Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

New Self-Serving Study

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has long been on the frontlines of debunking marketing myths, starting with "How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know" in 2010.

Byron recently introduced me to the term SONK -- "the Scientific-cation Of Non-Knowledge."

In an interview last year, Byron credits SONK to his mentor Andrew Ehrenberg.

As Byron describes SONK:

"You take trivial findings and dress them up with tortured statistics and jargon. And spread it over many pages. It's style over substance."

There's an epidemic of SONK in marketing.

Social media feeds and marketing news sites carry an endless stream of whitepapers, studies, and reports that have nothing more than the sheen of being evidence-based. Many of these are clearly biased by the agencies or brands that commissioned the research.

Some of the takeaways are then cited in marketing decks and thought leadership as if they were carved on stone tablets.

It's possible to justify just about any marketing approach by pointing at research somewhere, no matter how shallow.

SONK spreads when marketers can't tell the difference between evidence and the appearance of evidence.

Keynote Corner

I just confirmed two new keynote talks in Portland, Oregon and Orlando, Florida in the next few months.

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s my brand new 5-minute speaker’s reel:

Cartoon From the Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2015. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.