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Comment by onurcel | Hacker News Reader

The comments here lack so much nuance that if it wasn't HN, I would wonder if they were not made by a trolling farm.

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.

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Well the first step is realising the problem then discussing a solution. The solution is difficult. There's a difference between a single person business trying to show themselves to people and a department of employees working on tiny incremental improvements to manipulate people. The issue, like many issues, isn't with the small but with the big. I don't have a solution. I don't think any one person could offer a whole complete solution. But I think spreading the idea is a good start. It gets more people talking about potential solutions.

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'

I believe that you only had to turn to marketing because the big established solutions continuously used marketing to remain big. If it weren't for online marketing, your access to market wouldn't have been by challenging the established brands with further marketing, but by providing extra value.

So your use of marketing ever only solved a problem established by marketing.

Which is good marketing for marketing, of course.

There are many alternatives to modern marketing, which is specifically made to manipulate you, through emotional, aspirational and fear-based psychology.

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.

Marketing has a lot of facets. One of the things which has happened was that goods which were generic and mostly identical like flour and soap have gotten brand names and all kinds of artificial distinctions invented. That didn't help mankind.

A lot of marketing is simply based on exploiting people's feelings and encouraging them to desire something they don't really need.

I suspect that the negative responses come mainly from people who regard selling as something that other people do. I certainly thought that marketing was quite an easy thing to do before I set up my own business and built my own products and had to try things like Google ads, SEO rankings, cold calling, networking, content creation, making deals, and more. Painful.

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.

Nobody thinks that informing people about your product is evil. That isn't what they are talking about when they say "marketing is evil". Thinking otherwise is just you guys not understanding people.

My take on a solution: ban any statements from advertisement, that can not be fact checked directly. Same should apply to imagery - it must not imply anything beyond what is factually verifiable.

> My question to you marketing-haters: what exactly are your suggestions here?

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.

I bet the majority of the less nuanced comments are made by people who have never worked in a business capacity let alone ran a business. Tell any small business owner that they must not do marketing and they will consider you utterly ignorant or insane.

You are just mixing up "The act of marketing" and "The marketing industry". People who think marketing is evil are talking about the marketing industry.

Informing people about products is legitimate. Alas, marketing also incentivizes unethical behavior. I don't know if there is a true way to remove that incentive since the main meaningful metric for marketing is how much you sell.

The act of marketing a good product isn't evil, but the marketing industry doesn't care about the quality of your product they will market whatever the highest bidder tells them to.

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