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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad.

All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At best you get language that emphasizes upsides while downplaying downsides.

There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be trusted.

> Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products?

Word of mouth.

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> The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers.

Absolutely not, unless your business model relies on single sales.

In functioning organizations with actual products, marketing and sales are advocacy functions for the customer as much as they are revenue functions for the business. They're how you know what to make and who to target.

The point was that relying on marketing messages causes the user having to research themselves what the product is actually good at and what it isn't good at and wasting time because the company isn't upfront the products strengths and weaknesses. The product might be sufficient in the end, but marketing will very rarely tell you what the product is actually sufficient at and what it is not.

The statement wasn't about whether the product is actually good or not, though in extreme cases, yes, the product is worthless while the marketing is all rainbows and sunshine. But relying on marketing is bad for the user in nearly every case, even if the product is good.

And even if you are "one of the good guys", your users won't know that. That's why you should verify from independent sources, or do your own research.

If marketing was really a reliable source of information, reviews, samples, product trials etc. wouldn't be a thing.

You say this but ISPs deliver only a fraction of the bandwidth they advertise, SSD marketing doesn't mention the fact you're not supposed write to it too much... Drug marketing never mentions any side effects, food marketing blatantly takes advantage of the public's ignorance...

People should assume all marketing is incomplete or untrustworthy information at best.

Every piece of drug marketing I've ever seen has been accompanied by a comically long list of side-effects. What market are you seeing unregulated drug marketing in?

> Every piece of drug marketing I've ever seen has been accompanied by a comically long list of side-effects.

In as big a font / for as long and loudly as the supposed benefits? As prominently towards the top of the page / the beginning of the clip?

Let me guess: Hardly, right?

> What market are you seeing unregulated drug marketing in?

It's not a matter of regulated vs unregulated, it's a matter of how close to ignoring the regulations one can skate. And of lobbying the regulators enough to get very-skatable regulations... In what market are you seeing marketing regulations (for drugs or any other product / service) that cover length and prominence as per my first paragraph above?

Even TV ads? In my country they're forced to say "consult a doctor if symptoms persist" and they already compress that as much as humanly possible. No mention of side effects at all.

I literally just saw this on the HN front page:

> Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/05/13/ads-are-im...

Yet another example.

That is an ideal. Reality is a mixed bag.

Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces the problem of getting those first users. Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to reach someone who can actually spread it before anything will happen. So many awesome products and services die because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral word of mouth spread.

I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...

This is off topic to the main post, but wanted to thank you personally as somebody who's used saucenao pretty consistently for the last ten years, being adjacent to a lot of anime/game fandoms and even personally posting art on pixiv regularly. Such a fantastic and easy little tool. Can't even remember where I heard about it, which in some ways speaks to how good the site is.

> Word of mouth works, but can be very slow

Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is healthier for society. All this explosive never ending economic growth we see today seems pathological to me.

> Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion?

Those first users are presumed to be close to the person who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll tell other people about it if they liked it.

> my reverse image search service SauceNAO

Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites.

I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell if advertising would present conflicts of interest.

Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-level marketing schemes and social networks both do this.

I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.

Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other form of communication. Of course it's important to have some personal ability to detect deceit, and it's also important to have systems in place to disincentivize deceit. But the fact is that, when such systems are not in place or are not sufficiently strong, of course there are many cases where people are incentivized to lie with any form of communication.

> Marketing is no more inherently trustworthy than any other form of communication.

It's less trustworthy. A simple example of trustworthy form of communication is instant messaging with people I know. I have friends who are knowledgeable about all kinds of subjects and I absolutely trust them several orders of magnitude more than any random marketing material out there. If a friend tells me they had a great experience with some product or service, I believe them.

I'd say that honest, thorough and helpful articles like this as a function of marketing lead to word-of-mouth, organic growth.

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