Malcolm Ashworth

Malcolm Ashworth
Born	(1925-11-14)14 November 1925
Died	7 April 1978(1978-04-07) (aged 52)
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service / branch	British Army
Years of service	1943 – 1952
Rank	Captain
Unit	Devonshire Regiment Gloucestershire Regiment
Battles / wars	World War II Malayan Emergency
Awards	Mentioned in Despatches
Relations	King Edward I Wadham Wyndham
Other work	Marketing pioneer

Malcolm Stanley Ashworth MBIM MCIM (14 November 1925 – 7 April 1978) was a decorated British army officer and a noted marketing and advertising executive regarded as the leading figure in the establishment of marketing as a professional discipline in the UK. He is also credited with saving the highly influential Crawford's Advertising Agency from financial failure in the late 1960s. He was the son of Arthur Broad Ashworth, a naval architect to the Admiralty, and, through his mother Kathleen, the great-grandson of Wadham Wyndham.

Education

He was educated privately at St Boniface's College in Devon, where he was a House Captain (Wyndham), Captain of the First XI and Captain of the First XV, and at the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. He was matriculated into Edinburgh University in 1943 but abandoned a degree in favour of military service.

Military service

Ashworth volunteered for the British Army on 15 June 1943 aged 17, having served with the 13th Devon (Totnes) Battalion Home Guard until he had completed his school education and reached the minimum volunteering age. He was one of 710 British officers granted a full King's Commission from the Indian Military Academy and served as a captain in the Devonshire Regiment and Gloucestershire Regiment during and after World War II in India, Burma and Malaya (Mentioned in Despatches).

While serving with the 1st Devons in Malaya in 1948 Ashworth succeeded Captain Michael Bullock (later Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Bullock OBE DL officer commanding the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment) as Battalion Intelligence Officer (IO GSOIII) and was placed in charge of intelligence gathering and analysis in the Kluang area, specifically monitoring Malayan Communist Party guerrillas during the Malayan Emergency. He retired from active service in 1952 and was placed on the Regimental Reserve until resigning his commission in 1958 when the Devonshire Regiment amalgamated with the Dorset Regiment.

Post-war career

Upon entering a career in the relatively new discipline of Marketing in 1953, Ashworth's promotion was rapid, becoming Director of Marketing for Quaker Oats in 1957, Marketing Director of Revlon in 1961, and then returning to Quaker Oats in 1964. It was as Marketing Director of Quaker that in 1968 Ashworth conceived the idea of engaging his friend and celebrity chef Sir Clement Freud to promote the dog food Minced Morsels (later Chunky). He appointed Collett Dickenson Pearce to produce what became a landmark television advertising campaign which saw Quaker's dog food become the market leader almost overnight and turned Freud into a household name.

In 1968 Ashworth's career evolved from purely marketing rôles to the management of major advertising agencies when he succeeded Sir Hubert Oughton, a director since 1929, as Chairman and Chief Executive of the highly influential but creatively and financially ailing Crawford's Advertising Agency founded by Sir William S Crawford in 1914. In the following year he masterminded the merger with Dorland, which is credited as having saved the agency from financial collapse, and Crawford's was still operating under its original name until 1985, latterly as the Crawford Hall Partnership. It became part of Saatchi & Saatchi in the early 1980s.

Following the rescue of Crawford's, in 1970 Ashworth's turnaround capabilities were sought as Deputy Managing Director of Overmark Smith Warden, another important but financially embattled UK advertising agency. His initial success in turning round the agency saw him become the agency's Chairman in 1973, however ultimately the debts of the business proved too great an obstacle to profitability and in January 1976 he put the company into receivership and resigned from the board. The receivers managed to find a buyer for the agency which continued in business until 1983.

Along with figures such as Professor Neil Borden at Harvard Business School, Ashworth is regarded as a leading figure in growing recognition for Marketing as a professional discipline, and is regarded the most influential marketing professional of his time in the UK. He was instrumental in what he termed "the marketing revolution" of the 1960s, which he compared to the professional evolution of advertising in the 1950s. In his introduction to 'A Consuming Passion', the first book ever published on Marketing as a career, he noted that historically many people had "become marketers as a result of happy chance, or had, in fact, been doing a marketing job for our companies without really knowing it." He contrasted this to the new era of Marketing where while "there are no recognised academic qualifications which ensure success in marketing ... success in such a challenging situation demands intellectual ability, imagination and determination of a high order."

Ashworth was Speaker on Marketing at the University of Liverpool in the 1970s until shortly before his death in 1978, and authored numerous articles on marketing and advertising.

Political interests

Ashworth was by conviction a centrist and one-nation conservative who was motivated to become politically active in order to to defend community interests, both in his native west country and in London, with a particular focus on issues affecting children, the elderly and road safety.

In 1973 he stood as an independent Centre Party candidate in the Hammersmith and Fulham Greater London Council Election in order to highlight the borough's road safety issues, having identified that too few pedestrian crossings were provided to keep pace with increasing traffic volume and speed. He was for many years a Trustee of the Sir William Powell's Almshouses in Fulham, London which were founded in 1680.

Ancestry and Family

Malcom Ashworth was a direct descendant of the Ashworths of Ashworth, a Lancastrian family tracing its lineage in the male line back to 1170 and, according to Sir Bernard Burke writing in 1858, one of the oldest families in England. Through his grandmother, Alice Wyndham, he was directly descended from King Edward I and was a distant cousin of King George VI. In 1957 Ashworth married Ingeborg Laufs, younger daughter of Heinrich Laufs and Antonia (née Welck, a natural descendant of Karl Wolfgang Maximilian, Baron von Welck) and had one son, Alexander Ashworth, who followed his father into marketing). Malcolm Ashworth died unexpectedly at the height of his career in 1978 as the result of a cerebral haemorrhage and other complications arising from his war wounds aged only 52.

Further reading

• Schwarzkopf, Stefan Creativity, Capital and Tacit Knowledge, The Crawford Agency and British advertising in the interwar years (Journal of Cultural Economy, Volume 1, Issue 2 July 2008)
• Pearson, David, The 20 Ps of Marketing, a Complete Guide to Marketing Strategy, Kogan Page, 2015
• Aggett, W.J.P., 'The Bloody Eleventh: History of the Devonshire Regiment, Vol. 3, 1914-1969" (Devonshire and Dorset Regiment, 1995)