The market is eating itself. The old adage was that if you wanted your competitor's market share, you had to design a better product. You can now get away with selling a worse product, if your advertising convinces consumers that the previous model is worthless or the competitor's product is poor. The pricing data here supports that negative advertising goes a lot further than positive advertising.

What is the incentive to pay for good product design or innovation if it's more profitable to pay off reviewers and advertisers to lie for you? Why develop a valuable product when you can so easily lie about its actual value? We are moving out of an age of engineering and into an age of advertising and snake oil.

The 50s was the golden age of advertising, and the basis for the show Mad Men. Its no coincidence this was around the time that it was discovered the product really wasn't important. It was more about how the person felt when buying and consuming that product.

In short the "better mousetrap" hasn't been thought true for the last 70 years. If you are going to actually make a better product you better make your customer feel smart for buying it - or you will fail.

Do you only buy products that make you feel better or smart for buying it?

On average, yes. Statistically speaking you do as well.

Statistically speaking I do as well? What does that even mean?

Would it be fair for me to say that your entire argument is a hot take that ignores evidence to the contrary when it contradicts your priors, because it makes you feel better and smarter even though better quality arguments exist?

Not every purchase a person makes is some decision derived from marketing. You're basically arguing that people have no free will here and all decision-making is outsourced to advertising.

I see ads for things I don't buy and have no interest in all the time that do try to use the method of appeal you describe. Your model falls apart and doesn't explain this.

I could have used the raw statistics but it would have undermined the whole point. People don't make fully rational decisions - even when up/down voting.

But to get analytical, the argument is not that you buy everything that is advertised. The argument is that your purchases are primarily based upon how the purchase makes you feel. Even for everyday "necessities" like toilet paper which Japan gets away just fine without (they use bidet style toilets which are more effective at cleaning). In North America a bidet "feels" weird so nobody has one. When you get down to it toilet paper is not a logical purchase at all - better alternatives exist.

Further the argument is not that people don't have free will, quite the contrary. The argument is that the decision process is based upon considerations outside the efficacy of the product. Consumers don't do scientific studies on the products they buy, they only infer based upon heuristics which are primarily emotional in nature. This is why people consider bad tasting medecine to be more effective, and why Buckley's uses the slogan, "Tastes terrible, but works!".

Marketing includes making a product and finding customers through messaging, so nothing is changing.

False advertising has long been against the law but social media and the various "influencer" platforms are mostly unregulated wastelands that dont have proper oversight or standards. It's not like unscrupulous companies weren't able to buy bad word-of-mouth before.

Also how presidents get elected. The spokesppl/talkingheads/oped columnists/twitterati/news reader class all do the same thing - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway