The Joy of Marketing BS

Unfortunately, the marketing industry is full of BS.  One example is this “study” undertaken by the Arnell Group for Pepsi.  Pepsi purportedly spent an enormous amount of money on this project that is eminently cheesy. Quote: “Breathtaking is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy”.  Arnell goes on to compare his new design for Pepsi to Leonardo Da Vinci, the Parthenon and other historical works of art.  As I plodded through his 27 pages of absolute nonsense, I began to lose hope in the traditional marketing industry.  Performance-based marketers like myself shudder when we see old-school marketers resorting to sophistry to cheat their clients out of money and brand equity.  There is absolutely no empirical research in this study.  Nowhere does he actually test people’s reactions to his re-branding in the marketplace.

However, marketing as a field is very young and eventually the hacks and cheats like Arnell will be washed out.  Clients will go to marketers who can show proven success, metrics and data for their ideas.