To set the stage… I’m a scientist at heart. Before I got into tech I was working on my PhD in neuroscience. So its with healthy skepticism (a valuable trait in a scientist) that I looked at Intelligent Design – a reformulation of Creationism as the explanation for how we got here and where we are going. Intelligent Design asserts that there is an “intelligent cause” — some entity — the Christian notion of G_d, directing the growth of organisms as opposed to the process of Natural Selection which is the key process in evolution. In natural selection, random genetic variation represent traits that are either advantageous to species survival or not. If they are advantageous they become more popular over generations.
Evolutionary Marketers
Well, do you believe that you should be injecting new talent into your marketing team regularly? Do you recruit or collaborate with non-marketers AND customers to produce new positioning and ideas on how to take your product to market? How much effort is given over to innovating the marketing function at your firm? Do you give your teams the opportunity to experiment and FAIL then take learnings from that failure and use it to breed success? Do you leverage scientific approaches to going to market? If so then count yourself as an Evolutionary Marketeer – you believe in growing your organization in sometimes unexpected directions and you understand that some strategies are marketing dead ends, they won’t go any where.. won’t “perpetuate the species: — your firm by driving Demand.
Intelligent Design Marketers
Is your marketing “pre-ordained?” Do you have a few folks directing the overall strategy without input from either the feet on the street, your customers or those responsible for execution? Are most of your marketing efforts coming out of some sort of play-book or recipe? How often do you vary that recipe? Hardly at all? Do you rely on the same talent — virtually all of the time? How much experimentation is there in your marketing activities? Are you quantity driven as opposed to being quantity and quality driven? If the majority of these attributes describe your marketing organization then you’re an Intelligent Design Marketer.
Its a simple choice really. You can evolve and grow your marketing organization and keep your competitors off-balance. Or you can execute well for a while until your competitor evolves some survival strategy that vaults them into a position of market dominance while placing you into an evolutionary dead end. And we all know what that means… we’ll be seeing your organization in the “Extinct Species Wing” of the museum.
Okay, so maybe there’s a chuckle in Mann’s article, but the deceptive marketing of the pseudoscience of intelligent design creationism is no laughing matter. The propaganda masters at the Dishonesty Institute have given up that there is any actual science backing intelligent design creationism, so they are poisoning the well by marketing it to the faith community (which is of course where it originated) rather than to the science community.
A review of the marketing of the execrable anti-science film “Expelled” shows the depths to which these creationists will go: Lying to actual scientists in interviews and then cherry-picking their responses, parroting long-disproven creationist lies coupling Darwin to Hitler, and packing secret pre-release showings with naive churchgoers. (Or is just good marketing?)
Make no mistake about it, most “cdesign proponentsists” (Google the term, if you’re unfamiliar with it) – supporters of intelligent design creationism – are willfully ignorant of science, and count their scientific illiteracy as a virtue, not a sad deficit. Check out the Wikipedia article, “List of scientific societies explicitly rejecting intelligent design,” to see what the actual scientific community thinks of the pseudoscience of intelligent design creationism. Better yet, read Dr. Barbara Forrest’s book, “Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design” or her paper, “Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals,” to see what these dangerous religious fanatics are really up to.
Paul… thanx for your comment however, I don’t believe that this is the appropriate place to have this discussion so I’d appreciate it in the future if you would restrict your comments to the subject at hand. I am happy to have a discussion on Creationism v. Evolution but only offline.