Throughout the 2010’s something interesting happened in the world of marketing and PR. Brands began increasingly talking about their ‘Purpose’. And no, we don’t mean making and selling things to their customers. This was ‘Purpose’ with a capital ‘P’.
If you were Starbucks, this meant not merely selling good coffee to punters needing a pick-me-up, but aspirationally describing their purpose as “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighbourhood at a time”.
Pepsi, during the height of the BLM protests in the US, produced one of the decade’s most spectacular marketing misfires with a campaign casting Kendall Jenner as some sort of soda-fuelled modern civil rights hero.
In short, many brands became convinced that the way to win the hearts and minds of their audiences was to do more than demonstrate that they were great at their core business – they had to imply they were changing the world in some meaningful way.
Into this milieu waded advertising creative, thinker and writer Nick Asbury, with his thought-provoking book – The Road to Hell: How purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world. And how human creativity is the way out.
The book delves into some powerful questions for anyone operating in the marketing/communications/advertising/PR space – at the heart of which is that question most central to the human condition: what is our purpose and where should we find it?
One Plus One Managing Director, Kelly Bennett, spoke to Nick Asbury to dig into just that.
