The main idea of yesterday’s post was marketing’s lack of a generally accepted theoretical foundation gives unsubstantiated opinions undue influence in marketing decisions. This is certainly how Nestlé CEO Peter Barbeck-Letmathe sees it: “Marketers treat personal common sense as superior to science-based knowledge and to what the humanities have to tell us.”
Blog reader Evelyn Rodriguez made some insightful comments on the post and invited me to say what I think can reverse marketing’s well-chronicled inadequacies.
Evelyn, unless behavioral science becomes the foundation of marketing, I see no prospect of change for the better. As I said in an earlier post, it’s a sad fact that a person can earn an MBA in marketing without a single course in behavior.
My non-marketing friends think I’m exaggerating when I tell them that. After all, if marketing is not about attracting attention and nurturing it into sustained interest that leads to a buying decision – all of which are aspects of behavior – then what is it about?
Perhaps, as happens in many other professions, marketing should have a certification program with continuing education requirements. That would make it easier to separate the competent from the incompetent in this most amateurish of professions.
I quoted another CEO in yesterday’s post, “If [marketers] read popular business magazines, they feel on top of things. They disdain anything else. People with these attitudes would not last in any other profession.” That’s CLU knowledge advancement in the marketing profession.
Marketers are hired under the assumption that they have enough working knowledge of human behavior to be effective in what they do. Why else would you hire someone to help you market a product? Sorry, experience is not a substitute for dedicated scholarship and consumer surveys, interviews and focus groups cannot tell you what you should know about consumers.
Tomorrow: Why Traditional Consumer Research Can't Do the Job
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