Got a phone call last week from an old buddy who’s CEO of a small manufacturing company…
Smock!! Yup. Bonehead here. Hey Bonehead whats up? Yo buddy called you a liar. Huh? Yea, that Seth guy wrote a book saying all you marketing pukes are liars. Uhh… no Bonehead, thats not quite accurate. Yea it is. He’s got a picture of a bald-headed guy with Pinocchio’s nose on the cover of the book. Did you read the book Bonehead? Nope. You know I never read that crap.
I’ve been having a little heartburn about Seth Godin’s latest book All Marketers Are Liars. The problem is that like Bonehead, most business folks will never read Seth’s book. They’ll see the clever cover plastered on web sites and in book stores, but they will never read the book, let alone the blog entries or the reviews. So the essence of Seth’s message will be lost, like it was on Bonehead. And will leave marketers like me to explain why we are not really liars. Thanks Seth.
More importantly, marketing and marketers are under fire to demonstrate relevancy and accountability. And while the fine art of storytelling as eloquently described by Seth may help with relevancy and accountability – he couldn’t of picked a worse time for selecting this title. I have a request of Seth. Help save marketing. Use your formidable storytelling talents to make that connection between new school notions and old school realities of revenue, share and profit that so many CEO’s are desperate to understand.
Several other blogs have been hosting some interesting exchanges on All Marketers Are Liars. Johnnie Moore has nagging doubts about the story thing, readers took Seth to task on his statement that all politicians are liars at Jennifer Rice’s Brand Mantra, and Peter Caputa has his own version of heartburn.
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So clients can’t handle the truth?
This issue has its roots in number theory and logic, and judging by what I’ve been able to discern from the VSENTE site, you folks value rational analysis. It turns out that formal systems appear to be constitutionally incapable of defining or specifically demonstrating truth. There are a rather extensive group of theorems, corollaries and lemma which allude to this curious problem. It’s a bootstrap thing. See Tarkski, Gödel, Russell, et al.
But there’s more: It turns out that often with even those decisions which would seem to militate in favor of highly rational approaches are made, ultimately, by intuition. I’m outlining Kant’s analysis/synthesis dichotomy here. People are not automata, running breadth-first decision-tree analysis on each decision (notably purchasing decisions.) We desire and even require theatre.
Analysis is powerful. This is not in question. The more important question, to my mind, is when it can be most usefully applied, and when it should get the hell out of the way. A professor of music theory once told me that music theory is not a prescription for music; it is a description of music. Music is composed by the artist and then analyzed later by the theorist and not the other way around. N’est pas?
How about a theorem, a principle and a law…or Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Taken together this theorem, principle and law show that it is impossible to determine the character or nature of a system within itself. More importantly, the harder you try to determine the nature of a closed system from within that system, the more confusion, panic and disorder will result. Most of the time the client doesn’t know the truth.
“Most of the time the client doesn’t know the truth.”
Nor do we, the marketers. That’s my point. Analysis is a handy tool to evaluate what you’ve already done, but it doesn’t create anything. Creation is an intuitive, synthetic process. You can produce all the analytics you want, but without the creative intuition to parse that stuff and even occasionally defy it, you get nada.
Seth is trying to tell a story. What’s more, he’s the one who engendered this particular story. In this context, it seems to me that a punctilious, literal reading of the word “liar” completely misses the point.
When I say, “So clients can’t handle the truth,” I don’t mean some kind of didactic elocution of the marketing process – I mean the guts to tell a good story, even if it seems risky. The people who take the word “liar” in the title of Seth’s book as an asseveration of their own poor evaluation of marketers are not the folks I want as clients.
Good marketers know the truth.
Agree… creative whether developing strategy or content rules.
Yes our process is driven by analytics. But you have the traditional competency grooved – read Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict and focus on his defintion of orientation and the role interaction and isolation play in competitive activities.
As to Seth’s book. Most will never read it. They will judge the book and it’s contents by the cover and never get to the real story.
Good luck finding the clients that haven’t been negatively influenced by bad press or bad experiences with marketing consultants, ad agencies, pr firms etc…