The “Marketing Is Evil” Problem
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A few years ago I created a SaaS product, and as a newcomer in the market, I was happy that (online) marketing existed so that people discovered what the advantages of my tool are compared to more established products that people already knew.
My question to you marketing-haters: what exactly are your suggestions here? Let people use only what they know? This doesn't incentivise innovation. Let an ideal unbiased search engine do the magic? One can argue that it is still marketing, but in the hands of someone else.
A lot of marketing is simply based on exploiting people's feelings and encouraging them to desire something they don't really need.
Word of mouth is probably the most powerful one. If someone you trust recommends you a specific app, that's better than any marketing campaign. Why do you think astroturfing exists?
If marketing was solely based on showing a product in an honest way and listing its properties and specifications, with no hyperbole and exaggeration, that would be something else. When was the last time that sort of advertising was the norm?
Advertising used to have lots of text extolling the features and benefits of the product in question, but that's too complicated. Now it's just bright flashy colors and vague allusions to power and capability. BMW has been running an ad on Youtube for a while now about a new electric model, and the voice-over basically says "there are so many reasons why car is great, it would be impossible to list them, just trust us and buy it", they're not even pretending to tell you about the product itself.
Marketing doesn't incentivize innovation, it tries to sell you an inferior product at a higher price.
So your use of marketing ever only solved a problem established by marketing.
Which is good marketing for marketing, of course.
I know that's not particularly helpful but surely you didn't expect an actual answer to a global-scale socioeconomic issue? Personally, I would focus on breaking up centralisation. People spread ideas through networks incredibly quickly. But then there are issues of paying off "influencers", "streamers", "reviewers" to give a fake idea of authentic acceptance.
We should also be careful in the actual question. I don't think many people on HN are against the idea of "marketing" i.e. getting some information across. That why in my original comment I said 'mass marketing' and 'targeted marketing'
The fact is that we cannot get away from selling. Going for an interview - tart up your CV and sell yourself. Going on a date - sell yourself. Want to convince a jury - sell your case. Wanting to upgrade your property - sell your house. Build a product or deliver a service - sell it: even if it is genuinely the best on the market that people should know about, you have to crack open the market and you will likely have to work against resistance.
I'm willing to compromise and agree that we don't have to ban all marketing. Let's maybe just ban billboards, product placement, sponsored messages, targeted messages, and most forms of in-public advertising, and see where that gets us.
So of course you need to make sure your product is known. But there's a way to do that...
…after spending a substantial amount of R&D into how to brainwash you into artificially inflating your value estimation.
The deception is fractal, with makes it just so much harder to overcome.
The only safeguard would be sensible policy.
Problem is that politicians ask "big tech". Few of these companies have an interest of collecting less information. On the contrary, they would probably try to sell access to their data in the process.
I don't think advertisers would care too much about not being allowed to collect certain info as long as they can be sure their competitors are subjected to the same rules.
As soon as a customer has made a choice between two suppliers, then any marketing for the other one will be considered invasive. By definition it isn't wanted because the customer chose not to use that supplier. Consequently any marketing will always be seen as invasive by some people, unless the market is a monopoly, and therefore all marketing is problematic (or "evil").
If you believe this, then shouldn't marketing be equally accessible to everyone? Instead of the ones with the deepest pockets, and bidding for the best ad space?
Even in a more important arena, if I’m a minor party politician, I don’t see why I should get the same reach as the major parties.
Ad companies are vying for attention; ad space is a proxy at best.
That is exactly how third party product comparisons and reviews works though. I don't think the world would be worse of if all product discoverability happened in such third party environments.
Search “usb 16gb flash drive” on AliExpress. Who’s going to meaningfully review all those results?
If we (effectively) don’t allow new entrants, that seems like a massive giveaway to Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston, and the other existing players.
Sure it’s not a 30-second TV spot or 15 second pre-roll video, but there is money changing hands from the seller to AliExpress in exchange for that relationship (same as for Amazon, EBay, Etsy, Tindie, Newegg, etc...)
When you go into a grocery store and see Tide on the entrance end cap this week where Coke was last week: that’s a paid ad.
What you’re calling a bad faith argument is a straightforward use of standard business terminology as far as I can see. I’m not even bending the definition a little bit.
How does that help me learn about a new entrant to the flash drive market (or help them get me to see their catalog), though?
More broadly, the economy is designed to drive people to get you to pay for stuff, whether it personally enhances your life or not. This intrinsically predatory motivation favors the evil over the helpful.
I don't believe this, likely he just made that up to make marketing look better.
> People outside the profession believe marketers have low standards of honesty. In their eyes, we’re willing to bend rules, manipulate, tell lies, mislead, and use their psychological weaknesses against them to get what we want.
