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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> People were telling each other about these.

I've seen this argument a lot, especially by technically minded folks.

When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly? Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

I get the sense that lots of people in the HN community don't realize when they read an article from <insert tech company engineering blog> that this is marketing dollars at work.

> But as a rule it definitely appears to be.

By your "rule", sure. I understand the gripe with marketing from the consumer perspective, but pretending is inherently evil because it (1) invades your personal attention and (2) you think people are going to organically talk about products or services they don't know exist is a pretty myopic view of marketing as a whole.

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> When you say "telling each other" what do you mean exactly?

I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here.

> Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

> I don't think we need to discuss the meaning of words that are in the top 5000 commonly used dictionary words here.

Good. We're on the same page then. Snarky response not required but okay.

> Yes. It's called word-of-mouth and it is how it has always been done.

I don't know where to start with how to respond, but I'll bite:

Let's magically go back to the gold rush in the US. You're traveling from New York and arrive in San Francisco. You know nothing about products and services in that market. You walk into town and look for a general good store to buy some water. You ask a guy on the corner where the general store is and so you find the general store based on his help. Okay, so word of mouth. You want to prospect some gold and know you need to buy a pan. There are two gold prospecting material vendors in town, Gold Supply Inc and Acme Gold (but you don't know this because you're new to town). You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans. He is paid by Gold Supply to do this. This is marketing/advertising.

So, no, this is not "how it's always been done" and its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing. I understand the grievances about having hundreds of thousands of megaphones in your face 24/7, but let's stop pretending the world's marketplaces can operate efficiently on word of mouth alone because that's what you're implying.

> You walk through town looking for a vendor and notice a guy with a megaphone is yelling to the crowd about Gold Supply Inc offering better prices on pans.

Which may be true. Or not. And they may be crappy pans, or not. And that's my point: all that yelling just muddies the water, it's like a mountain of 'fake reviews' and no way to pick up the signal any more because of all of the noise. Marketing mostly lies.

I don't understand your point?

You think that the average person:

- Be fully educated on every product and service available to them in every market they encounter

- Spend the time to speak to N amount of people via word of mouth and understand how many N amount of conversations are required to have the confidence to buy the best product (in terms of value, feature set, price, etc.) for the item they're looking for

- Discover products and services that they didn't know existed but may solve their problem in a novel way

All without any marketing/advertising interaction? And that this is somehow going to magically make buying decisions more clear (i.e. not muddy)?

Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality...

> I don't understand your point?

and

> Sorry but that is hilariously out of touch with reality...

are incompatible with each other.

I posed a bunch of clarifying statements to understand your point and instead of responding to them that's how you respond? Weird.

I respect most, if not all, of your viewpoints on HN (even if we disagree), but dodging the meat of my questions and clarifying statements isn't helping with your argument.

That's fine, but I think that if you don't understand someone's point then your best bet is to ask, not to extrapolate.

I'm not dodging anything here, it's just that it makes responding much harder because now instead of clarification we're off on some wild goose chase.

It's ok with me if you don't believe that people got by just fine before marketing became a weapon in the armory of companies that all compete for the same market because traditionally the reach of companies was fairly limited due to the cost of transportation. But (mass) marketing as a profession is a relatively recent invention, as are companies with global consumer reach.

The availability of 30 brands for the same niche is what drives one form of marketing ('we're better than them', when in fact the products are most likely at best at parity). The other is that plenty of 'need' is merely marketeers pushing jealousy buttons, something that you don't need to do if there is a genuine need for a product.

All that marketing and advertising is in the end an arms race and a big contributor to overproduction and overconsumption. The thing that needs marketing the most is probably the thing that you need the least.

> Do you think businesses just magically get talked about with zero investment in marketing dollars?

Yes. It's hardly magic. If some business or service provides a great value or "a better way of being" people naturally get excited and tell their friends. I'm not a domain expert but my understanding is that these organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. The other organic thing that happens is when people realize they have a need and ask their friends for referrals and recommendations. It works great if your product is great.

If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. Deliberate marketing is commercial propaganda. Someone wants to put their hand in my wallet and is deliberately using professionally-design artificial media to trick me into letting them.

Your example of the barker with the megaphone is noise pollution and a waste of a human being. But you can go much further back. It was decadent when the Romans did it, and it was decedent when we San Franciscans did it, it's decadent today.

> its inconceivable to think any modern company doesn't spend money on advertising/marketing

You can't conceive it, maybe, but I can. There are worlds without advertising/marketing. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. You might not believe me, but it's true, and from those worlds our modern advertising/marketing mania seems like a madness.

> There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone.

Which ones? Please enlighten me.

First, there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example.

The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone. For example, I met a guy once who was part of a very high-end IT consultancy. They had A-list customers, all the work they could handle, and their website was a single line of text that basically said, "You have a problem? Email us". In other words, most markets have a subset of "quiet" companies that thrive on word-of-mouth alone.

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