Sustainable Marketing - Really?

As an engineer by education and profession, it's not surprising that I am at ease with quantitative content and am a fish out of water in marketing. Marketing comes across as a bunch of paradoxes, too fluid and amoeba like to put any meat around anything or have any sort of structure, sometimes too obvious and sometimes brilliant too. For instance, I came across this line "Marketing questions the assumption of rationality by classical economic theory by factoring in fairness". Often times, I also see that it relies on "fooling" the customer or creating a misplaced perception. This in my opinion, is not something that is sustainable. Even if it can't be said that people are getting smarter every day, one can't deny that mankind is advancing every day and with increased computational power at the disposal of a customer (read internet, mobile phone yada yada...), marketing will become an increasingly harder game to play. Numerous pricing models will break down if there is information sharing amongst customers. With word of mouth advertising in social networking and increased technology penetration in everyday life, the game just gets harder. With the non-linearities that exist today, can marketing successfully factor in consumer behavior and be sustainable?

And some more...

In some kind of weird bacchanalian orgy, I have decided to write after quite some time. For the next year, I will mostly be writing about my time at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Yes, student life ishtarts again.

There, I said it, now, Google, do your thing and make sure you direct traffic to this page.