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I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
by AaronAPU 3mo ago
I’ve long considered marketing to be one of the purest forms of evil in existence. It truly does envelop and destroy everything good.
- tavavex 3mo agoI wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?
- john_strinlai 3mo ago>I wonder how most of them sleep at night. i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity. or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes. (edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)
- kylecazar 3mo ago8 hours a day, 5 days a week is a pretty significant chunk of your life. It is a part of your identity, if the word identity means anything. Unless you are severed, of course.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tavavex 3mo agoOf course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're doing a moral good, or is their mind just a nonstop stream of "$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$"?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cassianoleal 3mo agoI think the first thing you should learn about HN is that there's all sorts of individuals on it. Reducing all of us to "the people on the venture capital marketing forum" is not helping your ability to understand what goes on here.
- tomgow 3mo ago[flagged]
- john_strinlai 3mo agohuh, i thought it was just one person with multiple accounts, thanks
- customguy 3mo ago> its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity. Of course not, because an identity is just an idea, a word. You lose sleep, or don't, over what you actually do. And you cannot do a job without doing it, by definition. Some jobs are kinda scummy, some scummy people enjoy them I remember over 20 years ago when at a party this other kid suddenly started talking about his job in a call center, selling lottery tickets to grannies basically, and he grinned and told me he could imagine I could be good at that, that the money is good if you hit the quota and whatnot. I thought, what do I care, I'm also good at running real fast, so does that mean I snatch purses now? No, because I do not enjoy that, and would lose sleep over it. > or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide First off, there is a lot of grey area between "they're all poor victims" and "they're all demons". Secondly, why "all"? You're basically using the good people and poor saps to cover for the bad guys by waving your hands around a little.
- nikanj 3mo agoThey sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins
- joecasson 3mo agoMarketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession. Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.
- Cytobit 3mo agoPeople seek out services when a need arises. Marketers' job to invent new needs that didn't exist before
- cassianoleal 3mo agoExactly that. Their job is to manipulate me into believing I need something that has never missed in my life - enough for me to trade my own health (in the form of work hours, which I exchange for money) for it. Literally trying to convince me that a thing I never wanted or needed is worth dying a little in exchange for it.
- joecasson 3mo agoA plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?
- Izkata 3mo agoScroll back up and notice most of these comments are distinguishing "marketing" from "marketers". I think a lot of people also wouldn't consider just an ad as marketing without some further details (such as the comment you replied to).
- plomme 3mo agoOk. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently. I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.
- omnimus 3mo agoEver wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart? They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.
- pixelready 3mo agoIt strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services, and the endless escalation eats away at the underlying system turning it into more noise than signal.
- cwmoore 3mo agoThere’s a name for this right? Marketers that discredit free markets, lawyers that ruin the law, accountants w bank on loopholes, social services that thrive without a social safety net, the lobbyists of democracy, what else? Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame, but the others?
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> Actual mercenaries and prostitutes kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame Why single out sex workers here? I understand the other examples, but unless you're talking about sex workers tricking people/robbing them or something else, it seems like a service-profession like any other, like a cleaner or what not, but I'm guessing you wouldn't actually put 'Actual mercenaries and cleaners kinda fall under the “all is fair in love and war” frame'. I think a mix match of perverse incentives, rent-seeking, cobra effect, regulatory capture and institutional corruption all together lead to the inevitable situation of institutions or professions whose incentives depend on the persistence (or even worsening of) the problem it claims to solve.
- cwmoore 3mo agoSo no single term, for something so widespread, must be taboo to talk about, or too risky to address, and threaten the social status of someone connected to the uglier side of a profession. Of course I didn’t “single out” anyone, but you got that.
- CPLX 3mo agoMarketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things. You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.
- AlexandrB 3mo agoMarketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors. Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen_body_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...
- CPLX 3mo agoYes, of course, there's often dishonest or misleading or exploitative marketing. But that's not really what the problem is, since marketing would still be annoying even with that solved. The problem is much more akin to a tragedy of the commons type of thing, where, when everyone is shouting, you can't hear what you want to hear. Usually, that's the thing that bothers people. Billboards, unsolicted emails, etc. I think for people who really get annoyed at marketing it helps to take a couple of steps back and look at how we fit into the natural world, everything that frustrates you about human society is something you'll find an analog for. Things like brightly colored frogs that are poisonous, fur spots that look like eyeballs looking backwards, peacocks, bugs that looks like sticks, etc. All of these are what's called emergent behavior, and they're intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems, like natural ecosystems, and human society itself.
- hedbdbf 3mo ago[flagged]
- natsucks 3mo agoI wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.
- egr 3mo agoI wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces. Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .
- tracerbulletx 3mo agoI'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.
- AaronAPU 3mo agoI literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.
- john_strinlai 3mo agoyou just replied to a comment with an unsolicited advert of your website less than 2 weeks ago. you are running a banner with a discount on your website where you also solicit testimonials. you have a dedicated youtube channel and facebook for your company. you advertise yourself on gearspace. your HN username is even an advertisement for your company. outreach, discount sales, testimonials, business pages are all marketing. "purest form of evil" unless you're doing it i guess. (or, perhaps, there's some nuance to be had instead of proclaiming marketing in general to be one of the "purest forms of evil in existence"...? )
- tracerbulletx 3mo agoJust to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."
- drawfloat 3mo agoWhy does your username contain “APU”?
- AaronAPU 3mo agoIt’s part of my identity? Nobody is going to see those letters, google them, find my products, figure out wtf they even are and buy them. To call it marketing is stretching the definition to the point of absurdity. The idea that you can’t even in passing mention something you spend all day every day working on, because then it’s “marketing” is exactly the sort of consequence which leads to so many of us loathing marketing as an industry.
- egr 3mo agoI love this observation and this thread in general.
- Frost1x 3mo agoMarketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil. There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.
- esseph 3mo ago100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.