Is there any evidence that these strategies aren't common in marketing?
Can you find 3 examples written prior to today of people demonizing the marketing of products they love?
https://healthcareglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain/da...
If you want more examples just search for it, isn't hard to find at all.
The notion that we should be emotionally invested with products, and attached to them, is right where things spiral downwards.
I have a suggestions wrt. "non-evil" marketing: How about we get rid of the emotionally subversive language and actually inform about products primarily?
People "love" the first two enough to give them money, and hate being berated for more. People like the existence of the drugs, but don't want to think about them most of the time due to the discomfort almost everyone has of contemplating mortality.
How else am I supposed to find this stuff?
Many years ago, I'd buy Computer Shopper magazine because it had nothing but ads for computer parts and accessories.
Marketing is how buyers and sellers find each other. Buyers do marketing, too (hence "Wanted" ads). I get unsolicited offers in the mail to buy my house now and then. Employers looking to hire advertise.
I've talked with independent software developers now and then who had created a brilliant product, and lamented to me that nobody was buying it. I'd ask them what marketing they'd done, and they'd blanch and say marketing is evil and they didn't want to do it. Weeeelll, no marketing meant nobody knew about their brilliant product, and that's why nobody bought it. "Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.
That they often use sleazy methods to accomplish their goal is just another reason to dislike marketing.
Safety razors are still being made by all of the major razor manufacturers. Its not that "they didn't market themselves properly" its that the companies that were making them decided its better to sell people a cheaper, shittier razor in an even shittier plastic frame for several dollars a piece rather than sell safety razor blades for 10c each. They intentionally don't market their safety razor products at all.
There are smaller companies that have started making them because there's a very small, niche market for safety razors. Perhaps some of them have issues marketing correctly, but the biggest issue is that they are competing with giant companies that thoroughly convinced the world that an inferior product is better decades before these tiny boutique companies ever existed.
Maybe I have been misled by people who was in turn misled by Gillette marketing, though. I must confess I haven't really tried them.
With an old-fashioned safety razor, you have to use a lighter touch to let it glide across the skin, and you have to keep the correct angle yourself. It does take a bit of practice, but unless you drag the blade sideways or put pressure on it, you won't be in any great danger of cutting yourself. Just go slow and don't try to shave long strokes in one go.
Safety razor handles come in a lot of different designs, and they vary by how much of the blade they expose and how steeply they angle it. Some people like the really aggressive designs to shave in one pass, but they also tend to grab at coarse beard hairs. I've had a Merkur HD for ages, and I think it's a good starting point. There's a nice heft to it, which feels reassuring.
Also, marketers don't work in a vacuum, they are hired by managers and business owners to create exposure and help create growth. Of course marketers work for money, we all do and very few us do work that actually help customers in a profoundly meaningful way no matter how we rationalize our work.
Then you go back to the product you were previously buying, and it doesn't work any more because they had to cut costs to spend more on marketing.
And competence of advertising usually correlates with product quality. That's why you're less likely to enter your credit card details in a website that looks like it was designed in 1998. Quality ads serve as an honest signal that the company is making enough money to pay for them. If they're making money, that means people are buying the product, and if they're buying the product, it probably isn't terrible.
If your plumbing is leaking, how are you going to find out what plumbers are available nearby to fix it?
How are you going to determine which movie at the cineplex you prefer to see? How are you even going to find out what's playing at the cineplex? Or even if there is a cineplex and where it is?
It is the nonfunctional uses of marketing typically done by those in the profession I take issue with.
Try selling your house some time without doing any marketing. It won't sell, because nobody will even know it's for sale.
This is, if a marketer:
1. is truly trying to help the target make the best decision, including going with a competitor or simply not buying anything;
2. won't even try to sink the target's attention unless they have good, informed reason to believe that the totality of their offer (including relevant costs, time, and effort) is expectedly a net positive for the target;
then they'd be good and not-evil.
That said, advertisers who seek to push products indiscriminately would be evil. The allegorical used-car-salesman who pushes a vehicle that they know to be worth less than they make it out to be, or seeks to trick the buyer into spending way more than they need to, is harming their target for their own self-interest; seems like simple predation.
That said, not all marketing is simple predation. For example, some offers are for legitimately useful products that a non-trivial portion of the target-audience could quite plausibly benefit from buying. Such marketing can have elements of good mixed into it, too.
Destruction has many facets here: ad blindness, hate against marketing, ad blockers, stopping watching TV and movies, and so on.
I've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of physical goods, most of it to people who frequent this site (or similar demographics).
Marketing is absolutely evil, but without it most of you wouldn't be making nearly as much as you do.
