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I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs"

• oaththrowaway 2y ago
  Just makes me more cynical about everything I see posted. Marketers ruin everything eventually
  • lotsofpulp 2y ago
    You can extend that to stories people tell and images they portray in real life.
    • MrMcCall 2y ago
      Dishonesty is rampant in our world. That's why Merlin says honesty is the most important virtue.
    • aziaziazi 2y ago
      I don’t see ruined value in fables telling though, usually the meaning and mind perspectives provides a benefit to the reader. Same with portray and most images shown in museum.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I am not talking about fables, I am referring to lying in order to sell one’s self, perhaps for business, or love, or networking, or even just for a laugh. Maybe even because people are lying to themselves.
        • aziaziazi 2y ago
          Oh ok i didn’t read your comment that way. That makes sense. NLP is a form of self marketing I guess. "Sell" yourself ideas you want to buy on!
  • IAmGraydon 2y ago
    >Marketers ruin everything eventually You need to follow that chain of thought a little further. The unfortunate weak spot in a capitalist economy is that it's basically a Darwinistic system where the fittest survive, and "fit" means willing to do anything to make a dollar. Morals therefore become a weakness, and those who are guided by morals will be stomped out by those who don't really care. The guardrails are made of laws, not morals, and those who make the laws are often benefiting from the status quo. Like it or not, this is the jungle we find ourselves in.
    • paulryanrogers 2y ago
      IMO there is a tension between tolerating gray areas and stomping out the faintest shadow with prejudice. In the long term societies with no trust or accountability will fall to those with higher trust and cohesion because the latter can be more efficient.
    • justinl33 2y ago
      > The guardrails are made of laws, not morals damn.
      • Schiendelman 2y ago
        But untrue - or at least very incomplete. Reputation is a huge guardrail which operates downstream of collective morality.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      > The guardrails are made of laws, not morals The guardrails that work are made of brand awareness and reputation. Laws are there to stop the company from harms that are too severe for waiting for people to suffer them and from harms to third parties that don't get a say on the decision. Both of those kinds seem to be completely broken nowadays, everywhere. Getting the law back into working form seems easier, but it's not a viable alternative for most of the things you'll want companies to have morals about.
• bloggie 2y ago
  While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?
  • cobertos 2y ago
    It is naive, yet it is still read, believed and scored (and score gives it more trust). The medium still seems trustworthy but the individuals within it are not. And as the internet has progressed, the percentage of trustworthiness has slipped, but can also not be intuited directly from the medium as there are no signals that have meaningfully changed in the medium. Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
  • ndriscoll 2y ago
    Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.
• gcr 2y ago
  It looks like the author was eventually able to fulfill the orders in the end. What does the “lying” refer to?
  • datadrivenangel 2y ago
    I believe they made a fake post about someone documenting their experience getting mailed the bag of candies.
• edanm 2y ago
  > I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either! But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly. And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • aziaziazi 2y ago
    > something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly. That’s a broad and vague truth. Parent critics direct marketing. Also as exceptions makes the rules: the best item I ever bought was a second hand bike on the local Craigslist. Super cheap (repair included) and commuted +10000km with it. The « marketing » was the descriptive pictures and honest description, I guess.
  • djeastm 2y ago
    Making something available to purchase is all I want from marketers, but then the other 99% of marketers want to make money too so it's just a game of who can lie most convincingly
• BeetleB 2y ago
  I listen to How I Built This. It's not unusual to do this. Especially when they're trying to get a retailer to carry their items. They'll create fake buzz. Stuff like getting all your friends to go to a store asking "Do you carry X?" soon after you've pitched X to the store is a method that's worked for over a century.
  • ilaksh 2y ago
    Maybe that's why I'm not rich? Because I am honest? I think this culture of normalizing lying means that more and more humans are just garbage. Because being able to trust someone is telling the truth is just a fundamental part of integrity. Without integrity we have.. well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit. I hope the machines take over soon.
    • jasonshen 2y ago
      Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today. You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      > well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit. Just like the world we grew up in...? This type of lying-marketing has been around well over a century. There are documented cases of the tactic I described going back a century. Unlike back then we at least regulate false advertising now. Overall the space is more honest than it historically has been.
• therealdrag0 2y ago
  Seems like a no harm no foul sort of situation. If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    If you go by youtube, the problem is that the entertaining marketing wasn't labeled "sponsored post".
• 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy. What you're really complaining about is astroturfing, not marketing. The more dubious sort of marketing is Coca-Cola style marketing, where people already know that the product exists, and the ad just makes them feel vaguely good about it. But I suspect even this sort of marketing is surprisingly beneficial, because it incentivizes companies to make quality products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277 My argument for Coca-Cola style brand marketing would go something like: It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product. If I see an ad for Acme Corp, it's statistical evidence that Acme won an auction for that slot against other players in its industry. Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs. There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
  • greg_V 2y ago
    That's a fairly accurate assessment of marketing theory. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy talks about this in more depth.
  • pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    I mean Coca-Cola is junk food, it's unhealthy and we know it is. They advertise to maintain the illusion that it leads to success and happiness. They can't afford for scientific understanding to win over the brainwashing of 'brand advertising'as that would be the death knell for the company (or 99% of it).
    • pc86 2y ago
      Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness." Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
• gadders 2y ago
  I think a few years back someone examined the JS of one of those "XX people are looking at this product right now" or "ZZZ from YYY just purchased this product" and saw that it was basically randomly generated.
  • slig 2y ago
    "6.02214076×10^23 other people are looking at this room right now".
• jvanderbot 2y ago
  Bravery is just stupidity that worked.