The motte-and-bailey fallacy, and a response to a decent response

(Not a full-on post, more an extended LinkedIn reply)

I should go on holiday more often, or maybe less. As soon as I stepped out of the UK last week, there was a flurry of purposeful activity on LinkedIn—first with Antoine Renault sharing my most recent post (and discovering how heated some of the responses can get), then with Callum Towler writing a defence of purpose that got some traction and to which I promised to respond.

I made that promise because I appreciated getting a response that addressed the issues in a reasonable way, without any personal attacks, and showed evidence of having read / listened to the background and wrestled with the issues in good faith. Thanks Callum!

I’ll go through and respond to the post in more detail, but first I want to lay out something called the Motte and Bailey Fallacy, which is perpetually on my mind when I talk about purpose, but which I don’t think I’ve mentioned on this Substack before. (I know I said my last purpose post would be my last purpose post, but such is life.)

Social bailey, commercial motte

Philosopher Nicholas Shackel was first to use the medieval motte-and-bailey analogy to describe a common rhetorical gambit. The bailey is the bigger, more expansive claim—for example, saying Defund The Police with the radical implication of withdrawing all funding and abolishing police departments. The claim is big, controversial and attention-grabbing, but it’s also vulnerable to argument. So, when challenged, arguers might abandon the bailey and retreat to the smaller, more defensible motte—for example, we just mean we should reallocate a portion of police funding to community support services in certain cases. Having seen off the attack, the arguers can then go back to repeating the more expansive claim, until challenged again.

I’ve sensed a version of this in purpose debates. Look at every press article about purpose, every purpose awards scheme, every purpose agency website, every pronouncement from Larry Fink, Richard Edelman, Paul Polman, Klaus Schwab and Yvon Chouinard (to name a few) and purpose is continually meant in the values-laden, moral, social, stakeholder-capitalism, do-well-by-doing-good sense. This is what made it feel like a different idea in the first place, and it’s what drives the many heated debates people have had over the years.

But, when challenged, there is often a retreat to the motte of ‘We just mean commercial purpose. It doesn’t have to be social or morally loaded in any way—it’s just a business having a clear idea of who it is and how it benefits people. It might be as simple as making really tasty biscuits that people like!’

This is a smaller claim and much easier to defend, but it’s also wholly unremarkable. Jump in a time machine to 1980, 1960, 1940 or 1920 and any marketer or business leader would shrug and say, ‘Yeah… we know. We sometimes call it our proposition, mission, strategy, business plan, or just take it as read that we’re selling widgets that solve a widget-shaped problem and are marginally useful to people’s lives because they wouldn’t buy them otherwise. If that’s what you time-travelled back to tell us, it’s nothing new and I’m not sure why you think it is? But sure, if it makes you happy—every business can have a purpose in that sense.’

And it’s true. In the anodyne, motte-based sense, every business can be purpose-driven, with no moral implication either way. To use a British reference, Del Boy could say that Trotters Independent Trading is highly purposeful, in the sense that he has a clear vision of selling knock-off goods and get-rich-quick schemes with a view to becoming a millionaire by this time next year. Similarly, Halliburton could scoop all the purpose awards by fulfilling its purpose of selling oil and gas to a world that demands it. And Primark could be applauded onto the stage at Cannes for fulfilling its purpose of selling clothes cheap because people seem to like them. If purpose has no moral or social valence, no connection to values and responsibility, and is just about having a clear sense of what you do as a business, then all these things are equal examples of purpose, and are all equally eligible for purpose awards, and are all as likely as Patagonia to come up in the next press article about purpose.

But, of course, we know the word is never truly used in that way. Having seen off the challenge, purpose people head back out to the bailey and start talking about social responsibility, values and morality, all while citing Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s as examples of what they mean, and mixing in a bit of ESG and DEI because that’s obviously part of being purposeful. And when the next challenge comes, it’s back to the motte with Del and Rodney.

The response to the response

With all that in mind, I want to offer some responses to Callum Towler’s response. I’ll do it by commenting on screenshots—you can read the original here.

First, I agree with this observation, but it’s worth adding that it’s not just the absence of a defence to the critique. It’s also the absence of a clearly built case in the first place. If purpose is a new idea, then the burden of proof lies with its proponents. But the argument has always been made harder by the elusive nature of the initial claim. Jim Stengel’s Grow is just one example of the hazily defined original case, and it’s worth noting that Towler’s post doesn’t address of any of the specific Stengel critiques from Byron Sharp, Richard Shotton and others.

