"The lack of those fundamentals has been the main trouble with advertising of the past. Each worker was a law unto himself. All previous knowledge, all prog

"The lack of those fundamentals has been the main trouble with advertising of the past. Each worker was a law unto himself. All previous knowledge, all progress in the line, was a closed book to him. It was like a man trying to build a modern locomotive without first ascertaining what others had done. It was like a Columbus starting out to find an undiscovered land. Men were guided by whims and fancies - vagrant, changing breezes. They rarely arrived at their port. When they did, quite by accident, it was by a long roundabout course. " - Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising That was published in 1923 and still rings true. I think the crux of the issue is that some areas within an organization are judged by the metrics equivalent of divination. That looseness and lack of maturity allows a lot of cruft to accumulate, and trends to take hold in the larger ecosystem. Think of how little room there is for trends in physics, commission based salesmanship or C compilers. Then compare that with software development methodology, marketing and whatever the hot new .js is up to. And with the low barriers to calling yourself a "marketer", you end up with n-th derivatives of things that were cargo-cult to begin with.