This is a situation where a modest intellect has learned the language, and so can spew out a bunch of marginally related clichés. They  understand some of the obvious stuff, can look at the numbers, and have a superficial understanding of customer behavior,  and the context in which that behavior occurs, so they can babble about brands, marketing, and communication sufficiently well to fool some of the people, at least some of the time.

Real marketing is done by a very few very smart people who get  to the deeper reaches of motivation and behavior, who are able to scrape off the over-burden of verbiage, and get to the real guts of the strategic and communication challenges being faced.

Marketing is inhabited by a group that is pretty ordinary, just look at the UAI’s required to get into the various marketing courses around the place. The smart people are doing something else. Is it any wonder that there is a real lack of good strategy and marketing intellect at the top of organisations, the people at the top who make the succession decisions see the lack of depth in the marketing “profession” and act accordingly.

This rant was motivated by a bloke I was pitching to in a sufficiently senior role to say “No”, who not only failed to grasp the basics of the argument I was putting, which could have been put down to a lack of communication skill on my part, but he also asked a number of questions that demonstrated he knew nothing, and to top it off, talked about himself a lot.

Save us from the idiots making decisions with nothing more than dartboard tools.

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The “Santa” brand. Governments and marketing Brand loyalty a two way street. The 9 imperatives for small businesses when building a brand.