Bob Dylan, Seth Godin, and Neil Young

As someone who never thought of marketing as a profession, or even an interest, one of the questions that I've thought about a lot over the past year is 'what is marketing?'. I even bought and read a few classic marketing books like 'Kotler on Marketing' to brush up on the four 'P's and such.

My primary observation has been that 'Marketing' is badly named, branded, and positioned. Hopefully that will be the subject of a future post or ten.

But today in the first of a series of brilliant posts even by his own high standards, Seth Godin summarizes part of the confusion I have about marketing with this question:

Is marketing the art of tricking people into buying stuff they don’t need? Or is it about spreading ideas that people fall in love with?

I think both are done under this banner, and that's a problem. Hopefully admitting you have a problem is the first step to a resolution.

So how do Bob Dylan and Neil Young come into this? At BobFest in 1992 Neil Young said that what was great about Dylan was how simple he could be. Anyone can be complex he said, but Bob can be simple. I think this is true of Seth too.

(I don't have the exact Neil Young quote, but have asked the experts and should be able to post it here soon.)