Looks like I have not posted for 4 days now. You could assume that I had gone happy and lived so ever after. What a shot in the dark! :) Of course I didnt.

In fact I seem to be caught up in this "fed up" state of mind. I wish I knew why.. Some call this "autumn depression" how stup is that? I am sure there is winter depression as well. Following this logic I think I am having a monday afternoon depression... gee, life is complicated. Somebody told me the other day, that life is a big ugly sandwhich and every day is a bite. In this case life pretty well equals to an average bad lunch at Subway.

OK, man, stop whining. Perception is the key. Positive thinking is king.

Oh I had an interesting idea for today to share. My mentor used to say "Marketing is not art as many tend to believe, its a science". What is art after all? We all know it, but who can define it? I asked some of my msn contacts from I dont know where (dont ask how they become such) how he would define art. He said: "art is shit". Wow. I.. I.. mean, WOW. This guy had a perspective but maybe he is not an authentic source, so I looked it up in the Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary: "The use of imagination to express ideas or feelings particularly in painting, drawing or sculpture". I just copied the first part cause the other does not make too much sense. The author must have known Kotler.. but anyway. It is not easy to define.
Lets look at it from an other perspective. If art is art (hope you agree), and marketing is not art at all, but its science, than science has nothing on earth to do with art. Your head hurts already? Well, mine does.
If you take an artist as a brand. Leonardo DaVinci, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antoni Gaudi i Cornet or Mariah Carey. They are brands. They represent values and more or less you know what to expect from them. A conventional chiaroscuro from Italy, some classic melody from Wien, an astonishing building from Barcelona, or the most depressing dual of a bitchy dress and dumb smile that MTV awards had ever seen. This is Brand Recognition. These guys are artist. No doubt. Their "products" where made for a particular audience (target group). I think artists are (and had always been) marketers. The ones we know were successful. How many Mariah Carey-s are out there that we never know? How many "artist" that none will ever remember? A lot. Because art has always been treated as art, it was made in a stupid way. All sorts of weird products are just made and put out in galleries and such. It is the same as if companies around the world would go into production blindly. Without research. You might see my point by now.

The artist is a marketer that is poor in marketing because he or she just does not give a shit about research and the target customer. He is self focused. Creates it and than just waits for the customers to come.

In this respect, art should be science. It should be marketing. Than, good art is scientific, and IS based on research. So marketing is an art after all :)