Much of my year has been spent studying up, diving deeper, reading as much as I can on my profession. I’ve read some enlightening stuff, like Felipe Korzenny’s Hispanic Marketing, Forrester’s Groundswell, and I always get something from revisiting Ogilvy on Advertising.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, quality is rare, and after all the reading and research is done, I find myself heading back to the beginning—trying to clarify in my mind exactly what I want to accomplish. As a marketer, I’m trying to figure out exactly what my (or my client’s) message is, who it’s for, and why they should care. That’s it. Without knowing these things, any additional effort is lost.

Of course, figuring these things out is deceptively simple. It’s immensely difficult, and takes a lot of time. What’s more, there are about a million marketers out there eager to distract their clients with lofty promises of the next big thing, without addressing the client’s primary needs. This struggle to distinguish between signal and noise reminds me of one of my favorite passages from The Code of the Samurai:

…if [samurais] cultivate the arts of war wrongly, they get conceited about their knowledge, looking down on others around them. Spouting high-flown but untrue theories, they mislead the youth and spoil their dispositions. Although they speak words beyond their own capacity that may seem correct and true, in their hearts they are very greedy, always calculating gain and loss. Gradually their character degenerates, and there ar those who even lose the mentality of warriorhood altogether. This is an error connected with the half-baked cultivation of military science.

If you are going to study military science, you should not stop halfway. You should practice until you reach the inner secrets, finally to return to original simplicity and live in peace. If, however, you spend your days in half-baked practice of military science, unable to reach the inner principles, thereby losing the way to return to original simplicity, thus remaining frustrated and demoralized, that is most regrettable.

In this context, returning to simplicity refers to a condition like your state of mind before having studied military science. Generally speaking, just as with bean paste that stinks of bean paste, since ancient times it has been traditionally said that when you meet a military scientist who stinks of military science, you cannot stand the smell.

From “Army Principles and Combat Principles” (emphasis mine)

Beware of marketers who stink of marketing.