Just yesterday I saw a documentary (in German TV) about magazine ads for overprized health products with little to no actual health benefit (like a shoe insert which, literal quote, "instantly cures 100s of chronic ailments"). These ads always have testimonials from doctors, but when the journalists tried to find those doctors, they always turned out to be stock photo models.

That's marketing at its worst. But also the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of marketing.

Maybe marketing is similar to infrastructure. When it's good, it's invisible; so you only notice it when it fails.

I'm not sure if you're trying to disagree with my comment or making a different point...

It matters if they didn't want the product before your marketing campaign, and started to want it after. Desire itself is not a bad thing. Inducing desire in people is a completely different topic.

> I'd much rather people have agency over their decisions

Sure. And marketing as an industry mostly works to override people's agency. That's what all the tricks from Cialdini's book do. That's why the industry is so keenly weaponizing research from psychology and cognitive sciences.

> Also products are definitely getting better all the time.

That's a tangential topic (and a big one), but I very much question the thing those products are getting better at. It somehow never is about maximizing value to the buyer. Quite the opposite, actually - everything from white goods through tools, clothing, cars, to software, is getting less useful, more disposable, less repariable, of worse quality, and locked behind DRMs and service-instead-of-product schemes.

No, agency is not overridden. That's a crazy stretch. The most advertising can do is create desire, but a person still has to make the decision to act. Otherwise you're talking about mind control and if we had that then the world look very different.

Re: product quality, you're just making quite a lot of subjective statements so I'll skip it.