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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Marketing is evil because the entire point is to make us spend more for a worse product. That is the explicit goal of the profession. It costs a lot of money, and does not improve the actual quality of the product. Of course consumers will hate it.

That they often use sleazy methods to accomplish their goal is just another reason to dislike marketing.

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Sometimes you miss out on amazing products at lower prices because they don't market themselves properly. Example: safety razors are cheaper and better than any Gillette razor you might buy but very few people use safety razors because they have fallen out of fashion. Why? Because they don't market their products anywhere.

>because they don't market themselves properly.

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.

I'd say they have fallen out of fashion because they are harder to use, at least if you don't want to cut yourself.

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.

A cartridge multi-blade razor lets you just jam it into your face and use pressure, it takes care of the angle due to the pivoting head, and there are glide rails on the sides that prevent you from digging the blades into your skin.

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.

You just described a situation where marketers made people miss the good products by heavily marketing Gillette razors. Why do marketers market the overpriced products instead of the good ones? Because they do it for money, they don't do it to help you. So from a consumers point of view they are evil.

So we can agree that by absolute necessity a company needs to market its products and services due to competitors doing the same. Since, you know, you can't actually outlaw marketing, businesses have no choice to compete in this area.

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.

You don't have the time to accurately judge every marketing campaign so assuming that all of them are manipulative and evil is reasonable. What do you suggest people would do instead?

None of your argument is that marketing isn't evil, just that it's necessary in this society or that other things are also evil. I agree.

An example of safety razors marketing themselves "properly" is Gillette, where the product became more expensive and of a lower quality, yet they dominate the market. Too much marketing by competitors is what's causing people to miss out on amazing products, not too little.

Another really great example which works exactly the same is shaving soap. Shaving soap is more environmentally friendly (because it doesn't require an aerosol can etc) lasts way longer and is therefore tons cheaper than shaving creme. It also actually gives you a better shave, which is why if you go to a barber and get a shave it's what they use. But the vast majority of people use shaving creme because that is marketed and shaving soap is not. As a student I had a bar of shaving soap that literally lasted me more than a year shaving every day. Presumably companies realised they can make a much better business by encouraging people to buy an inferior product with higher margins that doesn't last as long.

If you want to buy a house, how are you going to find out what is available and what they're like?

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?

While posting a notice of a house for sale, publishing the yellow pages, or putting a sign outside your business with the name on it is marketing, it can be reasonably done by nonprofessional marketers.

It is the nonfunctional uses of marketing typically done by those in the profession I take issue with.

It's absolutely marketing.

Try selling your house some time without doing any marketing. It won't sell, because nobody will even know it's for sale.

I said it is marketing, but your example if how it won't sell in a field dominated by marketing doesn't make the point you think it does.

Sometimes marketing tells me about a product that I didn't know existed, or tells me about a superior product to the one I'm currently buying.

And then you buy it, and the functionality that it claimed was completely misleading or doesn't work, and it was actually worse than the product you were previously buying.

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.

I rarely buy a product without reading the reviews. In the long run, selling bad products is usually not a good way to make money. (Unless the government is subsidizing your industry, e.g. for-profit colleges.)

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.

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