Despite the fact that some of my ravings might suggest otherwise, I love marketing. I love it with a passion. So, with equal passion, I hate its being abused.
As one indication of its abuse, I enter into evidence this post — “Which Technologies and Content Types are Rising in Importance for B2B Marketers?” — from which I won’t cite a single word. Nor will I take a word of it earnestly. What I will do, however is ask a question: How seriously can we take a blog post that, in its 452 words, cites 19 statistics?
That’s right — 4.2 percent of this misbegotten missive (if you’ll forgive the statistic) comprises statistics. It might purport to be about marketing, but this exercise in fraudulent time-wasting constitutes statistical and arithmetical gymnastics at the expense of marketing and language.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. (Mark Twain)
And what’s the upshot of all those statistics? Mindless, mind-numbing jabbering like this post, the subhead of which is this: “Designing Human and Digital Experiences Is the CMO’s Top Priority”.
If you think about that, even for a moment, two more questions have to cross your mind: What the hell are digital experiences? And who’s supposed to have them? Here’s a hint: You’ll never be able to tell from this kind of babble:
Agile digital companies are seeking to disintermediate the relationship between both traditional digital and brick-and-mortar companies and their customers … Putting in place an analytics capability to enable data-driven, personalized journeys … Initiating or accelerating the business technology agenda to improve technologies that deliver customer value and drive growth.
Here’s what I know: I’ve never had a digital experience. As a customer of anything, no digit has ever delivered my value or driven my growth. And even if I had an inkling about what it means to disintermediate the relationship between both traditional digital and brick-and-mortar companies and their customers (I don’t, nor do I want to), initiating or accelerating the business technology agenda isn’t going to do a damn thing to give any semblance of meaning or credence to data-driven personalized journeys.
Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity. (Ellen Glasgow)
The only thing that angers me more than the fact that people are writing and publishing useless drivel like this is that somewhere, right now, other people are pontificating publicly about it — and even more people are sitting in the audiences of those other people — raptly, haplessly lapping it up.
That’s abuse, pure and simple.
I love marketing. I hate what’s being done to it.
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Image by geralt, courtesy of pixabay.com.