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The “Marketing Is Evil” Problem

28 points by doppp 5y ago

benjaminwootton 5y ago
Off topic, but I am presented with a Captcha before reading this blog, one which I couldn't solve because apparently I don't know how to identify boats. More sites seem to be implementing this nowadays. Is it justified on a blog? Surely we've lost the war if we have to manually verify that readers are genuinely humans.
- grenoire 5y ago
  Is it the Cloudflare checkbox you're talking about? It's just an aggressive DDoS protection.
raspyberr 5y ago
Marketing is about making me spend money. All those examples he gave could have been solved with the person searching rather than being told. Bored? Find something to do. Hungry? Find something to eat. Marketing heavily favours large amounts of money and things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals. They no longer exist to offer you solutions to your problems. Mass marketing is evil. Targeted marketing is evil. Marketing as a term is a business term not a human term.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals "Dehumanize when it's trendy." This is billionairephobia, friend.
  - taberiand 5y ago
    That's ok, billionaires shouldn't exist (except that what would replace them would be worse).
    - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
      If I gave you a billion dollars, do you believe that you would suddenly transform into an amoral non-human monster?
      - cagenut 5y ago
        not suddenly, but within a decade, yep
        qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Why do you believe that? And if you believe that, how are you so sure that it hasn't already happened? If you're a software developer making $100K annually, you are already in the global 1%. Should people like you exist? Have you signed any sort of giving pledge, as many billionaires have? https://givingpledge.org/ https://givingpledge.org/
      - KozmoNau7 5y ago
        That's a trick question, because the only way[¤] to amass enough wealth to become a billionaire, is to be amoral and callous in the first place. [¤]Excepting the exceedingly rare few who win an exceedingly rare 1+ billion lottery prize.
        qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        If what you say is true, billionaires who inherit their money should also be among the most ethical. Is that what you believe?
        KozmoNau7 5y ago
        Everyone who inherited that sort of wealth was brought up and raised by billionaires, they were literally brought up in that worldview from the day they were born. There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, that's the whole problem, that such wealth can only be amassed by unethical means.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    The commenter is talking in general terms about [big, faceless] companies, hence “things” not “people” or “humans”
    - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
      It looks like a billionairephobic dog whistle to me. Why is it necessary to emphasize that they aren't humans if what he means to refer to are corporations? But here are some interesting stats for you. raspyberr thinks that "things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals". So let's consider the thing with the largest amount of money of all: the US federal government. The federal government's annual budget is almost 6 trillion, approximately 30 times that of Google Inc. Google gets 100% of its energy from renewable sources. The corresponding figure for the federal government is 10%. Shall we tax Google more? I'm not sure. Seems like we'd just transfer assets from a moderately amoral entity to one which is even more amoral.
      - raspyberr 5y ago
        Well since this is spurring a conversation I should clarify my position. The person above was right. I was talking about corporations and companies. Billionaire humans are a seperate discussion but they aren't the marketing industry. With regards to your second point, I don't really think you've said anything noteworthy. Governments aren't humans and don't have morals. They're processes. When they do mass marketing we call it propoganda and that word seems to have pretty negative connotations with it.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Marketing is about making me spend money. Making you? Or else what are they going to do to you?
- duckmysick 5y ago
  The problem is marketing influences our searching, even if we're not aware of it. When you find something to eat at the farmer's market, your choice is largely influenced by the seller's marketing efforts: pricing, selection, her straw hat, or the fact that the best looking plump heirloom tomatoes are right in front of the stall. The farmer is telling you to buy her produce even before she speaks to you.
enriquto 5y ago
There is no problem here. Marketing is actually evil. Forced exposure to brands does not solve any problem that society has, and creates a lot of problems. Moreover, it distorts all search engine efforts that would actually solve the problem of people finding products. It is almost impossible today to look for a product in amazon or google without being bombarded and misled by useless "sponsored" shit.
mkl95 5y ago
Marketing is evil. It's a problem for people who are not in the marketing industry, and it could be argued that for those who are as well.
Hard_Space 5y ago
> If you’re marketing vape pens to teenagers, trying to convince consumers climate change is their problem, promoting vaccine misinformation, or designing dark patterns to mislead web users, stop. Your $#!^^y marketing is the problem. Your $#!^^y marketing is why people think all marketing is evil. Exploiting weakness is Marketing #101, and deferring your moral compass to the needs of the client is Marketing #102, so I don't see any way that change will happen, in this respect.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  > promoting vaccine misinformation This is a worrying inclusion - are payed marketers doing this? To who's gain?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    The entire trend was started by Andrew Wakefield, who was planning to roll out his own fake vaccine product. Almost everybody who actively attacks vaccines is selling something.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      > Almost everybody who actively attacks vaccines is selling something I'm going to see more evidence for that as I see the claim as extraordinary; there are plenty of convinced anti-vaxxers who promote this viewpoint without personal gain IMHO.
- op03 5y ago
  Exploitation at large scale is an ancient story. And it will end the same way colonialism and slavery ended. With a lot of drama.
Paul_S 5y ago
"Marketing isn’t inherently good or evil" in the same way bombs aren't inherently good or evil.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  What about when charities engage in marketing to solve the dire needs of millions, are they being evil?
  - sunsipples 5y ago
    advertising/marketing is manipulative/evil charities can appeal for help vs compete against other charities for the available $$$.
    - arkitaip 5y ago
      That's called marketing.
  - username90 5y ago
    Bombs are used to mine stuff or build roads, they aren't evil either.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
