worse because what they subtly do is reinforce the insecurities that they claim to be fighting.

You see lots of articles out there from the last few years, all written by women as it happens, talking about how Dove has co-opted this language of empowerment, which can strike young girls or women as slightly disconcerting. It’s like, ‘Why do you keep telling me I can do it? I wasn’t even doubting that before and now I’m thinking, oh shit, you know, maybe I’m not strong enough. Maybe I’m not empowered enough.’ 

If you look at the trend since Dove’s Real Beauty launched in 2004, mental health statistics, particularly when it comes to younger women, have plummeted since then. In the 1990s women [in the UK] were twice as likely to suffer from mental health issues [than men], and now it’s three times as likely. Generally, the trends are in a worrying direction.

There’s a widespread belief that that’s partly driven by phones and social media, but one of the structural issues is that Dove’s advertising is [funding] all of these platforms. Dove is a great funder of TikTok [in terms of advertising], even while it does campaigns that are supposedly about the damaging effects of TikTok. You could say the most socially purposeful thing to do would be to withdraw all your advertising from Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and say that you’re not going to support socially damaging platforms. Some brands have done that. 

Dove has bought into this ‘do well by doing good’ school of thought — ‘We need to make sure we’re shifting lots of products so we’ll keep marketing to the younger generation on TikTok but we’ll do it by projecting these messages about empowerment and hand-wringing about mental health.’ There’s something really uncomfortable about that. 

Isn’t purpose-led marketing effective at all?

This is all with the proviso that we’re talking about commercial effectiveness rather than social impact, but as a marketing tool is it commercially effective or not? There hasn’t been compelling evidence that it is. And actually, there’s been lots of evidence that it isn’t.

One of the first big things that was offered as evidence of purpose working was Jim Stengel’s book, Grow, which came out in 2012, where he offered this thing called the Stengel 50. He claimed that the 50 top corporations had one thing in common, which was having a strongly expressed purpose. He built a lot of the purpose argument on that and it was really shoddy methodology.

Richard Shotton masterfully unpacked all that and showed how incredibly thin and post-rationalised it all was. There was then some research by the IPA and Peter Field in 2021, which compared purposeful with non-purposeful campaigns. The finding was that purposeful campaigns were far less effective than the non-purposeful. That should have been the end of the study and that would have been the headline.

But the study then took this further step of weeding out of the worst purposeful campaigns, keeping the best ones and comparing them to the whole of the non-purposeful group, rather than a proportionate sample. If that had been a proportionate sample, purpose still would have been worse. But by comparing the whole non-purposeful group with selected purpose campaigns, they were able to generate the headline that the best purpose campaigns outperform the non-purposeful. 

A lot of purpose is built on a false conception of the way people make buying decisions. We know from current research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute [that] people just aren’t thinking about brands that much in general, never mind their purposes. There’s all this research [How Brands Grow, by Byron Sharp] about how much massive brands like Coke or Pepsi rely on light buyers — 30% of Coke buyers buy it less than once a year, 50% for Pepsi. They’re not divided into tribe Coke and tribe Pepsi. Most people buy both, it just depends what’s to hand at the time and most people just have this vague perception that Coke is the red one, Pepsi is the blue one. No one’s thinking hard about the brand in general, and certainly not thinking about their politics and social stances before [they] buy. 

Also, purpose pushes you into very same-y territory. It turns every brand into another version of ‘we’re here to make the world a better place’. It pushes you into this slightly more abstract, ethical territory [which leads to] very same-y language. You climb this ladder of abstraction away from your product, whether you’re a coffee brand or a taxi company or washing powder. It’s like, ‘We’re not just about coffee, we’re about making people happy with coffee, and when people are happier, that means the world is happier, we’re actually all about sharing happiness.’

You end up with all these abstract concepts that make you sound more like a Buddhist movement than a coffee brand. And the problem is that the chocolate company and the biscuit company are doing the same thing. They’re all doing this logical chain of, well, we’re not just about chocolate, we’re actually about making people feel better and more connected through the power of sharing or something. 

What should brands look to embrace instead of purpose? 

Going back to Bud Light and this idea of brands becoming more socially divisive, I think one of the most useful roles mass market brands can play is to be a form of common ground. You may have Trump and Biden supporters who don’t connect on any level but what they can both agree on is kicking back and drinking a Bud Light or a can of Coke or watching a Disney movie — that those things are fine and good. They have a weird uniting effect. But when brands charge into the purpose realm, they end up becoming a political statement.

Buying a particular brand of beer or particular bar of chocolate or whether you go to a Disney movie or not — they’ve all become wrapped up in these culture war battles. For me, that’s a shame in these divided times. The most useful thing brands could do, not in a cowardly way, is stay out of these debates. In an almost brave way, [to] just step to one side and say, ‘We’re a lovely fizzy drink, sit back and enjoy it. This is America — have a Coke with Trump supporters and Biden supporters. We don’t care, it’s just a nice drink.’ There’s something quite wholesome and, you could argue, socially useful about that.

What’s the way forward for brands that genuinely want to do good?

I always try to emphasise this: even though I’m anti-purpose, I’m very pro ethics and pro-doing good things on a business level. When it comes to donating to charities and so on, do that because it’s good, not because it’s a marketing opportunity. If anything, it’s better not to talk about it because, as soon as you do, it puts a veneer of self-interest on it.

I think the best advice is to start close to home. What are the things as a business that you can do better? You can make sure your workers are fairly paid, that they’re not working evenings and weekends unpaid. You can get your tax affairs straight so that you’re contributing positively to society. One of the best ways to help society is to pay a decent amount of tax to fund hospitals and schools and roads and the infrastructure we depend on.

All of those things are hard to achieve and get right. But if you just do [them] — and this is before even thinking about wider social issues — you can sleep at night knowing that you’re doing something worthwhile. You’re supporting a lot of people as they earn money to raise families — you may well be supporting an entire community. Businesses are very useful just by being in business.

The best approach is to do good things but not make a big deal out of it. You see brands like Timpson’s, for example. Certainly in their marketing they don’t make a big deal out of their social purpose. Even though they’ve got a very good record in terms of recruiting ex-convicts and offering very fair working conditions. If you look at any Timpson’s branding or marketing you’re not going to see that plastered all over the communications and there’s no purpose statement if you go to their website. 

Maybe just stop thinking of doing good as a marketing issue and see it more as part of the continual struggle of being a human in the world trying to do decent things. I’m a fan of Bill Bernbach, who said a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something. For me, that’s a good North Star, rather than ‘do well, by doing good’. 

Photo by Calvin Ma on Unsplash

Any final words for people on the fence about purpose?

I think a lot of people are slightly afraid of the anti-purpose position because they think if they make any noises in that direction, that will be perceived as somehow right wing or problematic or you’re not at all interested in companies doing good things. The one thing I would say is don’t be fooled into thinking that being anti-purpose is a rabidly right-wing position.

There’s a long tradition of people in the centre and on the left and even the far left even being suspicious of corporations making these grand moral claims, of corporations interfering in politics and societal questions. I consider myself coming at this more as a critic from the left. So I would just put that out there for people to not be afraid of the debate — it is actually quite an important debate to have.’

Nick Asbury is a creative writer for branding and design, commentator at nickasbury.substack.com and author of The Road to Hell.

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