Right, but if a professor hired marketing professionals to handle those things for him I'd say that it is evil. And if science devolved into every professor hiring teams of marketing professionals in order to compete for grants I'd say that science would be much worse off than today. If you think that sounds ridiculous, why do you think that the scenario is totally fine in other parts of society?
This simply isn't true, it ignores products becoming popular on the merit of their quality alone. Practically all open source software uses this method, even if it isn't sold, it competes with commercial software and often wins without any marketing.
I get that marketing comes in different forms, one could argue merit is a form of marketing, but that's not what the author is talking about.
Marketing tricks us into choosing products based on values other than their efficacy to get the job done, and as such is a bad thing, not to mention the raft of really bad side effects it brings with it.
I have a couple of highly educated friends working in the field and it's kind of sad watching them trying to defend and/or explain the need for the industry.
But they do have a point: if you have just one company "marketing products", the others are at disadvantage, so the net result is that you need some marketing in almost every industry to stay afloat.
This is not an acceptable excuse though. I'd rather have all marketing banned.
What? The whole point of marketing is to memorable and leave an impression, thats what good effective marketing does. I dunno what the article is even trying to say.
More sites seem to be implementing this nowadays. Is it justified on a blog? Surely we've lost the war if we have to manually verify that readers are genuinely humans.
Yeah, that's my problem. Marketing is essentially all about manipulating my thoughts to benefit someone else. If you are deliberately trying to manipulate people without them realising, that can never be ethical.
All of this is marketing and branding. When the author mentions the 9990 exposures to marketing, he’s likely referring to these that we all consciously rarely register or see. But it’s still marketing. Someone was probably paid to craft it.
I’m not gonna die on the hill of “marketing isn’t evil”; it absolutely can be. I’d argue though that marketing is more often than not an extension of the company’s ethos. If you find some piece of marketing to be questionable or evil, let that be a reflection on the company more than the practice of marketing.
After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free.
Yeah, it'd be evil for a spammer to push posts without legitimate reason to believe that doing so would be beneficial to readers. I'd rather block anyone who'd so selfishly try to waste my time; their messages wouldn't be worth reading.
But that's not what a lot of folks do. Many try to make helpful comments that they suspect will help benefit readers. Maybe sometimes they're wrong, but on the whole, a competent community-member ought to generally write things that'd tend to be worth it for others to read.
Which is to say that, sure, we can frame discussions like this in terms of marketing -- even describing criticisms of marketing-practice as themselves being instances of marketing. But the moral there would be the observation that marketing CAN be good; not that much of it isn't evil.
To be fair to your position though: yes, if marketing's thoughtful enough to act in the target's best-interests, including not bothering people when it wouldn't be worth their time to consider a proposal and up-front about information that might steer consumers elsewhere, then, sure, it can be good. However, the concern's that marketers are often pushing products/services whenever they can, attempting to skew consumers' perceptions toward the decision to buy rather than attempting to help consumers make optimal decisions.
The fact that we aren't paid to do it makes all the difference. If anyone here was paid to spread certain views I'd call that evil as well.
Exploiting weakness is Marketing #101, and deferring your moral compass to the needs of the client is Marketing #102, so I don't see any way that change will happen, in this respect.
This is a worrying inclusion - are payed marketers doing this? To who's gain?
I'm going to see more evidence for that as I see the claim as extraordinary; there are plenty of convinced anti-vaxxers who promote this viewpoint without personal gain IMHO.
> But, 0.01% really are evil. They’re trying to mislead us. Or sell us something deeply problematic. Or convince us of something that could harm us or others.
Marketing is OK as long as it is on the product itself, and companies should be allowed to present their name and actual products at the buildings where they are sold.
charities can appeal for help vs compete against other charities for the available $$$.
"Dehumanize when it's trendy." This is billionairephobia, friend.
And if you believe that, how are you so sure that it hasn't already happened? If you're a software developer making $100K annually, you are already in the global 1%. Should people like you exist? Have you signed any sort of giving pledge, as many billionaires have? https://givingpledge.org/
[¤]Excepting the exceedingly rare few who win an exceedingly rare 1+ billion lottery prize.
There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, that's the whole problem, that such wealth can only be amassed by unethical means.
If you think there is, why can't there be ethical billionaires? An ethical billionaire is just an ethical millionaire who kept working to make the source of their income grow until it grew 1000x as large.
Big businesses are generally more ethical than little ones -- subject to more customer and regulatory scrutiny. It's much easier for a small business to get away with flouting environmental regulations or treating its employees harshly. (When's the last time the manager at a tiny roadside restaurant got fired for sexually harassing his employees?) This increased level of scrutiny means it is easier to bring to mind examples of unethical behavior by large businesses even if the actual rate is about the same. The media is biased to cover misdeeds by billionaires due to billionairephobia, the same way it is biased to cover misdeeds by Black people due to racism.
