Marketing is only legal because it doesn't work most of the time

I don't really know how marketing works in practice but I always imagined that marketing is about all the processes needed to bring a product to the market.

Often people equate marketing with advertising/etc, because these things are in your face.

But a lot of marketing is about market research, market segmentation, pricing strategies, subconscious associations, appearance/style of the product, through which sales channels the product is sold, etc.

A lot of designer clothes are just your average clothes with a prominent branding on them.

If you want to sell as many t-shirts for as little as possible you are going to sell it at a discounter with zero packaging maybe in a set of three.

Meanwhile the designer brand will try to make the shopping experience as fancy as possible, only allow the t-shirt to be sold in their own store, set the price point very high but also offer discounts to make people fear losing out, the product is then put in a fancy bag. Of course all of this is intended to reinforce peer pressure, especially among teenagers, so that people subconsciously form a connection between themselves and the brand.

What I'm getting at is that cheap no name brands want to buy awareness and luxury brands want to buy "customer lock-in"

Ultimately both t-shirt manufacturers start out with the same product but they do very different things with them.

The notion that marketing doesn't work is, itself, an example of marketing that is working. The manufactured perception is essential to keep it from being regulated. Scott Adams is a clever functionary.

How have the 0.01% managed to get fully half of the American public to reliably vote against their own interest, and in favor of what most benefits the 0.01% and nobody else? How have they convinced a permanent underclass that they are all middle class, despite having access to none of what their actually middle-class grandparents had?

Edward Bernays and his star pupil Josef Goebbels succeeded in their aim to find a way to create a managed population that will vote just as they are told to vote, eliminating democracy as a dominant force in the world. We are living today in their ideal world.

Gosh. I know this is a cartoon, and it’s funny… but I’d love to debunk content like this. It is really hard to get over the common (incorrect) view that marketing==privacy invading ads.

The fixation of hatred on marketing is one aspect: promotions. Of which advertising is a subcategory.

Another aspect, that most do not hate, is product.

Marketing needs to be reframed by the technology community as market-making between suppliers and customers; and not be as reductive.

If you’re a product manager, you’re fundamentally doing a marketing function. Only in recent decades have product managers been placed within engineering orgs to facilitate communications, which in turn has spurred some to perform revisionist history.