Marketers complain that their business colleagues and the public don't take their work as seriously as they would like. But marketers have only themselves to blame. They tend to set goals that cannot be fulfilled: sustained growth; brand differentiation; persuasive advertising; added values; maximizing profits or shareholder value; and instant new knowledge based on just a single set of isolated data.

Editor's Note: Warning! Many of you will find this article to be blasphemous...read it anyway.