There are countless examples.
Amazon warehouse employees not being allotted time to go to the bathroom, while Jeff Bezos buys a $165 million mansion in LA, not to mention the endemic underpayment and disregard for physical and mental stress.
Richard Branson forcing his employees on 8 weeks of unpaid leave, while he's sitting comfortably on a fortune that means he doesn't have to care.
Steve Jobs building the wealthiest company in the world and becoming a billionaire, while their subcontractors install suicide preventing nets on their factories.
Simply the fact that some people are amassing such wealth, while millions of people in the world starve and cannot access even basic education or healthcare. That alone makes being a billionaire unethical, by default.
> "The media is biased to cover misdeeds by billionaires due to billionairephobia, the same way it is biased to cover misdeeds by Black people due to racism."
Excuse me, but did you just compare literally the most privileged human beings to ever exist in all of history, to people who have been historically downtrodden and subjugated for hundreds of years due to their ethnicity?
The mind boggles at what a temporarily embarrassed billionaire can delude themselves into thinking.
The point I am making is simple. There are approaching 3,000 billionaires worldwide. Suppose 90% are upstanding and 10% are unethical. That's 300 unethical billionaires. Suppose each unethical billionaire does just 1-2 unethical things per year, that is plenty of "unethical billionaire" stories for journalists to write about an unethical billionaire every day if they want.
You write: "The only way to amass that sort of wealth is to exploit the labor of others." Then you cite a few examples of billionaires behaving, in your view, unethically. That's very nice, but to prove your claim, you need to show that every billionaire has done this. You mentioned 3 billionaires. With about 3,000 worldwide, you are about 0.1% of the way there.
But the examples you've provided so far don't even pass the sniff test. Example:
"ABC News[47] and The Economist[48] both conducted comparisons, and found that although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn was large in absolute terms, the suicide rate was actually lower than the overall suicide rate of China[49] or the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis
>Simply the fact that some people are amassing such wealth, while millions of people in the world starve and cannot access even basic education or healthcare. That alone makes being a billionaire unethical, by default.
This argument only applies to billionaires who haven't signed the giving pledge. Those I will agree with you on. However, it would be highly unethical to tax away the wealth of those who have signed the Giving Pledge, in order to provide even more goodies for Americans who are already quite wealthy by global standards.
The signees haven't even made any moves towards actually giving away a significant fraction of their wealth, their collective wealth has more than doubled over 10 years. Add to this that the majority of donations have been given to private foundations[¤], and that donations to charity are tax-deductible, means it really is no more than a giant tax scheme, under a thin veil of "charity".
[¤] Often family foundations, which pay salaries to family members of the donors and don't disclose where the donations actually go.
Once again, it is impossible to amass such wealth (a significant fraction of any country's GDP) and keep it, without extracting an extreme excess of value from the labor of others. You cannot become this rich by simply "working hard", you cannot amass such wealth through any kind of individual labor. It can only come from the mass exploitation of the labor of others, from not paying people the fair value of their labor.
Pretending to give away a tiny portion of that to charity, after the fact, is like putting a Hello Kitty band aid on a massive gaping chest wound. Ineffective at best, and in reality an abject insult.
The fact that we know that we could make the world better, by taxing corporations, capital gains and inheritances much higher, yet refuse to do so, is a scathing condemnation of the callous and inhumane nature of capitalism.
Remember all the furor over the Gates divorce because people were worried that it would impact their global health work and so on? I guess that was all bogus concern because the Gates Foundation is actually a giant tax scheme?
Given the state of the system though, I think the only thing that could replace them would be something even less fair and more violent than what we have.
But here are some interesting stats for you. raspyberr thinks that "things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals". So let's consider the thing with the largest amount of money of all: the US federal government. The federal government's annual budget is almost 6 trillion, approximately 30 times that of Google Inc. Google gets 100% of its energy from renewable sources. The corresponding figure for the federal government is 10%. Shall we tax Google more? I'm not sure. Seems like we'd just transfer assets from a moderately amoral entity to one which is even more amoral.
With regards to your second point, I don't really think you've said anything noteworthy. Governments aren't humans and don't have morals. They're processes. When they do mass marketing we call it propoganda and that word seems to have pretty negative connotations with it.
Making you? Or else what are they going to do to you?
When you find something to eat at the farmer's market, your choice is largely influenced by the seller's marketing efforts: pricing, selection, her straw hat, or the fact that the best looking plump heirloom tomatoes are right in front of the stall. The farmer is telling you to buy her produce even before she speaks to you.