Marketing is evil because the entire point is to make us spend more for a worse product. That is the explicit goal of the profession. It costs a lot of money, and does not improve the actual quality of the product. Of course consumers will hate it. That they often use sleazy methods to accomplish their goal is just another reason to dislike marketing.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  Sometimes you miss out on amazing products at lower prices because they don't market themselves properly. Example: safety razors are cheaper and better than any Gillette razor you might buy but very few people use safety razors because they have fallen out of fashion. Why? Because they don't market their products anywhere.
  - chevill 5y ago
    >because they don't market themselves properly. Safety razors are still being made by all of the major razor manufacturers. Its not that "they didn't market themselves properly" its that the companies that were making them decided its better to sell people a cheaper, shittier razor in an even shittier plastic frame for several dollars a piece rather than sell safety razor blades for 10c each. They intentionally don't market their safety razor products at all. There are smaller companies that have started making them because there's a very small, niche market for safety razors. Perhaps some of them have issues marketing correctly, but the biggest issue is that they are competing with giant companies that thoroughly convinced the world that an inferior product is better decades before these tiny boutique companies ever existed.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    I'd say they have fallen out of fashion because they are harder to use, at least if you don't want to cut yourself. Maybe I have been misled by people who was in turn misled by Gillette marketing, though. I must confess I haven't really tried them.
    - KozmoNau7 5y ago
barneygale 5y ago
It's better to do absolutely nothing with your life than work in marketing.
wiz21c 5y ago
The problem is not marketing. The problem is deceptive, invasive marketing. And unfortunately that the one I'm most exposed to : ads are invasive, green-washing is deceptive, lying on car fuel consumption is deceptive, selling me a good at how much I value it instead of how much it's worth is deceptive, selling stuff "because people buy them" is morally strange, etc. So of course you need to make sure your product is known. But there's a way to do that...
- FloatingUp 5y ago
  I would argue, that every kind of modern marketing basically boils down to 'evil' marketing. It is sadly the most successful kind of marketing, and thus corporations optimize for it.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    Yeah, sure. But what I don't understand is why corporations do that. I mean, nowhere is it written that they must be evil. I can understand competition, the will to please the customer, etc. But why many big corps end up there, I don't get it. It's as if once a corp becomes big, the collection of its part loose its moral compass... Dunno... Any sociologist here ?
- creshal 5y ago
  > selling me a good at how much I value it …after spending a substantial amount of R&D into how to brainwash you into artificially inflating your value estimation. The deception is fractal, with makes it just so much harder to overcome.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I think the industry is in general in a race to the bottom for privacy. Sure, if a competitor gets information that you don't collect, he has an advantage. Others are forced to collect data as well. The only safeguard would be sensible policy. Problem is that politicians ask "big tech". Few of these companies have an interest of collecting less information. On the contrary, they would probably try to sell access to their data in the process. I don't think advertisers would care too much about not being allowed to collect certain info as long as they can be sure their competitors are subjected to the same rules.
amelius 5y ago
> But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean anyone will find it. To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing. If you believe this, then shouldn't marketing be equally accessible to everyone? Instead of the ones with the deepest pockets, and bidding for the best ad space?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If I started Sokoloff Cola today, I don’t see any reason that I should be granted as much ad reach as each of Coke and Pepsi. Even in a more important arena, if I’m a minor party politician, I don’t see why I should get the same reach as the major parties. Ad companies are vying for attention; ad space is a proxy at best.
  - username90 5y ago
    > If I started Sokoloff Cola today, I don’t see any reason that I should be granted as much ad reach as each of Coke and Pepsi. That is exactly how third party product comparisons and reviews works though. I don't think the world would be worse of if all product discoverability happened in such third party environments.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Are they obligated to review every product in a category? The few review sites that I follow don’t seem to cover anywhere near the full breadth of SKUs, but the N most popular, which would become self-fulfilling if this was the primary mode of discovery.
      - username90 5y ago
        The people who care would go to more specialized third party sites that covers more stuff. It already happens today, and if we shifted resources from marketing to such efforts they would become more common and popular.
username90 5y ago
> Interestingly, almost no one argues that marketing by and for companies, products, people, causes they love (or whatever work they’re doing) is evil. I don't believe this, likely he just made that up to make marketing look better. > People outside the profession believe marketers have low standards of honesty. In their eyes, we’re willing to bend rules, manipulate, tell lies, mislead, and use their psychological weaknesses against them to get what we want. Is there any evidence that these strategies aren't common in marketing?
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  >I don't believe this, likely he just made that up to make marketing look better. Can you find 3 examples written prior to today of people demonizing the marketing of products they love?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I can't find 3 examples written prior to today of people demonizing the marketing of products they hate. Who collects critiques on specific marketing campaigns?
  - username90 5y ago
    There is plenty. People hate drug advertisers, but I am pretty sure they think medical drugs are important etc. https://healthcareglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain/dark-side-big-pharma-how-marketing-doctors-really-works https://healthcareglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain/da... If you want more examples just search for it, isn't hard to find at all.
  - FloatingUp 5y ago
    I don't love products. I buy and use them when I need them. The notion that we should be emotionally invested with products, and attached to them, is right where things spiral downwards. I have a suggestions wrt. "non-evil" marketing: How about we get rid of the emotionally subversive language and actually inform about products primarily?
