The most common form is curing an invented disease. If it ain't broke, break it: enablers will invent terminal problems with existing elements so they can put it out if its misery while putting forward their alternative in its place. A good example is anyone trying to kill off the funnel: the enablers always use generic textbook versions to set them up as a straw man, because they don't understand they are just illustrations of the concept rather than actual funnels to be taken literally and used out of the box.

 

Another is an iteration as innovation. The enabler will take an element, pick one or more inherent parts of it, extract them, and add them back on and push it as a new development. This happens endlessly with concepts like the 4Cs, which are constantly being dissected and reassembled into more convoluted alternatives, even though the new version covers exactly the same ground as the original.

 

A variant of iteration as innovation is the magpie's nest, taking parts of other disciplines that are typically deemed more respectable and bolting them onto marketing. Often they are taken from disciplines that have an air of science about them, or at least allow the inclusion of scientific sounding terminology. Psychology, economics, sociology, politics, semiotics: they've all been co-opted. Equally often they are misused because they are not properly understood in the first place, shoehorned in by enablers because they know it will appeal to marketers who want to shortcut credibility by being perceived as a polymath. There's always a framework arbitrarily applying Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to segmentation, a guide applying a culturally ignorant western-centric reading of colour theory to distinctive assets, or a playbook pushing a neuroscience concept into a campaign plan.

 

Then there are the reinvented wheels: the enablers will take something basic, common sense, or simple, and dress it up in faux technicality. A wheel is old hat, which makes it hard to sell; but call it a Kinetic Circular Momentomator, refer to it as a "K.C.M.", and now it can be sold as a new, dynamic, modern solution. It does the same thing as the original, but it does an equal or worse job of it. This is why there is a near endless slurry of buzzwords, terminology, and acronyms clogging up meetings and presentations.

 

A more covert version is the scare tactic. A mountain will be made from a mole hill, with the implication that a lack of immediate and drastic action will cause irreparable damage. If you don't buy this tool or service, your career and/or business is over. It combines hyperbole with a general lack of specialist knowledge to create panic and discomfort, which they can provide an immediate remedy for. At the time of writing, you can't go more than a few minutes without another enabler manufacturing fear around AI with yet more grandiose apocalyptic prophecies.

 

Then there's the hyper-structured procedural. Straightforward tasks will be turned into overworked formalised processes, packed full of unnecessary steps and distractions. They create a veneer of professional rigour and thoroughness, but they don't add anything of value or improve the outcomes. They make everything look busy and technical, but it comes at the cost of wasted time and energy. The hyper-structured procedurals arrive in the waves of frameworks, playbooks, how-to guides, decision trees, methodologies, and so on.

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Even when the source is empirically sound it has little use. A lot of marketing science outputs are little more than academics or agencies producing contextless statistics that offer little to no practical value: it only tells them 'what', not the 'why' that guides action. It tells marketers what is happening, but it doesn’t tell them how to avoid it or use it to their advantage. Telling marketers that 65% of adverts produce no sales lift for brands is useless on its own: without knowing why it doesn’t work or what does work for the other 35%, nothing can be done with that data.

 

There are also the subsets of Marketing™, first being the secondary or submarket for "evidence": the pseudo-empiricism that is used to justify and legitimize buying into Marketing™. Selective examples from unrepresentative samples will have curated data presented in manipulated visualizations, knowing most marketers will not apply skills like critical thinking or data literacy to it, so the tricks and misdirections will be wilfully ignored as it is showing them what they want to see.

 

When was the last time you saw a social media agency publish a whitepaper that concluded social media was a fairly effective but not entirely necessary channel? It is very convenient that the needed thing always is the thing that the enabler sells. When it happens one hundred percent of the time it's not coincidence, it's design: the "evidence" is demand generation content marketing dressed up as objective empiricism, presented by salespeople dressed up as Samaritans.

 

A more recent subset which has become a favourite form of Marketing™ are bullshido courses, littering the discipline with training and programmes at any opportunity. In many instances they are created and/or delivered by enablers who largely present opinion as wisdom, are overstating the importance of their own specialism, or think their knowledge of a few specialisms qualifies them to teach the whole discipline. It is fairly common for a lot of the ‘educators’ to ‘teach’ things they never have done themselves, building the curriculum on repackaged and regurgitated material taken from more credible places, not learnings from real-world practical experience. Many are little more than thinly veiled indoctrinations into proprietary approaches or propaganda rallies for specialisms; primers to set up spend on ancillary products like future courses, the figurehead’s books, or the training provider's wider services. At their very worst they cynically and shamelessly exploit desperation, appealing to marketers who are at a low point with promises of copy-and-paste routes to quick success.