I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.
or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes.
(edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)
Unless you are severed, of course.
Of course not, because an identity is just an idea, a word. You lose sleep, or don't, over what you actually do. And you cannot do a job without doing it, by definition. Some jobs are kinda scummy, some scummy people enjoy them
I remember over 20 years ago when at a party this other kid suddenly started talking about his job in a call center, selling lottery tickets to grannies basically, and he grinned and told me he could imagine I could be good at that, that the money is good if you hit the quota and whatnot. I thought, what do I care, I'm also good at running real fast, so does that mean I snatch purses now? No, because I do not enjoy that, and would lose sleep over it.
> or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide
First off, there is a lot of grey area between "they're all poor victims" and "they're all demons". Secondly, why "all"? You're basically using the good people and poor saps to cover for the bad guys by waving your hands around a little.
Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).
It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.
I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.
With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.
They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
Why single out sex workers here? I understand the other examples, but unless you're talking about sex workers tricking people/robbing them or something else, it seems like a service-profession like any other, like a cleaner or what not, but I'm guessing you wouldn't actually put 'Actual mercenaries and cleaners kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame'.
I think a mix match of perverse incentives, rent-seeking, cobra effect, regulatory capture and institutional corruption all together lead to the inevitable situation of institutions or professions whose incentives depend on the persistence (or even worsening of) the problem it claims to solve.
Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.
Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
outreach, discount sales, testimonials, business pages are all marketing. "purest form of evil" unless you're doing it i guess.
(or, perhaps, there's some nuance to be had instead of proclaiming marketing in general to be one of the "purest forms of evil in existence"...? )
The idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of us loathing marketing as an industry.
You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...
But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc.
I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for.
Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc.
All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.
I think billboards should be completely banned, or at most relegated to designated districts of dense urban areas. I'm in favor of banning products that are addictive or harmful to people, like gambling, tobacco, and the like. I think that conflicts of interest should be disclosed, and false claims should have consequences.
But I think it's helpful to start the discussion by recognizing that the state that we're in now is the natural state of affairs. It's not evil, and we all engage in elements of it most of our waking lives. But unchecked marketing and persuasion will flood every crack of everything if you let it. Which is why you have to decide what you are willing to permit as a society.
It has to be done coercively, though. The incentives are so unbelievably strong to cheat that shame or persuasion isn't a useful counterweight.
A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.