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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

No its about product discovery. It is in fact essential to a rational market. Imagine you create a really good product. You actually believe in it and you think people would want to buy it. Please tell me how you will practically get it noticed? I would like actual practical advice.

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Product discovery is one facet of it, certainly. It’s also about pursuading people to buy a product / service they don’t really need, creating demand where none (or not as much) existed previously, of convincing people that their product / service is better than that of others when this might not in fact be the case.

In the exact same way as if you had a godawful product and you want to sell it.

Promote it, talk about it on social media, possibly contract some marketing services, find out who is more prone to purchasing it and focus on that group, etc etc.

I think you are agreeing with me. This process is valuable - it brings your product to people who benefit from it. It does not diminish just for the reason that there might be godawful products some times.

This is actually a pretty solid example of a flaw in free market economics. Marketing can increase and decrease knowledge and there's not a strong market force pushing things the right direction.

I thought about what you said and I think you are correct. But since we don't live in an ideal rational world do you agree that without advertisements the market can fail? How would new products even enter the limelight?

Without advertisements? Word of mouth, neutral databases of information (these are hard to create in practice without at least some gaming, but i think things like the yellow pages or government operated lists of services get close)

I'm not anti-marketing but it does point to a clear example of how consumer protection laws are needed for efficient markets.

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