  - CamJN 5y ago
JulianMorrison 5y ago
Marketing is not intrinsically evil but evil marketing is incentivized by (1) the existence of marketing companies, who have to market things just to continue existing, and (2) the existence of a million and one bullshit products whose only purpose is to make money because that's how we run our economy for some daft reason, and whose existence is predicated on persuading you to buy garbage with negative utility. More broadly, the economy is designed to drive people to get you to pay for stuff, whether it personally enhances your life or not. This intrinsically predatory motivation favors the evil over the helpful.
l0b0 5y ago
> But, 0.01% really are evil. They’re trying to mislead us. Or sell us something deeply problematic. Or convince us of something that could harm us or others. Since we're pulling numbers out of asses, why not phrase that as 99.99% instead and see whether the rest of the article still makes sense? I have to the best of my ability purged advertising from my life, and I just wish I could tear down all the posters and especially screens which are grabbing my attention every time I happen to be anywhere near a population centre. Each one feels like a little "fuck you, I need to make more money!" to people passing by. Marketing is OK as long as it is on the product itself, and companies should be allowed to present their name and actual products at the buildings where they are sold.
onurcel 5y ago
The comments here lack so much nuance that if it wasn't HN, I would wonder if they were not made by a trolling farm. A few years ago I created a SaaS product, and as a newcomer in the market, I was happy that (online) marketing existed so that people discovered what the advantages of my tool are compared to more established products that people already knew. My question to you marketing-haters: what exactly are your suggestions here? Let people use only what they know? This doesn't incentivise innovation. Let an ideal unbiased search engine do the magic? One can argue that it is still marketing, but in the hands of someone else.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Marketing has a lot of facets. One of the things which has happened was that goods which were generic and mostly identical like flour and soap have gotten brand names and all kinds of artificial distinctions invented. That didn't help mankind. A lot of marketing is simply based on exploiting people's feelings and encouraging them to desire something they don't really need.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  I bet the majority of the less nuanced comments are made by people who have never worked in a business capacity let alone ran a business. Tell any small business owner that they must not do marketing and they will consider you utterly ignorant or insane.
  - username90 5y ago
    You are just mixing up "The act of marketing" and "The marketing industry". People who think marketing is evil are talking about the marketing industry.
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  There are many alternatives to modern marketing, which is specifically made to manipulate you, through emotional, aspirational and fear-based psychology. Word of mouth is probably the most powerful one. If someone you trust recommends you a specific app, that's better than any marketing campaign. Why do you think astroturfing exists? If marketing was solely based on showing a product in an honest way and listing its properties and specifications, with no hyperbole and exaggeration, that would be something else. When was the last time that sort of advertising was the norm? Advertising used to have lots of text extolling the features and benefits of the product in question, but that's too complicated. Now it's just bright flashy colors and vague allusions to power and capability. BMW has been running an ad on Youtube for a while now about a new electric model, and the voice-over basically says "there are so many reasons why car is great, it would be impossible to list them, just trust us and buy it", they're not even pretending to tell you about the product itself. Marketing doesn't incentivize innovation, it tries to sell you an inferior product at a higher price.
DoubleGlazing 5y ago
"Remember, good marketing usually doesn’t feel like marketing at all!" Yeah, that's my problem. Marketing is essentially all about manipulating my thoughts to benefit someone else. If you are deliberately trying to manipulate people without them realising, that can never be ethical.
bsdubernerd 5y ago
The only kind of people I've seen defending marketing are those who work in marketing. I have a couple of highly educated friends working in the field and it's kind of sad watching them trying to defend and/or explain the need for the industry. But they do have a point: if you have just one company "marketing products", the others are at disadvantage, so the net result is that you need some marketing in almost every industry to stay afloat. This is not an acceptable excuse though. I'd rather have all marketing banned.
pogorniy 5y ago
Marketing the marketing. Good try but not.
WalterBright 5y ago
I subscribe to Mopar Action magazine because it is full of ads promoting parts and accessories for my ancient Dodge. How else am I supposed to find this stuff? Many years ago, I'd buy Computer Shopper magazine because it had nothing but ads for computer parts and accessories. Marketing is how buyers and sellers find each other. Buyers do marketing, too (hence "Wanted" ads). I get unsolicited offers in the mail to buy my house now and then. Employers looking to hire advertise. I've talked with independent software developers now and then who had created a brilliant product, and lamented to me that nobody was buying it. I'd ask them what marketing they'd done, and they'd blanch and say marketing is evil and they didn't want to do it. Weeeelll, no marketing meant nobody knew about their brilliant product, and that's why nobody bought it. "Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.
- username90 5y ago
  The point is that you should assume everything they write is as close to a lie as they can get away with, that is what people mean when they say marketing is evil.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It's kinda tough to go through life assuming everyone is lying to you.
    - username90 5y ago
      Not everyone, just marketing professionals.
danbruc 5y ago
A bit off-topic - has anyone an example of some marketing material which says something like our product is not good at XYZ, have a look at our competitors product ABC if XYZ is important to you? Because if you are actually interested in solving my problem I do not only have to know what you can do but also what you can not do. So even if your product does not support XYZ you can still help me solve my problem by suggesting a look at ABC. You see this sometimes in conference talks - which can certainly fall into the marketing category - but in general every product is always best in class, world leader with all the check marks in the comparison tables.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  I see this in B2B marketing all the time when it's obvious that customers are doing an apples to oranges comparison when it comes to your products and those of a certain competitor. Example: your competitor sells basic desktop accounting software targeting small businesses while you target large corporations with a complex SaaS. You have to acknowledge the customer's comparison and you can even suggest your competitor's product to customers because those are customers that you cannot service anyways.
