The Road to Hell is out

Today is the official release day of my book, The Road to Hell. Here's the introduction—along with an earnest appeal for support.

May 13, 2024

If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you’re part of the hallowed crowd who have helped me shape my thoughts over the years—thank you. This is the one part where I hit you with a ‘call to action’—ideally to buy the book, even more ideally to tell people about it, and/or review it on Amazon and elsewhere. If you’ve already pre-ordered, copies should land within days—just as soon as Jeff Bezos gets to the Post Office.

Here’s the introduction that I include in the book.

8 October 2008. The United Kingdom is hours away from a “breakdown of law and order” as the Labour chancellor Alistair Darling would later describe it. The Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group has stepped down and the government has stepped in with £50 billion of public money to save the banking sector.

25 July 2023. The Chief Executive of Coutts, part of the NatWest Group, formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, has stepped down following a row about the withdrawal of banking services from former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage. The decision comes after an internal report detailing how Farage no longer aligned with the ‘values’ of the bank. The bank is still nearly 40% owned by the UK taxpayer.

10 November 2010. Parliament Square in London is packed with 50,000 students protesting the trebling of tuition fees by the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition government, despite an electoral pledge by the Liberal Democrats to oppose such an increase. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will later apologise for the u-turn, which heralds a decade of austerity politics.

14 March 2022. The former Head of Strategy for the 2010 Liberal Democrat election campaign, and Director of Policy from 2010 to 2015, takes on a newly created position at University of the Arts London. Her mission is to lead a rising generation of politically aware students who see ‘art as a form of activism’. Her title is Chief Social Purpose Officer.

17 September 2011. Wall Street is packed with protestors angry about economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics—a protest sparked by the editors of anti-consumerist publication Adbusters and publicised with an image of a dancer atop the iconic bull sculpture.

8 March 2017. The protestors have disappeared from Wall Street. In their place is a bronze statue of a girl facing down the bull. Fearless Girl is the brain child of ad agency McCann and asset management firm State Street, who will later be sued by their female employees for systemic pay inequality, and by the female sculptor for curtailing her creative expression. The idea is hailed by the global ad industry and becomes one of the most awarded campaigns in Cannes history.

This book is about what happened in between.

It’s about a single word: purpose.

Some readers will be unaware of the special meaning that gathered round this word in the marketing and business world over the course of the 2010s. Maybe you noticed how ads became more earnest over that period: more saving the world, fewer laughs or catchy jingles. Maybe you noticed business leaders becoming more vocal about social issues. If you’re in the UK, you might remember a culture war skirmish, in which Conservative minister Kemi Badenoch criticised the political stance of Ben and Jerry’s. If you’re in the US, you might recall the Battle of Bud Light or the cat-and-mouse fights between DeSantis and the Disney Corporation. Wherever you are in the world, you can’t fail to have noticed the rise of trillion-dollar companies, celebrity oligarchs and a widening wealth gap.

Other readers will be more attuned to the marketing and business world debate, and already tired of it. Those readers will be aware that the word ‘purpose’ has been at the centre of a tangled debate about the social role of businesses, and how that affects their marketing. Some may have arrived at the conclusion that purpose is all in the nuance. Sure, there are charlatans and hypocrites who talk a good purpose game to conceal what’s really happening. But it shouldn’t put us off the real thing: purpose is good when it’s real, bad when it isn’t. End of book.

That would be an easy book to write, and many have written it.

This is a harder book to write, and no one else has written it in the way I’d like. I’ll be making the case that purpose—even, or especially, when it’s ‘real’—is an incoherent way to think about marketing, business and business ethics.

The clue to my argument is in the title of the book.

It comes from an English proverb: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. And my argument is that, for all the (sometimes) good intentions behind purpose, it’s a fundamentally flawed concept that leads to bad marketing and worse outcomes for society.

I’ll make that argument by talking about what purpose is, where it came from, how it leads to worse marketing, and how it leads to a worse world. Then I’ll make a positive case for an alternative, based on a combination of creativity, cognitive empathy, and valuing the human over the corporate.

All this matters because, even if you are tired of the purpose debate, you can’t afford to be tired of what it’s fundamentally about: the role of business in society, and the political and ethical dimensions of what businesses and marketers do every day.

For over a decade, purpose has warped clear thinking around that question, to the point where things have happened that would have seemed inconceivable to the Wall Street protestors in 2011, the student protestors in 2010, and the public watching in 2008 as £50 billion of their money disappeared into the ether.

From there, we leap straight into definitions, which means leaping into the heart of the argument. 220 pages later, you’ll hopefully emerge blinking into the sunlight of a new era of creativity, cognitive empathy, humour, humility and humanity. Or you might write your own book about why I’m wrong.

I’m proud to have five fine readers chiming in with a back cover quote: Eliza Williams of Creative Review, who published purpose critiques before it was cool; Byron Sharp, a rare and unshakeable empiricist in adland; Paul Feldwick, whose erudite books on advertising are more vital than mine; Michael Johnson, the brilliant designer and writer about branding, whose work is often on behalf of actually purposeful non-profits; and Andrew Kelly, a reader of this Substack who does meaningful work at the Antarctic Science Foundation and shares the frustrations with corporate posturing.

I’m also proud to have a cover design by David Pearson, whose work is one of the best adverts for craft and creativity you’ll find.

I’m beginning a month of podcasting and other PR and will keep you posted on a launch event. In the meantime, here’s the call to action: please go buy my book.

Blackwells
Foyles
Barnes and Noble
Waterstones
Hatchards
Amazon UK
Amazon World

NB: for the time being, there’s no audio or Kindle edition—it’s an old-school print-only book. For the right fee, I’ll read it down the phone to you. (Or seriously, you could ask me to come and give a talk.)