Much philosophy, an Oxford professor once said, is finding bad reasons for what we believe instinctively. Very much the same could be said of marketing and marketers, who are often accused of cloaking what they do in baffling, quasi-scientific jargon which on closer analysis signifies very little. The issue was given fresh piquancy at a recent Marketing Week conference, when a management consultant condemned category management as 'an overly complex, jargon-laden number-crunching exercise'

The same charge could be laid against other faddish shibboleths, such as 'media neutrality', 'efficient consumer response' and 'customer relationship management' (whose initials can be confused with another CRM, cause-related marketing).