_Nat_ 5y ago
Sure, if a marketer is truly trying to help the consumer make informed decisions -- making an earnest attempt to help interested consumers find the product/service that's right for them -- then they'd be good, not evil. This is, if a marketer: 1. is truly trying to help the target make the best decision, including going with a competitor or simply not buying anything; 2. won't even try to sink the target's attention unless they have good, informed reason to believe that the totality of their offer (including relevant costs, time, and effort) is expectedly a net positive for the target; then they'd be good and not-evil. That said, advertisers who seek to push products indiscriminately would be evil. The allegorical used-car-salesman who pushes a vehicle that they know to be worth less than they make it out to be, or seeks to trick the buyer into spending way more than they need to, is harming their target for their own self-interest; seems like simple predation. That said, not all marketing is simple predation. For example, some offers are for legitimately useful products that a non-trivial portion of the target-audience could quite plausibly benefit from buying. Such marketing can have elements of good mixed into it, too.
dangerface 5y ago
> Bad marketing, either the evil, manipulative kind or the well-intentioned, but poor-performing kind, tends to leave a more memorable impression than the good, effective varieties. What? The whole point of marketing is to memorable and leave an impression, thats what good effective marketing does. I dunno what the article is even trying to say.
brayhite 5y ago
Commenters here who are dying on this hill of “all marketing is evil” are forgetting that virtually all aspects of communicating _who_ created _what_ is a form of marketing being intentionally used by the creator. Does your laptop sport a logo? Does your favorite local coffee shop have a sign on its front door? Does your food come in hip colors with interesting typeface? All of this is marketing and branding. When the author mentions the 9990 exposures to marketing, he’s likely referring to these that we all consciously rarely register or see. But it’s still marketing. Someone was probably paid to craft it. I’m not gonna die on the hill of “marketing isn’t evil”; it absolutely can be. I’d argue though that marketing is more often than not an extension of the company’s ethos. If you find some piece of marketing to be questionable or evil, let that be a reflection on the company more than the practice of marketing. After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free.
- _Nat_ 5y ago
  > After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free. Yeah, it'd be evil for a spammer to push posts without legitimate reason to believe that doing so would be beneficial to readers. I'd rather block anyone who'd so selfishly try to waste my time; their messages wouldn't be worth reading. But that's not what a lot of folks do. Many try to make helpful comments that they suspect will help benefit readers. Maybe sometimes they're wrong, but on the whole, a competent community-member ought to generally write things that'd tend to be worth it for others to read. Which is to say that, sure, we can frame discussions like this in terms of marketing -- even describing criticisms of marketing-practice as themselves being instances of marketing. But the moral there would be the observation that marketing CAN be good; not that much of it isn't evil. To be fair to your position though: yes, if marketing's thoughtful enough to act in the target's best-interests, including not bothering people when it wouldn't be worth their time to consider a proposal and up-front about information that might steer consumers elsewhere, then, sure, it can be good. However, the concern's that marketers are often pushing products/services whenever they can, attempting to skew consumers' perceptions toward the decision to buy rather than attempting to help consumers make optimal decisions.
Aunche 5y ago
People here often confuse marketing for advertising and forget certain good aspects of marketing. In its most broadest sense, marketing is just the discovery of the optimal allocation of scarce resources. A professor writing grants and attending conferences to spread their work is really just marketing. Trying to determine what your customer actually wants is also marketing. The success of Amazon can be credited to the perfect solution to the marketing question, "how can an online store offer a superior experience to a physical store?" Bezos chose to start with books because there are more books in print than one can fit inside the largest physical store.
- username90 5y ago
  > A professor writing grants and attending conferences to spread their work is really just marketing Right, but if a professor hired marketing professionals to handle those things for him I'd say that it is evil. And if science devolved into every professor hiring teams of marketing professionals in order to compete for grants I'd say that science would be much worse off than today. If you think that sounds ridiculous, why do you think that the scenario is totally fine in other parts of society?
hownottowrite 5y ago
Actual "evil" marketer here... No really. That was my job title. I've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of physical goods, most of it to people who frequent this site (or similar demographics). Marketing is absolutely evil, but without it most of you wouldn't be making nearly as much as you do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
roydivision 5y ago
"To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing." This simply isn't true, it ignores products becoming popular on the merit of their quality alone. Practically all open source software uses this method, even if it isn't sold, it competes with commercial software and often wins without any marketing. I get that marketing comes in different forms, one could argue merit is a form of marketing, but that's not what the author is talking about. Marketing tricks us into choosing products based on values other than their efficacy to get the job done, and as such is a bad thing, not to mention the raft of really bad side effects it brings with it.
roydivision 5y ago
“There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.” Carl Sagan
fmajid 5y ago
For those who claims marketing does not influence them: you are kidding yourself. When I don't know the words to a song, I use the words from a Japanese TV commercial jingle I last heard 36 years ago.
_nalply 5y ago
Marketing suffers from that people's attention is a commons. People don't sell their attention, so marketers are free to grab it. And then the inevitable happens: because attention is limited and because it's free, the commons get destroyed. (look up tragedy of the commons!) Destruction has many facets here: ad blindness, hate against marketing, ad blockers, stopping watching TV and movies, and so on.

