People have said products have three main ways they get marketed.
Specs: These are the physical characteristics. Emotional: You are keeping up appearances and are besting the Joneses. Spiritual: You are realizing your true inner self thru this bespoke vehicle.
EBF. Emotions, benefits, features. You spark a feeling within someone, whether it's presenting them with the pain they feel or showing them their life a bit better ("my mobile pictures are crap" / "Dave's doggie photos always look on point").
Then you say, well, "this new phone can take awesome photos".
The feature will be "16MP, autofocus etc..." to ground the ethereal feelings to tangibles to make it real for people.
Then BAB. B(efore), A(fter), B(ridge). Frame someone's life before your product, then what their life will be like afterwards, and then the bridge is your product, linking the before and after. "Fed up of blurry, out of focus mobile pictures? Picture this - all of your Instagram lunchtime shots hitting the trending list. Make it happen with the 16MP camera in the Piphoxel."
Of course, if enough startup/tech people are interested in some more tailored lessons, reach out (email in profile). Been thinking of building out a small course/curated info on marketing with this sort of stuff.
I don't get the hate for marketing, over and above UX people who build nice interfaces that get you to do something since it's easy and enjoyable, or developers who create systems that get you to undertake entirely new habits.
Marketing is perhaps seen as the most disposable part of building a business ("if we just build an awesome product, everyone will just talk about it freely!!1!!1"), but I don't understand why it and the frameworks it relies on are looked down on compared to every other element of creating something that's designed to add-and-take value.
"Marketing is evil" worldview aside, the idea that manipulating human behavior can be reduced to a three-letter acronym, and that it can be so formulaic and still be so effective is I think what people find off-putting.
And yet marketing, because it's perceived as being detached from the product (which it really isn't) is the bad actor because it's explicit and transparent about its goal. Amuses me as much as it frustrates.
The tools you've described in your post are unambiguously manipulative (sparking emotions, associating mental states with a product independently of its qualities etc.). Based on this I'm wondering whether there are any marketing frameworks that don't directly rely on one aspect of human psychological weakness instead of simply telling a customer what the product does. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in this regard.
Of course, it's hard to blame advertisers for doing this, because the incentives are there. It works tremendously well, and I am deeply vulnerable to it myself. Despite this, I can't help but feel distress that the working life of so many smart people is dedicated to inserting needs in other's minds. The acronyms are the cherry on top: the manipulation is so routine that it is parceled with buzzwords, as the other poster noticed.
On a more global scale, it highlights a deeper problem. The practices of advertising today are already lightly dystopian if contrasted with people's expectations of the world a few decades past: massive data-gathering, extremely advanced and detailed A/B testing and optimization, devices providing identification info at all times and in all places, psychological experiments such as those tested by Facebook... etc. Based on these developments and on the precedent of technology often being applied in a deeply unethical way, it's no longer impossible to imagine that it will get worse, possibly even unimaginably worse. Heck, if there were a way for people to insert ads directly into a person's mind should the opportunity I have no doubt that it would become an acceptable practice after a while. We already have people reduced to selling their plasma. Of course, this is all very speculative and it maybe won't work out this way, but I'm not holding my breath.
I do agree that marketing is not the only culprit here, just the one most likely to evoke an epidermic reaction.
You're right that most marketing relies on human psychology, but I wouldn't call it weakness per se, it's the same areas that are influenced by all kinds of storytelling (whether that's film, fiction or marcomms).
Diving deeper, there's also a lot of "marketing" in nature, we look at the evolution of plants and animals whereby entire species have developed based on generating emotions and actions in other animals. Perhaps a tenuous connection :) but I always find it holds valid for me, we're designed to look for emotional triggers to influence what we do. Whether utilising these is "taking advantage" or not is where that personal interpretation comes in.
I'd also point out that advertising is a subset of marketing, but not all of it, it's probably the area that's most explicit in its intentions though, but things like content marketing are designed to influence you as much, whilst being more subversive about it.
I don't hate marketing per se but, nowadays, I am frequently left with an uncomfortable internal voice after making a purchase that asks "Is this really the choice that I wanted/needed or is it just that the I let the company with the best marketing manipulate me into buying this particular choice?"
It was the heyday of p2p filesharing music piracy (as in people were not just doing it, they were ecstatic about it), with a whole generation of non-techy people suddenly turning into part time nerds just for all the abundant music. While all the other devices were engineered for the few songs one might own, the iPod was specces for the flood of music coming from filesharing (iTMS came much later).
I don't think people buy better versions of themselves, what they will buy is a product that solves the problem they have and are even more inclined to do so where that product also makes them feel good or improves their social position.
The ads tell or remind consumers those products exist, and how good they are for their needs. The ad is a trigger to a pre-existing match. The purchase decision is created by the match.