Seth Godin Deconstructs Marketing BS

Well, well, well. Once again, a relatively innocuous post about marketing ("How Branding Can Kill Your Profit") has twisted the shorts of a plethora of marketing folk.

You'd think that nobody would bother to argue against the something as uncontroversial as the idea that marketing groups sometime waste money.

But marketeers are desperately trying to hold onto the notion that their activities do not need to be measured. They want to control the big budgets and pretend that they're "driving" sales, when all they're really doing is driving margins into the ground.

I just love it when some marketing executive from some podunk B2B SMB tries to use the Coke brand, or the IBM brand, as a reason why their should be spending more on marketing. Like the same rules apply for Coke and IBM as apply to them. Give me a break.

Anyway, here's Seth Godin -- a marketing guy who really gets it -- deconstructing all that 20th century BS about advertising and demand creation that keep popping up on the comments to this blog.

The video is a bit long, but it's definitely worth watching, especially if your firm has an infestation of traditional marketing drones:

READERS: Do you agree or disagree with Godin?

UPDATE (2/3): Check out comment #5 for an excellent summary of Godin's speech.