28 points by doppp 5y ago

Off topic, but I am presented with a Captcha before reading this blog, one which I couldn't solve because apparently I don't know how to identify boats. More sites seem to be implementing this nowadays. Is it justified on a blog? Surely we've lost the war if we have to manually verify that readers are genuinely humans.

grenoire 5y ago
Is it the Cloudflare checkbox you're talking about? It's just an aggressive DDoS protection.

raspyberr 5y ago

Marketing is about making me spend money. All those examples he gave could have been solved with the person searching rather than being told. Bored? Find something to do. Hungry? Find something to eat. Marketing heavily favours large amounts of money and things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals. They no longer exist to offer you solutions to your problems. Mass marketing is evil. Targeted marketing is evil. Marketing as a term is a business term not a human term.

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
>things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals "Dehumanize when it's trendy." This is billionairephobia, friend.
- taberiand 5y ago
  That's ok, billionaires shouldn't exist (except that what would replace them would be worse).
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    If I gave you a billion dollars, do you believe that you would suddenly transform into an amoral non-human monster?
    - cagenut 5y ago
      not suddenly, but within a decade, yep
      - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Why do you believe that? And if you believe that, how are you so sure that it hasn't already happened? If you're a software developer making $100K annually, you are already in the global 1%. Should people like you exist? Have you signed any sort of giving pledge, as many billionaires have? https://givingpledge.org/ https://givingpledge.org/
    - KozmoNau7 5y ago
      That's a trick question, because the only way[¤] to amass enough wealth to become a billionaire, is to be amoral and callous in the first place. [¤]Excepting the exceedingly rare few who win an exceedingly rare 1+ billion lottery prize.
      - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        If what you say is true, billionaires who inherit their money should also be among the most ethical. Is that what you believe?
        KozmoNau7 5y ago
        Everyone who inherited that sort of wealth was brought up and raised by billionaires, they were literally brought up in that worldview from the day they were born. There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire, that's the whole problem, that such wealth can only be amassed by unethical means.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  The commenter is talking in general terms about [big, faceless] companies, hence “things” not “people” or “humans”
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    It looks like a billionairephobic dog whistle to me. Why is it necessary to emphasize that they aren't humans if what he means to refer to are corporations? But here are some interesting stats for you. raspyberr thinks that "things with large amounts of money aren't humans and don't have morals". So let's consider the thing with the largest amount of money of all: the US federal government. The federal government's annual budget is almost 6 trillion, approximately 30 times that of Google Inc. Google gets 100% of its energy from renewable sources. The corresponding figure for the federal government is 10%. Shall we tax Google more? I'm not sure. Seems like we'd just transfer assets from a moderately amoral entity to one which is even more amoral.
    - raspyberr 5y ago
      Well since this is spurring a conversation I should clarify my position. The person above was right. I was talking about corporations and companies. Billionaire humans are a seperate discussion but they aren't the marketing industry. With regards to your second point, I don't really think you've said anything noteworthy. Governments aren't humans and don't have morals. They're processes. When they do mass marketing we call it propoganda and that word seems to have pretty negative connotations with it.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Marketing is about making me spend money. Making you? Or else what are they going to do to you?
duckmysick 5y ago
The problem is marketing influences our searching, even if we're not aware of it. When you find something to eat at the farmer's market, your choice is largely influenced by the seller's marketing efforts: pricing, selection, her straw hat, or the fact that the best looking plump heirloom tomatoes are right in front of the stall. The farmer is telling you to buy her produce even before she speaks to you.

enriquto 5y ago

There is no problem here. Marketing is actually evil. Forced exposure to brands does not solve any problem that society has, and creates a lot of problems. Moreover, it distorts all search engine efforts that would actually solve the problem of people finding products. It is almost impossible today to look for a product in amazon or google without being bombarded and misled by useless "sponsored" shit.

mkl95 5y ago

Marketing is evil. It's a problem for people who are not in the marketing industry, and it could be argued that for those who are as well.

Hard_Space 5y ago

> If you’re marketing vape pens to teenagers, trying to convince consumers climate change is their problem, promoting vaccine misinformation, or designing dark patterns to mislead web users, stop. Your $#!^^y marketing is the problem. Your $#!^^y marketing is why people think all marketing is evil. Exploiting weakness is Marketing #101, and deferring your moral compass to the needs of the client is Marketing #102, so I don't see any way that change will happen, in this respect.

Chris2048 5y ago
> promoting vaccine misinformation This is a worrying inclusion - are payed marketers doing this? To who's gain?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  The entire trend was started by Andrew Wakefield, who was planning to roll out his own fake vaccine product. Almost everybody who actively attacks vaccines is selling something.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    > Almost everybody who actively attacks vaccines is selling something I'm going to see more evidence for that as I see the claim as extraordinary; there are plenty of convinced anti-vaxxers who promote this viewpoint without personal gain IMHO.
op03 5y ago
Exploitation at large scale is an ancient story. And it will end the same way colonialism and slavery ended. With a lot of drama.

