"All marketers are liars". Seth Godin is a marketer. Hence?

Sorry for the cheeky title, but Seth sort-of ticked me off today with his post "Nobody Knows Anything".

First off, as someone who makes his living providing marketing analytics, I get a bit, let's say annoyed, when someone like Seth starts a blog post with "There are two kinds of marketing analysis, both pretty useless".

I calmed down a little bit when later in the post he conceded "Here’s the really good news: in addition to analysis, marketing today offers something that actually works: a process".

But his post in general has an attitude that says "Marketing is not science", and that "most marketing breakthroughs come down, sooner or later, to luck".

Well, I am not a guru like Seth (or as "lucky" in terms of having a couple of bestsellers under my belt), and he definitely knows a lot of things I don't -- but this is my blog :-) -- so, I will say that marketing is just as much of a science as social science is. It may not have equivalents to Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity, but marketing analytics does have some tried and tested ways to leverage data to make smart predictions about future behavior of customers and prospects.

Now, once equipped with the intelligence that marketing analytics provides, it is completely up to the marketers on how successfully they can change their strategy and tactics to yeild results (so, marketing is only partially scientific) -- but marketing analytics will almost always put a marketer somewhere above pure dumb luck.

Of course, you may agree with Seth, or not -- but I just had to get this off my chest.

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