Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.
Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.
I think this is overgeneralized and the effect that people agree on a set of believes/values/rules isn't a good indicator of the presence of free will. There might be other mechanisms involved.
The latter is some sort of humanism, that ultimately resulted in all the things we collectively seem to value about western societies, while the former is more or less responsible for the biggest problems we have.
So even if free will turns out a complete illusion, it would still matter how people treat each other based on that idea. Usually you can amend it to: “Free will is an illusion, at least for those poor idiots who have nobody but themselves to blame for it, which is why it is socially acceptable for me to exploit them”
(This is not aimed at you, it is just a thought that crossed my mind, when I read your comment)
* or do you exploit others with it until you're financially comfortable and morally uncomfortable, at which point you pivot, mea culpa, and educate...
I flipped open at random the other day the book 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' and was a bit disturbed by what I read. It was about a particular way of starting a conversation in order to manipulate someone into then finding it difficult to resist your next conversational gambit, with the obvious end goal of parting them from their money against their better judgement or similar. I want to get rich one day and get out, but is this what I need to become to do it?!
Marketing is poison, and the sooner a person learns to ignore it and do their own thing instead, the happier they'll be.
It also sounds like the Postmodernist Disease of the Science Wars assuming nothing is real while they write bullshit indistinguishable from a Markov Chain generator output.
The prevalence just shows that - not that it isn't pathological.
1. You're putting a lot of very different things in the same bag. Marketing is not advertising, and all advertising is not unethical.
2. I don't know where you work, but I'm willing to bet you're making a living because advertisers are pushing a product or service you build/direct.
If you're going to make this kind of blanket statement, you should at least follow its implications all the way to the endpoint.
Hard to disagree with that, but this is very different from the parent poster's claim.
This stuff, buying clicks, lobbying platforms to ban content you don't want to be associated with your product/service because it could distort its "cleanness".
Advertising is needed but there are a lot of valid reasons people don't like them very much.
There are bad marketers as there are bad programmers, bad lawyers and bad physicians, but we don't jump to 'all programming is bad'.
Let me guess, Bill Hicks, right? Anyway, this is a straw man of what marketing actually is.
Marketing is the process of finding out what a customer wants and finding the most efficient way to deliver it. What you've described is advertising.
Marketing at its best is helping people see how a product fills a need or makes their life better in a way that might not have been clear at first.
Yeah, it's crazy, but there is something noble about letting people know that there is good stuff that can help them in ways that they can't imagine yet. It's doubly good if that helps you run a business that makes a truly useful product.
I don't know anything about Hunky Bill (I just noticed he lived in Vancouver! WTH... Can I really trust him?) But that perogie maker. Yep. Good as gold.
Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC
Just as an illustration, if you watched the show Silicon Valley, this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.
What you call help is not what I would call help - using a wealth of scientific literature to design information that when conveyed can optimally take advantage of statistically likely emotional or physiological triggers to exploit people into buying something they didn't already want is evil.
Marketing as a concept could make some sense in information scarce environments like the era before global instant communication between anyone anywhere to any number of people. Since then, absolutely nobody has asked the question "I don't know what to spend my money on, I sure wish a corporation would suggest something".
Cynicism is easy, but the truth is that there are useful, helpful things out there, and that making people aware of this is not intrinsically wrong.
Is this the "decentralized internet" product, or the initial Pied Piper product? SV the show is very accurate in some ways, but how did it take them until Season 2 to discover that average consumers don't give a crap about a hard-to-use, seemingly B2B-focused app that compresses their pictures?
No it isn't. It's just a shame that 99.99% of the industry are ruining it for the rest of them.
Advertising a new product or service is great, but showing me the ads over and over again is manipulation. Creating a brand to get people emotionally invested is manipulation. Almost the entire industry is manipulating people to buy something they didn't want, spend more than they should have (including the costs that marketing adds to the product) or trying to convince them to buy from you instead of someone else.
Everything in the exploitation economy is evil. But then most previous attempts at large-scale human organisation have been evil too, in their own ways.
It's possible to have a humane non-exploitation economy, and it might even be possible for it to include some marketing. But it would look very different to the economy we have today.
For the record, this is not what marketing professionals do. What you are talking about is somewhere between black-hat advertising and lifestyle advertising (which is much deeper than "manipulation").
I personally like 'tptacek's definition of marketing (at least within the tech area he was in at the time):
> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1024678
That definition describes the field much more reasonably.
"The ads portrayed Mac as a young, hip, laid back guy in a hoodie, whereas PC was a stodgy, befuddled, error-prone, middle-aged nerd... not surprisingly, adroit and modern Mac always got the best of outdated and inflexible PC ... The campaign produced results... less than 2 years later its [market] share had doubled... the cool campaign also helped boost customer value perception... Good advertising wasn't the only thing contributing to Apple's success..."
That campaign clearly had nothing to do with 'creating customer value'. It was a smear campaign. Yet in the same textbook these marketing academics praise it as great advertising. There is a laughably tiny section on ethics (2 paragraphs) at the end of the chapter which simply has open-ended questions, no guided discussion or anything.
It should surprise no-one that marketers have a fantastic bullshit story to convince people marketing is some kind of force for good. It is after all their job. Most amusingly I think they have largely pulled the same trick on themselves.
(1) - https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-14th-Philip-Kotl...
Marketing professionals absolutely use manipulative predatory tactics like that on the people they are trying to convince to buy their products. Just because you nonsensically try to suggest otherwise, doesn't magically make it so.
What's even less shocking is that it has real limitations in that, once trust is lost by a bad actor in one area of marketing, all other areas are suddenly seen as untrustworthy as well. That is the reason marketing only tends to work on younger people with little to no previous experience being targeted for the hard sell.
You can't distance yourself from people who use predatory advertising as a means to increase the "awarenes" metric any more than you can claim marketing isn't actually selling anything.....
Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.
Note that I distinguish marketing from mere ads, which (one hopes) are just trying to impart information. I have no problem with you saying you have skateboard for sale at $50. When you pay a 19yr old model to stand there looking cool with a sultry look on her face, thats not advertising, its manipulation. Sure it works, its even legal, but it's a very evil thing.
https://youtu.be/_86qb7hlbJI says it all (only 50 second long and very funny, be sure to check out his other stuff - comedy is usually greatest when its saying something true).