Yes, good to start with definitions, and my book does too.

This is close to Larry Fink’s ‘reason for being’ definition that I discuss in the book, but the word ‘beyond’ is doing a lot of work here. Does it simply mean a more detailed explanation of how the money will be made (‘We’re here to sell razors that people can trust to do a great job at a decent price’). Or is it ‘beyond’ with a hint of ‘above and beyond’—some higher claim like ‘We’re here to enhance self-esteem for everyone, everywhere and we just happen to do it by selling razors’. If it’s the latter, is it truly honest to call it the ‘reason for being’ or (at best) a potential positive externality—a fancy way of emphasising the emotional benefit over the functional feature, to use the old-school language?

And if you call it a ‘reason for being’, is that the kind of subtle inflation that leads you to think you’re truly driven by this purpose and profit is just a happy by-product—a way of thinking that will continually catch you out? After all, when a supplier says ‘Hey, you can boost our self-esteem by giving us a bigger margin!’ do you remember your reason for being and offer them a better deal, or do you remember your for-profit status and find a new supplier? That might sound flippant, but if words mean anything, you have to follow through the implications, because you’re already on a road that leads to confused ethics and inflated marketing.

Here we get the retreat to the motte that I talked about above—purpose is mostly commercial and only a small subset / exception is about creating a better world.

But even within the same section, the return to the bailey begins. Having being offered a ‘reason for being’ definition, we’re then immediately told not to take it literally, which surely isn’t a helpful starting point. Is there a definition we can take literally? Can we start there instead? And already, the word ‘values’ has drifted back in—a morally-laden term that takes us back into social purpose territory.

I won’t dwell on this, apart from pointing to my previous thoughts on ‘bothism’, a term I don’t believe adds much to the argument. It’s worth noting again how we’re back to purpose entailing “a brand’s commitment to a cause” and “moral conviction” when we’ve just been told that this is the exception not the rule when it comes to purpose.

The same section goes on to talk about the Peter Field/IPA research, once again adhering to the industry-wide agreement never to call it the Danone research, after the highly invested company that funded it. I wrote about it here.

Even braver than arguing with Jesus Christ, this section is arguing with Mark Ritson. The altruism research isn’t specified, but either way I think the point fails to land, because it’s ignoring the crucial difference between charity and business.

There are, of course, organisations who have to sound their trumpets loudly about the good they do, in order to inspire more of it. We call them not-for-profits and we give them that status partly because it removes the ick-factor about businesses trumpeting their virtue in order to turn a profit and boost pay-outs to shareholders.

Towler goes on to give the entertaining example of Larry David and “I’m anonymous!” along with the straighter example from Sam Harris. But these are examples of charitable giving and interpersonal etiquette. Even with individual people, there’s rightly a taboo around boosting your personal status by saying how much you give to charity, and Sam Harris has to tread extremely sensitively round the idea that he’s the guy giving a homeless person a dollar and then shouting to everyone in the street about how generous he is. Of course, it can be done with tact, and might inspire more people to do the same, but at least there’s no question of financial profit entering the equation, and the end beneficiary is a charity. It’s all a very different ethical world if you’re talking about for-profits selling widgets by leveraging social issues. We’re right to be uncomfortable about it.

Three things to note about this section: 

First, I’ve said all along that my primary concern isn’t whether purpose works commercially—I’d almost be more worried if it did, because it’s the social effects that matter most. In any case, we’re all meant to agree that the purpose of purpose is purpose and commercial effectiveness isn’t the point.

Second, we’re back to the Danone research. I’ve written a lot about the weirdness of the sampling-on-the-dependent-variable stuff. But there’s more weirdness in the core study, in the sense that we can’t see the full list of case studies to assess how and if they’ve been fairly categorised as purpose-led. And there’s no attempt to demonstrate causation over correlation—there might be all sorts of reasons why the best performers were the best performers, entirely unrelated to purpose. Maybe they all had animals in them.

Third, we’re back to plastics and beach preservation, rather than the commercial purpose that is meant to be so much more common. Social purpose is supposedly the exception rather than the rule, but it seems to loom large as soon as that point has been made and the conversation has moved on.

The difficulty with the ‘absolutely incredible work’ claim is that it’s still not clear how purpose-led work is even being defined. If it’s just about a brand having a clear idea of who it is and conveying it in a powerful, single-minded way, then sure—any successful ad can be defined as a purpose ad. Well done WeBuyAnyCar, congratulations Domino’s, thanks for your service GoCompare.

But in reality, we’re back to talking about refugees, domestic violence and supporting small businesses—all social, morally-charged stuff. And if we’re interested in more than the commercial results (for which no evidence is brought forward), then once again we have to ask uncomfortable questions about Airbnb’s wider social impact, or Amex being criticised by the small businesses they’re meant to be helping. And we once again have to make the distinction that YSL is engaged in charitable partnerships—a fine thing to do, but it’s the charity that’s purposeful, not the luxury fashion house sponsor.

This section sounds suspiciously like a business pitch, which I guess is fair enough. I’d just note that the claim that purpose started 20 years ago is only true if we’re back in the bailey, talking about the social purpose, do-well-by-doing-good movement that sprang up in that time. But if we’re in the motte of businesses simply having a clear sense of what they do and the emotional benefit they offer customers, it’s hard to know how anything substantive changed 20 years ago, or why any of this has caused such a fuss.

Finally, I agree that purpose campaigns can be easier, and this was part of the original appeal for ad agencies—there’s more scope to get attention and win awards if you do a domestic abuse ad rather than a luxury fashion ad. And it’s easier to pull the heartstrings if you do an autism ad instead of a fabric conditioner ad, assuming you can pull off the dismount at the end. (Once again, note how we’re back to talking about ‘tackling real-world issues’ when that’s meant to be the exception in purpose marketing.)

But I was particularly struck by the last sentence of the post. ‘Old-school, fame-first thinking’ is a strange way to think about the decades of brilliant commercial creativity that built most of the big brands to the point where they can afford to indulge in some purpose navel-gazing or pay for this year’s profoundly un-famous Cannes entry. It can’t be stressed enough that domestic abuse charities partner with YSL because what YSL brings to the table is fame and reach. That came from decades of strong branding and advertising. Purpose marketing didn’t do that.

One of the most painful ironies of the lost purpose years is that they overlapped with the How Brands Grow years that offered some genuinely useful, evidenced insights into mental availability (fame), distinctiveness versus differentiation, and the enduring power of creativity—all of which should be a gift to an ad industry beset by AI, influencers and programmatic. Instead, we’ve had years of defending the purpose bailey, retreating to the purpose motte, and gradually realising it’s the wrong hill to die on in any case.

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Anyway, I’d better stop there. All this is pretty in-the-weeds, but hopefully useful—and I didn’t want to come across like I was ignoring constructive feedback having lamented its absence previously.

Zooming out, the tectonic plates are continuing to creak all over the place. There’s Fast Company with a long read that tells a similar history to mine, with welcome platforming for Tariq Fancy, who has been a brilliantly clear thinker about all this, plus some refreshing acknowledgement that purpose critics from the left have long existed, mostly before the right-wing versions came along. There’s also Bloomberg airing the idea that we can’t rely on businesses to self-regulate their way to a better world. And even The Guardian is finding its voice on the excesses of ‘wokeness’, of which purpose has been the corporate version.

For me, there’s a sense of hearing the last rumbles of thunder as the storm fades over the horizon (though who knows what else is on the way). Clearly, arguments about the ethics and societal role of business are much older than the recent 20 years of purpose, and they can and should continue. But hopefully that can happen within a mental model that doesn’t immediately obscure all the issues and blur vital distinctions.

My last appeal is to anyone concerned that letting go of purpose will somehow ‘embolden the far right’—a claim I’ve heard a lot recently. I think the lessons of recent years and elections are that we should consider the opposite, as some on the left are now doing. To whatever extent those extreme elements exist, they would love nothing more than for the left to cling to unpopular ideas that they don’t even fully believe in themselves. So yes, there may be some hardcore ‘real purpose has never been tried!’ believers, but I think it’s better to leave them in the bailey and tiptoe away. As for me, I’ve talked for years about how we should be discussing ideas, craft and creativity instead—and that’s what I’m hoping to focus on now, eventually in a new book. I’ll share more about it when time and LinkedIn allow.

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Thanks for reading. For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. My book The Road to Hell is available on Kindle and in print.