Paul_S 5y ago

"Marketing isn’t inherently good or evil" in the same way bombs aren't inherently good or evil.

arkitaip 5y ago
What about when charities engage in marketing to solve the dire needs of millions, are they being evil?
- sunsipples 5y ago
  advertising/marketing is manipulative/evil charities can appeal for help vs compete against other charities for the available $$$.
  - arkitaip 5y ago
    That's called marketing.
- username90 5y ago
  Bombs are used to mine stuff or build roads, they aren't evil either.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

Marketing is evil because the entire point is to make us spend more for a worse product. That is the explicit goal of the profession. It costs a lot of money, and does not improve the actual quality of the product. Of course consumers will hate it. That they often use sleazy methods to accomplish their goal is just another reason to dislike marketing.

arkitaip 5y ago
Sometimes you miss out on amazing products at lower prices because they don't market themselves properly. Example: safety razors are cheaper and better than any Gillette razor you might buy but very few people use safety razors because they have fallen out of fashion. Why? Because they don't market their products anywhere.
- chevill 5y ago
  >because they don't market themselves properly. Safety razors are still being made by all of the major razor manufacturers. Its not that "they didn't market themselves properly" its that the companies that were making them decided its better to sell people a cheaper, shittier razor in an even shittier plastic frame for several dollars a piece rather than sell safety razor blades for 10c each. They intentionally don't market their safety razor products at all. There are smaller companies that have started making them because there's a very small, niche market for safety razors. Perhaps some of them have issues marketing correctly, but the biggest issue is that they are competing with giant companies that thoroughly convinced the world that an inferior product is better decades before these tiny boutique companies ever existed.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  I'd say they have fallen out of fashion because they are harder to use, at least if you don't want to cut yourself. Maybe I have been misled by people who was in turn misled by Gillette marketing, though. I must confess I haven't really tried them.
  - KozmoNau7 5y ago

barneygale 5y ago

It's better to do absolutely nothing with your life than work in marketing.

wiz21c 5y ago

The problem is not marketing. The problem is deceptive, invasive marketing. And unfortunately that the one I'm most exposed to : ads are invasive, green-washing is deceptive, lying on car fuel consumption is deceptive, selling me a good at how much I value it instead of how much it's worth is deceptive, selling stuff "because people buy them" is morally strange, etc. So of course you need to make sure your product is known. But there's a way to do that...

FloatingUp 5y ago
I would argue, that every kind of modern marketing basically boils down to 'evil' marketing. It is sadly the most successful kind of marketing, and thus corporations optimize for it.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  Yeah, sure. But what I don't understand is why corporations do that. I mean, nowhere is it written that they must be evil. I can understand competition, the will to please the customer, etc. But why many big corps end up there, I don't get it. It's as if once a corp becomes big, the collection of its part loose its moral compass... Dunno... Any sociologist here ?
creshal 5y ago
> selling me a good at how much I value it …after spending a substantial amount of R&D into how to brainwash you into artificially inflating your value estimation. The deception is fractal, with makes it just so much harder to overcome.
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think the industry is in general in a race to the bottom for privacy. Sure, if a competitor gets information that you don't collect, he has an advantage. Others are forced to collect data as well. The only safeguard would be sensible policy. Problem is that politicians ask "big tech". Few of these companies have an interest of collecting less information. On the contrary, they would probably try to sell access to their data in the process. I don't think advertisers would care too much about not being allowed to collect certain info as long as they can be sure their competitors are subjected to the same rules.

amelius 5y ago

> But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean anyone will find it. To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing. If you believe this, then shouldn't marketing be equally accessible to everyone? Instead of the ones with the deepest pockets, and bidding for the best ad space?

sokoloff 5y ago
If I started Sokoloff Cola today, I don’t see any reason that I should be granted as much ad reach as each of Coke and Pepsi. Even in a more important arena, if I’m a minor party politician, I don’t see why I should get the same reach as the major parties. Ad companies are vying for attention; ad space is a proxy at best.
- username90 5y ago
  > If I started Sokoloff Cola today, I don’t see any reason that I should be granted as much ad reach as each of Coke and Pepsi. That is exactly how third party product comparisons and reviews works though. I don't think the world would be worse of if all product discoverability happened in such third party environments.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Are they obligated to review every product in a category? The few review sites that I follow don’t seem to cover anywhere near the full breadth of SKUs, but the N most popular, which would become self-fulfilling if this was the primary mode of discovery.
    - username90 5y ago
      The people who care would go to more specialized third party sites that covers more stuff. It already happens today, and if we shifted resources from marketing to such efforts they would become more common and popular.

username90 5y ago

> Interestingly, almost no one argues that marketing by and for companies, products, people, causes they love (or whatever work they’re doing) is evil. I don't believe this, likely he just made that up to make marketing look better. > People outside the profession believe marketers have low standards of honesty. In their eyes, we’re willing to bend rules, manipulate, tell lies, mislead, and use their psychological weaknesses against them to get what we want. Is there any evidence that these strategies aren't common in marketing?

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
>I don't believe this, likely he just made that up to make marketing look better. Can you find 3 examples written prior to today of people demonizing the marketing of products they love?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I can't find 3 examples written prior to today of people demonizing the marketing of products they hate. Who collects critiques on specific marketing campaigns?
- username90 5y ago
  There is plenty. People hate drug advertisers, but I am pretty sure they think medical drugs are important etc. https://healthcareglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain/dark-side-big-pharma-how-marketing-doctors-really-works https://healthcareglobal.com/procurement-and-supply-chain/da... If you want more examples just search for it, isn't hard to find at all.
- FloatingUp 5y ago
  I don't love products. I buy and use them when I need them. The notion that we should be emotionally invested with products, and attached to them, is right where things spiral downwards. I have a suggestions wrt. "non-evil" marketing: How about we get rid of the emotionally subversive language and actually inform about products primarily?
- CamJN 5y ago

