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So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business. You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you. How do you propose they find out?

tapland 2y ago
Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case
adalacelove 2y ago
Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.
- richrichardsson 2y ago
  > A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    Well, ads obviously haven't worked...
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    One word. Amazon. I heard someone say Amazon did more damage to British town centres than Hitler's bombs.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Surely you didn't read that in the Washington Post
      - nonrandomstring 2y ago
        Nah, Walthamstow Post Office.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in London. But it's fair that a combination of online purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail overall.
unglaublich 2y ago
Billboards are there for big corporations to retain their oligopolies, not for small ones to penetrate them.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Then how come small businesses buy them sometimes?
burnished 2y ago
I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space. I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty. I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  You're just observing the long-term effects. If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established. I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies. But not all of them.
  - fzeroracer 2y ago
    > If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
    - ghaff 2y ago
      >Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.
robxorb 2y ago
A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality. Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion. I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic. I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively. What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive. Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality. How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it? > Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion. What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things? > I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively. An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN? Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior. Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.
tuetuopay 2y ago
You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion. Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is. > You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes. The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations". The latter might be a good time though.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I thought we were talking specifically about banning billboard marketing. Or outdoor marketing if you want to be broad. I see no problem with that at all. Somehow, as has been pointed out in this thread, Hawaiians, etc, seem to make do.
    - bhauer 2y ago
      > I thought we were talking specifically about banning billboard marketing. While that is the overall conversation, this specific subthread is rooted on a comment suggesting a world without marketing wholesale.
kelnos 2y ago
Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product. A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail. At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Word of mouth, to start. If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective. > If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product. What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola. > Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail. The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Do independent reviews and product testing count as marketing? There's some element of magicking away the payola in this thought experiment.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it? And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review. To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
fzeroracer 2y ago
The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing. So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
SebastianKra 2y ago
My hope is that there would be an increased demand for journalism & reviews. Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but that's not impossible.
consteval 2y ago
In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly. As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
- genewitch 2y ago
  i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought. As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society. edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not. Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
breuleux 2y ago
A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers. So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive. Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers. These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
  - breuleux 2y ago
    > I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising." True, that's how I interpreted it.
- valval 2y ago
  I bet all of the socialism that’s been tried so far hasn’t been REAL socialism?
BobaFloutist 2y ago
You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it. This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it). This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
layer8 2y ago
How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.
1oooqooq 2y ago
if you need butter you don't go to the market? i'm confused, how do you live? you only consume when something show up on your instagram feed?!

tapland 2y ago

Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case

adalacelove 2y ago

Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.

richrichardsson 2y ago
> A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Well, ads obviously haven't worked...
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  One word. Amazon. I heard someone say Amazon did more damage to British town centres than Hitler's bombs.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Surely you didn't read that in the Washington Post
    - nonrandomstring 2y ago
      Nah, Walthamstow Post Office.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in London. But it's fair that a combination of online purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail overall.

unglaublich 2y ago

Billboards are there for big corporations to retain their oligopolies, not for small ones to penetrate them.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Then how come small businesses buy them sometimes?

burnished 2y ago

I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space. I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty. I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
You're just observing the long-term effects. If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established. I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies. But not all of them.
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  > If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
  - ghaff 2y ago
    >Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.

robxorb 2y ago

A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality. Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion. I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic. I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively. What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive. Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality. How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it? > Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion. What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things? > I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively. An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
- jajko 2y ago
  Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN? Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior. Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.

tuetuopay 2y ago

You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion. Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is. > You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes. The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations". The latter might be a good time though.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I thought we were talking specifically about banning billboard marketing. Or outdoor marketing if you want to be broad. I see no problem with that at all. Somehow, as has been pointed out in this thread, Hawaiians, etc, seem to make do.
  - bhauer 2y ago
    > I thought we were talking specifically about banning billboard marketing. While that is the overall conversation, this specific subthread is rooted on a comment suggesting a world without marketing wholesale.

kelnos 2y ago

Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product. A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail. At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> Word of mouth, to start. If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective. > If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product. What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola. > Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail. The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
- card_zero 2y ago
  Do independent reviews and product testing count as marketing? There's some element of magicking away the payola in this thought experiment.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it? And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review. To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.

fzeroracer 2y ago

The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing. So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.

SebastianKra 2y ago

My hope is that there would be an increased demand for journalism & reviews. Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but that's not impossible.

consteval 2y ago

In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly. As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?

genewitch 2y ago
i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought. As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society. edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not. Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.

breuleux 2y ago

A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers. So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive. Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.

ryandrake 2y ago
> A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers. These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
- breuleux 2y ago
  > I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising." True, that's how I interpreted it.
valval 2y ago
I bet all of the socialism that’s been tried so far hasn’t been REAL socialism?

BobaFloutist 2y ago

You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it. This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it). This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.

layer8 2y ago

How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.

1oooqooq 2y ago

if you need butter you don't go to the market? i'm confused, how do you live? you only consume when something show up on your instagram feed?!