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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

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Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.

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.

People seek out services when a need arises. Marketers' job to invent new needs that didn't exist before

Exactly that. Their job is to manipulate me into believing I need something that has never missed in my life - enough for me to trade my own health (in the form of work hours, which I exchange for money) for it. Literally trying to convince me that a thing I never wanted or needed is worth dying a little in exchange for it.

A plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?

Scroll back up and notice most of these comments are distinguishing "marketing" from "marketers". I think a lot of people also wouldn't consider just an ad as marketing without some further details (such as the comment you replied to).

Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers.

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.

Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?

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.

It strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services, and the endless escalation eats away at the underlying system turning it into more noise than signal.

There’s a name for this right? Marketers that discredit free markets, lawyers that ruin the law, accountants w bank on loopholes, social services that thrive without a social safety net, the lobbyists of democracy, what else? Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame, but the others?

> Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame

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.

So no single term, for something so widespread, must be taboo to talk about, or too risky to address, and threaten the social status of someone connected to the uglier side of a profession.

Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

Makes sense—what’s their address?

Marketing salaries are not high at all

>I wonder how most of them sleep at night.

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)

8 hours a day, 5 days a week is a pretty significant chunk of your life. It is a part of your identity, if the word identity means anything.

Unless you are severed, of course.

Of course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're doing a moral good, or is their mind just a nonstop stream of "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"?

I think the first thing you should learn about HN is that there's all sorts of individuals on it. Reducing all of us to "the people on the venture capital marketing forum" is not helping your ability to understand what goes on here.

huh, i thought it was just one person with multiple accounts, thanks

> its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.

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.

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