That's harsh, is it not? If the software fulfils its stated purpose and provides value then is it not useless? If the marketing people fulfil their duty to generate inbound leads are they not useless?
As for marketing, this is the definition of bullshit job as I understood it: They generate leads, and it is needed only because every other company and competitors are doing marketing, as such it is defined as an "arm race", same thing for lobyists. If you removed all the marketers and lobbyist worldwide, the result would be exactly the same. as they are only needed to cancel each other but have no real effect on the end product or service
Without bullshit jobs there is no concept of "leads". People would just buy the service they need, and supposedly the best most utilitarian product would survive only based on that.
Marketers do all that stuff every day, and your system would still have them. You seem to be against advertising, which is a tiny subset of marketing.
The endgame is very similar still - one with higher reach and budget wins. Unless the competition is vastly superior.
Of course it won't work that way, because Google and Microsoft will spend shit ton of money spamming the Internet about their widgets, so yours dies in the noise. Therefore, you need to spend your money and time to shout louder and louder.
This is what it means to be in a zero-sum game. Pure waste, which unfortunately cannot be stopped from within the system.
You of course understand that is marketing right?
Literally, everything a company does is push, and everything a customer does is pull. Hell, even the act of making your widget in your basement is a push, you put the effort into making it so people would use it.
I reject the idea that I have to hear about ambulance chasing lawyers and diet pills and ways to make $$$ fast and cars I can't afford and watches I don't want and household cleaning products I don't trust and kitchen appliances I have no use for and websites solving problems I don't have.. because it's my responsibility to endure it so those poor businesses can continue existing.
Like it's some kind of charity and I'm obliged to give them my attention just in case I'm part of their target market. Spare just 2 hours per month to ensure this Chigaco company sells more product.
In the limit case, there are more companies and more products than I could learn about if all I did was watch advert show for the rest of my life.
And they would be perfectly happy to waste the rest of my life showing me adverts because my life is meaningless to them compared to even $1 more profit.
No.
Consider a world with perfect targetted advertising. I would benefit from an XYZ in my life. Suddenly I am inundated with emails, phonecalls, text messages, instant messages, from a planet full of XYZ sellers. Every billboard I see, every surface, every YouTube advert, every radio intermission, every pre-film trailer, every in-film product placement, every web banner advert, every Windows start menu product placement, every smartphone iAd, every Spotify break, all adverts for an XYZ. More adverts for an XYZ than I can take in if I spent a month just watching them.
I'm not magically happy with this state of affairs, just because the ads are relevant or precisely targetted. I am worse off, in fact, because of being creeped out by the targetting, and snowed under with the monotony and repetitive onslaught.
But if you removed ALL the marketers from the surface of the planet, people would still have needs and they would find product for those needs without the help of marketers. The end product would not change for a thing.
Let's take one of the most advertised product on the market: cars. Cars are highly utilitarian and are needed by people. Today every brand maker has to advertise in order to remind people that their model exist. If you remove all the ads for cars, people would still need cars and they would buy based on what they think is best suited for them, not based on the most flashy ads.
Not very well. All you achieve by getting rid of marketers is ceding control of marketing to random natural factors like geography or chance.
I’m not against companies having their own web sites to “sell” their product, just don’t put your ads in front of me to convince me I need something. If I need it, I’ll go look for it.
Not actually best as in most useful.
If I didn't intrusively steal people's limited time and attention to force my manipulative product spam right into their faces, I might not get what I want, therefore it's ok for me to do that - the ends justify the means.
advertising: n. The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.
marketing: n. The activities required by a producer to sell his products, including advertising,
then my complaint applies. Pushing information about your product into my face is both advertising and marketing.
If you mean "marketing: n. The act or process of buying and selling in a market." then your comment is unrelated, because neither I nor the person I replied to were talking about other people trading between themselves.
For example, Hacker News is absolutely a marketing vehicle for Y Combinator. Would you say that they "intrusively steal people's limited time and attention to force my manipulative product spam right into their faces"? You choose to come here, and in doing so, it elevates the brand of Y Combinator in your mind and in the world.
Most jobs are bullshit because our culture doesn't seem to value honesty and truth. So you can post outright lies on a big sign right off the road, and everybody acts like that's just a necessary part of life.
Maybe we can't ask for honesty because people just most fundamentally can't accept the idea that it's worth giving people what they need to survive without receiving anything in exchange. So we construct a huge artifice of bullshit so that we can sleep easy -- ignorant of all the needless and useless things that people do to survive -- we all feel the stress of it, so we dupe each other into thinking is both necessary and producing value.
That is inaccurately cynical and is a banal observation. There's an xkcd for it, but I won't bother.
Isn't our entire economy built on trust? Do you read every EULA, opt out of every arbitration agreement with companies you use? Do you maintain your own ledger to check your monthly bank statements? Do you examine the kitchen conditions of every restaurant you frequent? Do you visit the slaughterhouse to ensure your meat is processed in sanitary conditions?
Modern life quickly becomes unwieldy without these basic assumptions. This trust goes back all the way to basic agrarian societies, where you as a farmer would trust your neighbor to give you her apples when they ripen in exchange for your wheat now.
Anyone attempting to live a completely trustless existence is a hermit or ignorant of the immense amount of trust they place in their fellow humans daily.
That is called puffery and it is legally protected expression (at least in the US). If they assert any hard facts you could force them to prove it, but general floaty stuff like "best in the world!" would be puffery