JulianMorrison 5y ago

Marketing is not intrinsically evil but evil marketing is incentivized by (1) the existence of marketing companies, who have to market things just to continue existing, and (2) the existence of a million and one bullshit products whose only purpose is to make money because that's how we run our economy for some daft reason, and whose existence is predicated on persuading you to buy garbage with negative utility. More broadly, the economy is designed to drive people to get you to pay for stuff, whether it personally enhances your life or not. This intrinsically predatory motivation favors the evil over the helpful.

l0b0 5y ago

> But, 0.01% really are evil. They’re trying to mislead us. Or sell us something deeply problematic. Or convince us of something that could harm us or others. Since we're pulling numbers out of asses, why not phrase that as 99.99% instead and see whether the rest of the article still makes sense? I have to the best of my ability purged advertising from my life, and I just wish I could tear down all the posters and especially screens which are grabbing my attention every time I happen to be anywhere near a population centre. Each one feels like a little "fuck you, I need to make more money!" to people passing by. Marketing is OK as long as it is on the product itself, and companies should be allowed to present their name and actual products at the buildings where they are sold.

onurcel 5y ago

The comments here lack so much nuance that if it wasn't HN, I would wonder if they were not made by a trolling farm. A few years ago I created a SaaS product, and as a newcomer in the market, I was happy that (online) marketing existed so that people discovered what the advantages of my tool are compared to more established products that people already knew. My question to you marketing-haters: what exactly are your suggestions here? Let people use only what they know? This doesn't incentivise innovation. Let an ideal unbiased search engine do the magic? One can argue that it is still marketing, but in the hands of someone else.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Marketing has a lot of facets. One of the things which has happened was that goods which were generic and mostly identical like flour and soap have gotten brand names and all kinds of artificial distinctions invented. That didn't help mankind. A lot of marketing is simply based on exploiting people's feelings and encouraging them to desire something they don't really need.
arkitaip 5y ago
I bet the majority of the less nuanced comments are made by people who have never worked in a business capacity let alone ran a business. Tell any small business owner that they must not do marketing and they will consider you utterly ignorant or insane.
- username90 5y ago
  You are just mixing up "The act of marketing" and "The marketing industry". People who think marketing is evil are talking about the marketing industry.
KozmoNau7 5y ago
There are many alternatives to modern marketing, which is specifically made to manipulate you, through emotional, aspirational and fear-based psychology. Word of mouth is probably the most powerful one. If someone you trust recommends you a specific app, that's better than any marketing campaign. Why do you think astroturfing exists? If marketing was solely based on showing a product in an honest way and listing its properties and specifications, with no hyperbole and exaggeration, that would be something else. When was the last time that sort of advertising was the norm? Advertising used to have lots of text extolling the features and benefits of the product in question, but that's too complicated. Now it's just bright flashy colors and vague allusions to power and capability. BMW has been running an ad on Youtube for a while now about a new electric model, and the voice-over basically says "there are so many reasons why car is great, it would be impossible to list them, just trust us and buy it", they're not even pretending to tell you about the product itself. Marketing doesn't incentivize innovation, it tries to sell you an inferior product at a higher price.

DoubleGlazing 5y ago

"Remember, good marketing usually doesn’t feel like marketing at all!" Yeah, that's my problem. Marketing is essentially all about manipulating my thoughts to benefit someone else. If you are deliberately trying to manipulate people without them realising, that can never be ethical.

bsdubernerd 5y ago

The only kind of people I've seen defending marketing are those who work in marketing. I have a couple of highly educated friends working in the field and it's kind of sad watching them trying to defend and/or explain the need for the industry. But they do have a point: if you have just one company "marketing products", the others are at disadvantage, so the net result is that you need some marketing in almost every industry to stay afloat. This is not an acceptable excuse though. I'd rather have all marketing banned.

pogorniy 5y ago

Marketing the marketing. Good try but not.

WalterBright 5y ago

I subscribe to Mopar Action magazine because it is full of ads promoting parts and accessories for my ancient Dodge. How else am I supposed to find this stuff? Many years ago, I'd buy Computer Shopper magazine because it had nothing but ads for computer parts and accessories. Marketing is how buyers and sellers find each other. Buyers do marketing, too (hence "Wanted" ads). I get unsolicited offers in the mail to buy my house now and then. Employers looking to hire advertise. I've talked with independent software developers now and then who had created a brilliant product, and lamented to me that nobody was buying it. I'd ask them what marketing they'd done, and they'd blanch and say marketing is evil and they didn't want to do it. Weeeelll, no marketing meant nobody knew about their brilliant product, and that's why nobody bought it. "Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.

username90 5y ago
The point is that you should assume everything they write is as close to a lie as they can get away with, that is what people mean when they say marketing is evil.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's kinda tough to go through life assuming everyone is lying to you.
  - username90 5y ago
    Not everyone, just marketing professionals.

danbruc 5y ago

A bit off-topic - has anyone an example of some marketing material which says something like our product is not good at XYZ, have a look at our competitors product ABC if XYZ is important to you? Because if you are actually interested in solving my problem I do not only have to know what you can do but also what you can not do. So even if your product does not support XYZ you can still help me solve my problem by suggesting a look at ABC. You see this sometimes in conference talks - which can certainly fall into the marketing category - but in general every product is always best in class, world leader with all the check marks in the comparison tables.

arkitaip 5y ago
I see this in B2B marketing all the time when it's obvious that customers are doing an apples to oranges comparison when it comes to your products and those of a certain competitor. Example: your competitor sells basic desktop accounting software targeting small businesses while you target large corporations with a complex SaaS. You have to acknowledge the customer's comparison and you can even suggest your competitor's product to customers because those are customers that you cannot service anyways.

