> and hope they makes bad decisions
Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.
Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.
Diablo Immortal recently made hundreds of millions of dollars by using every psychological trick in the book in terms of marketing in-game.
Do you think Activision-Blizzard considers this a loss just because some games journalists and annoyed gamers are complaining?
Or do you think people really needed to literally spend thousands of dollars on in-game items?
No. But they wanted to, because the games create an endorphin rush.
Marketing didn't cause that. Downright evil game design did, but those are different things.
It's not all pure endorphin though. For example, the game shows you that you can add up to three gems to get better rewards from some activity. When you go and buy those three gems and add them, the UI changes, showing you can actually add up to 10!
Or, all of the prices in the store are very carefully calculated so you have to buy more of the in-game currency than you actually need - an item you are likely to want may cost 20 gems, but you can only buy bundles of 17 or 39 gems, for example.
Sure, the endorphin rush is what makes you want the items to begin with, and there are aspects unique to the game design that encourage that. But there are a lot of other aspects of the game that are designed to confuse and convince players to spend more than they'd like.
"Endorphin rush" is just a fancy word for "fun". You claim it is evil for people to play a game because it's fun?
And that, yes, I will call "downright evil", because it is exploitative abuse of the human firmware for mere profit. Developers of slot machines are excoriated for the same thing; there's no reason that virtual ones are any better.
The attempt to draw a distinction as rather tortured, and doomed to failure.
I am disappointed.
I like the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked because I knew I'd like it a lot, and would not want to quit. Smokers I know like smoking.
How about you?
Recurring revenue is the holy grail for businesses, not one-shot revenue.
Stock investors do not reward companies that eat their seed corn. They short those companies.
If you know which companies are sacrificing the long term, you'd be shorting their stock.
If we look at something like a Netflix sales pipeline we have:
Marketing that arranges interviews with stars of their new shows on new channels and on youtube and gives TikTokker preview screenings and merchandise and proposes pieces to the New Yorker and the NYTimes on how deep the script is etc..
Advertising makes sure that when you search "that new show staring XX from the NYTimes" they find the right thing
Sales takes the visitor to the website and tries to turn them into a customer.
It's the C-suite, mostly the CEO and maybe the CFO and the revenue team that decides "we will offer subscriptions".
So it's sales, not marketing the convinces people to part with their money, and it's the company management that decides on subscriptions.
(And I'd note that I prefer a subscription model for Netflix to one-off payments.)
> I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas.
Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?