Recently, I read Carey Smith’s article in Inc., entitled, “Keep Their Hands Off Your Brand” or, alternately, “Whose Company Is It Anyway?” In it, Smith claims that hiring a branding and marketing consultant is a very bad idea and you should never do it. After reading the piece, I was so upset that I outlined the entire thing, revealing each claim’s logical fallacy (I found 14 separate such illogical claims). In what felt like a letter one would write about an unrequited love interest, Smith’s piece drags my profession through the mud using hasty generalizations, faulty analogies, and appeals to emotion alongside the manipulative tactics of hyperbole, oversimplification, and straight-up false accusations. His piece is deplete of the intellectual honesty I, and many in my profession, hold dear. It feels like a shameless display of spite in family court. The piece misrepresents as general that which was, at best, particular in his experience—and obviously quite personal.

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