_Nat_ 5y ago

Sure, if a marketer is truly trying to help the consumer make informed decisions -- making an earnest attempt to help interested consumers find the product/service that's right for them -- then they'd be good, not evil. This is, if a marketer: 1. is truly trying to help the target make the best decision, including going with a competitor or simply not buying anything; 2. won't even try to sink the target's attention unless they have good, informed reason to believe that the totality of their offer (including relevant costs, time, and effort) is expectedly a net positive for the target; then they'd be good and not-evil. That said, advertisers who seek to push products indiscriminately would be evil. The allegorical used-car-salesman who pushes a vehicle that they know to be worth less than they make it out to be, or seeks to trick the buyer into spending way more than they need to, is harming their target for their own self-interest; seems like simple predation. That said, not all marketing is simple predation. For example, some offers are for legitimately useful products that a non-trivial portion of the target-audience could quite plausibly benefit from buying. Such marketing can have elements of good mixed into it, too.

dangerface 5y ago

> Bad marketing, either the evil, manipulative kind or the well-intentioned, but poor-performing kind, tends to leave a more memorable impression than the good, effective varieties. What? The whole point of marketing is to memorable and leave an impression, thats what good effective marketing does. I dunno what the article is even trying to say.

brayhite 5y ago

Commenters here who are dying on this hill of “all marketing is evil” are forgetting that virtually all aspects of communicating _who_ created _what_ is a form of marketing being intentionally used by the creator. Does your laptop sport a logo? Does your favorite local coffee shop have a sign on its front door? Does your food come in hip colors with interesting typeface? All of this is marketing and branding. When the author mentions the 9990 exposures to marketing, he’s likely referring to these that we all consciously rarely register or see. But it’s still marketing. Someone was probably paid to craft it. I’m not gonna die on the hill of “marketing isn’t evil”; it absolutely can be. I’d argue though that marketing is more often than not an extension of the company’s ethos. If you find some piece of marketing to be questionable or evil, let that be a reflection on the company more than the practice of marketing. After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free.

_Nat_ 5y ago
> After all, marketing is little more than paid, thoughtful, intentional opinion-sharing. Y’all are just marketing your anti-marketing sentiments for free. Yeah, it'd be evil for a spammer to push posts without legitimate reason to believe that doing so would be beneficial to readers. I'd rather block anyone who'd so selfishly try to waste my time; their messages wouldn't be worth reading. But that's not what a lot of folks do. Many try to make helpful comments that they suspect will help benefit readers. Maybe sometimes they're wrong, but on the whole, a competent community-member ought to generally write things that'd tend to be worth it for others to read. Which is to say that, sure, we can frame discussions like this in terms of marketing -- even describing criticisms of marketing-practice as themselves being instances of marketing. But the moral there would be the observation that marketing CAN be good; not that much of it isn't evil. To be fair to your position though: yes, if marketing's thoughtful enough to act in the target's best-interests, including not bothering people when it wouldn't be worth their time to consider a proposal and up-front about information that might steer consumers elsewhere, then, sure, it can be good. However, the concern's that marketers are often pushing products/services whenever they can, attempting to skew consumers' perceptions toward the decision to buy rather than attempting to help consumers make optimal decisions.

Aunche 5y ago

People here often confuse marketing for advertising and forget certain good aspects of marketing. In its most broadest sense, marketing is just the discovery of the optimal allocation of scarce resources. A professor writing grants and attending conferences to spread their work is really just marketing. Trying to determine what your customer actually wants is also marketing. The success of Amazon can be credited to the perfect solution to the marketing question, "how can an online store offer a superior experience to a physical store?" Bezos chose to start with books because there are more books in print than one can fit inside the largest physical store.

username90 5y ago
> A professor writing grants and attending conferences to spread their work is really just marketing Right, but if a professor hired marketing professionals to handle those things for him I'd say that it is evil. And if science devolved into every professor hiring teams of marketing professionals in order to compete for grants I'd say that science would be much worse off than today. If you think that sounds ridiculous, why do you think that the scenario is totally fine in other parts of society?

hownottowrite 5y ago

Actual "evil" marketer here... No really. That was my job title. I've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of physical goods, most of it to people who frequent this site (or similar demographics). Marketing is absolutely evil, but without it most of you wouldn't be making nearly as much as you do.

deleted 5y ago

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roydivision 5y ago

"To earn customers you need awareness. To earn awareness, you need marketing." This simply isn't true, it ignores products becoming popular on the merit of their quality alone. Practically all open source software uses this method, even if it isn't sold, it competes with commercial software and often wins without any marketing. I get that marketing comes in different forms, one could argue merit is a form of marketing, but that's not what the author is talking about. Marketing tricks us into choosing products based on values other than their efficacy to get the job done, and as such is a bad thing, not to mention the raft of really bad side effects it brings with it.

roydivision 5y ago

“There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.” Carl Sagan

fmajid 5y ago

For those who claims marketing does not influence them: you are kidding yourself. When I don't know the words to a song, I use the words from a Japanese TV commercial jingle I last heard 36 years ago.

_nalply 5y ago

Marketing suffers from that people's attention is a commons. People don't sell their attention, so marketers are free to grab it. And then the inevitable happens: because attention is limited and because it's free, the commons get destroyed. (look up tragedy of the commons!) Destruction has many facets here: ad blindness, hate against marketing, ad blockers, stopping watching TV and movies, and so on.