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New Self-Serving Study

15 June 2026 at 11:35

New Self-Serving Study cartoon

Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has long been on the frontlines of debunking marketing myths, starting with “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know” in 2010.

Byron recently introduced me to the term SONK — “the Scientific-cation Of Non-Knowledge.”

In an interview last year, Byron credits SONK to his mentor Andrew Ehrenberg.

As Byron describes SONK:

“You take trivial findings and dress them up with tortured statistics and jargon. And spread it over many pages. It’s style over substance.”

There’s an epidemic of SONK in marketing.

Social media feeds and marketing news sites carry an endless stream of whitepapers, studies, and reports that have nothing more than the sheen of being evidence-based. Many of these are clearly biased by the agencies or brands that commissioned the research.

Some of the takeaways are then cited in marketing decks and thought leadership as if they were carved on stone tablets.

It’s possible to justify just about any marketing approach by pointing at research somewhere, no matter how shallow.

SONK spreads when marketers can’t tell the difference between evidence and the appearance of evidence.

Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years: