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What honestly annoys me about marketing (and what to do about it)

Q: Does measurable mean the same as important?

No. It is the confusion Jerry Z. Muller named in The Tyranny of Metrics : we optimise what is easy to count and overlook what matters. Goodhart's law applies too: an indicator turned into a target becomes a bad indicator.

Josef Havelka recently wrote down what annoys him about marketing and hit the whole industry where it hurts. Let me build on his manifesto in my own way: with a little venom, a pinch of flourish, and above all with what serious science says about most of these vices. Because any grumbler can complain. Pointing to the evidence is rarer.

Daniel Votruba · 24 July 2026 · 4 min read

We want to be different. And we benchmark ourselves into uniformity

The most popular sentence at a strategy workshop is we want to differentiate. The second most popular is send me what the competition is doing. That combination is about as charming as a vegan schnitzel: it looks almost like the real thing and tastes of compromise. When everyone measures themselves against the best in the category, the whole category converges on one listless average where the logos differ only in shade of blue.

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put it bluntly: brands grow through distinctive assets and mental availability, meaning by being themselves and easy to recall, not by mimicking their way into the crowd. A benchmark is a good servant and a miserable master. A useful map of the terrain, a catastrophic destination.

We revere data. Then we decide on a hunch

Companies now hoard data with the collecting passion of a philatelist. Screens full of dashboards, attribution models across three monitors. And the final decision? That lands on Tuesday after lunch, because I simply prefer the yellow one. Data has not become a compass, it has become an alibi. It gets pulled out when it confirms what we had already decided, and discreetly omitted when it interferes with the plan.

I am not against intuition, quite the opposite. In Alchemy Rory Sutherland argues persuasively that excessive rationalisation kills the magic and that the best ideas look like nonsense at first. But intuition and data should not play hide and seek. Either we decide by the numbers or by sentiment, but then let us at least say so out loud and stop using econometrics as a fig leaf.

AI poses as a revolution. So far it mainly accelerates mediocrity

I love AI and use it daily. Which is exactly why it irritates me that it has become an incantation. In most companies it does nothing revolutionary yet, it just churns out more content faster. And when you send an average brief into the machine, you get mediocrity in industrial quantities, sooner and cheaper. AI is a multiplier, and a multiplier works on zero too.

It only acquires value the moment it takes over the routine and frees people for what a machine will not do: an opinion, taste, courage, and decisions somebody will carry the skin for. Reports from McKinsey and Gartner repeatedly show the gap between how many companies have deployed AI and how many have extracted measurable value from it. A tool is not a strategy. It never was.

We love frameworks. And we drown in decks

There are around four hundred marketing concepts and the vast majority promise the same thing: to simplify the complicated. In practice this produces a hundred-and-forty-slide deck nobody finishes and a matrix so colourful even Kandinsky would envy it. A framework is meant to be scaffolding you climb toward a decision. Not a cathedral we admire instead of building something inside it.

We want to experiment. But only when we know the result in advance

Let's be bold is a sentence usually followed in corporate life by an approval circuit as long as paying off a mortgage. An experiment gets blessed only once it is certain, which is a contradiction in terms: a certain experiment is not an experiment, it is a restatement of the known. A genuine testing culture assumes half the hypotheses will fall. That is not waste, it is the price of knowledge the competitor does not have.

We confuse measurable with important

This one annoys me most, because it is the most insidious. We measure what is easy to measure and declare it the thing that matters. In The Tyranny of Metrics Jerry Z. Muller named it precisely: an obsession with indicators deforms the work itself, because people start optimising the number instead of the thing behind it. And then Goodhart's law arrives like the bill after the party: once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

Which is why we talk to clients about four metrics the P&L can carry, not about likes and video completions. Penetration, market share, revenue, profit. The rest is an auxiliary instrument, useful for tuning, ruinous as a north star.

Key takeaways (TL;DR)

A benchmark is a map, not a destination. Differentiation is built on distinctive assets (Ehrenberg-Bass), not on copying competitors.
Data and intuition are both legitimate, but neither may serve as an alibi for the other. Let us admit what we are actually deciding by.
AI is a multiplier: without strategy and a point of view it merely scales mediocrity more cheaply. It delivers value once it takes over the routine.
Do not confuse measurable with important (Muller, Goodhart). Steer by the four metrics the P&L can carry.

FAQ

Why does benchmarking kill brand differentiation?

When everyone measures against the best in the category, they converge on the same average. Ehrenberg-Bass and Byron Sharp show brands grow through distinctive assets and mental availability, not mimicry. A benchmark is a useful map but a miserable destination.

Does measurable mean the same as important?

No. It is the confusion Jerry Z. Muller named in The Tyranny of Metrics: we optimise what is easy to count and overlook what matters. Goodhart's law applies too: an indicator turned into a target becomes a bad indicator.

Does AI really just accelerate mediocrity?

On its own, yes. Without strategy it churns out more content, not better content. It delivers value once it takes over the routine and frees people for decisions a machine will not make. AI is a multiplier, and it multiplies zero too.

Sources: The prompt was Josef Havelka's essay on what annoys him about marketing (The Other View, 2026). Supporting work: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) · Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA) · Rory Sutherland, Alchemy (2019) · Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press, 2018) · Charles Goodhart (Goodhart's law, 1975).