Language matters.
A few years ago, Paul Feldwick wrote a seminal book called The Anatomy of Humbug. It talks about how, over the last century of marketing, we have always had people convinced that their way of doing marketing was right and others wrong. It’s an excellent reminder that in marketing, unlike many other professions, there are many ways to be right (and, of course, many ways to be wrong). But whilst there have always been arguments about how marketing works, before the advent of the internet and ‘digital marketing’, at least both parties knew what it was the other was talking about. It’s not difficult to understand what mass marketing is, or direct marketing, or retail marketing. They are what they say on the tin so to speak. Brand marketing is somewhat more esoteric to create but, conceptually, also not that hard to understand.
The constant conversation about the right way to market still exists today, however, the industry’s complexity and specialisations now make any arguments virtually impossible to resolve. Jane Austin once said, “one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other”. If only we had one half of
