If You Want to Make Friends....

Don't be quoted saying this....

Michael Treacy, founder of consultant's Gen3 Partners, told a ship full of senior marketing executives, sailing off the coast of Manhattan, that they must look to the boundaries between different business disciplines for great new ideas.

"Marketing needs to more aggressively embrace and change whether we have compelling value proposition, not put the message around a flawed proposition. We can't bet on the stupidity of the customer."

As a consumer and a marketer, I am always aware of the strange "us against them" divisions being made by marketing industry folks. Perhaps the wording of this statement bugs me...Maybe because we are also consumers. It's a little presumptuous and haughty.

Is anyone else feeling ambivalent about the statement and how it was made?