Thoughts on Writing

What follows is an excerpt from my new book The Road to Hell, tackling the case of Simon Sinek and his 2009 book Start With Why. In other news, I’ve appeared on three podcasts recently, all quite different in tone and content. Check out The Marketing Book Podcast, In Clear Focus and the Fuel Podcast for some interesting conversations. At the turn of the century, Simon Sinek was an adman, working at Euro RSCG (now Havas Worldwide) and Ogilvy & Mather, before launching his own consultancy in 2002.

Forewarning: this post stems from a tweet that got more attention than I usually get. Cursed as I am by nuance, what follows isn’t a blistering ‘take down’ of the poster you see above, or the person behind it. He’s an obviously successful entrepreneur, and there are worse problems in the world than light-hearted billboards. But I think it goes to important issues about class, purpose, authenticity and nepotism, which I’m now going to think about aloud.

I should preface this by saying I’m not posing as some working-class firebrand who is in a position to call out the adland snobs. I’m a fair way up the snob hierarchy myself. But I like to think I’m just about grounded enough to think twice about my own assumptions, one of them being: wow, isn’t the new M&S ad embarrassingly shit and a huge branding misstep? Here it is, Francis Rossi and all: Terrible, isn’t it? Like some 1970s Woolworth’s ad, or a parody that belongs on The Apprentice.

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This will make more sense to anyone who has read part one, in which I talked about what purpose is and where it came from; and part two, in which I talked about how it leads to bad marketing and worse social outcomes. In this post, we come to the Simon Sinek question: why. And it’s a fair question to ask given how much time and verbiage I’ve dedicated to this topic. Why does it matter? I hope the answer is already becoming clear, particularly in the Cadbury’s case study.

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Hello again. In part one, I covered what purpose is and where it came from. In this post, I’ll set out how it leads to worse marketing and worse social outcomes. (I’ve made some of these arguments in more depth elsewhere, so follow the links or check the archive for more.) The image above is from Left-Handed Mango Chutney, which I mention further down. How does purpose lead to worse marketing?

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This three-part post is an expanded version of a talk I gave at the Worksmarter conference in Ghent in June 2023. Regular readers will know I’ve written a lot about purpose (as far back as a Creative Review article in 2017). But preparing the talk prompted me to structure the case in a way that might be a useful reference point in future, if only for myself. Parts 2 and 3 will follow in the next two days.