Before you go out and buy a book about the next marketing fad, you ought to read a down to earth assessment on business fads first....


One is in Monday's Wall Street Journal, where some level-headed thinking is exposed on how companies jump from consulting fad to fad, which one exec calls the "flavor of the month." Jeffrey Pfeffer (a former colleague of mine at the Stanford Business School) tells execs to me more independent and to "systematically examine evidence about what's gone right and what's gone wrong instead of following what everyone else is doing."
This is essentially why I don't like case studies...because they focus on what some other company has done right (or wrong). That's fine for some other company, but how does that relate to what you should do?
Another good article appears in the current Atlantic Monthly.
After reading these two articles, I'm once more convinced that marketers should be very, very wary of people who are touting the "new rules" of marketing. It seems like someone is trying to sell you something more than trying to help you market better.