If people honestly wanted or needed a particular thing, then marketing would be irrelevant. We've been manufacturing demand to meet supply for decades now. It is fundamentally a disingenuous act.

You seriously want a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker. The only reason you don't know that you want one is because you didn't grow up in Winnipeg. But trust me. You want one. It's a shame that you will read this on HN and you will dismiss it as a stupid joke and you almost certainly won't go out and order a Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker -- all because you didn't watch 100's of hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings in Winnipeg (or probably you'd be good in Regina or even Calgary... I'm not sure).

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.

But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.

I'll admit that I heartily agree with you there. I think my only point was that marketing is not inherently bad. It's just the extremes that we take it to.

This is ridiculous. There are about a zillion products and brands out there that people didn't know about until they found out through marketing.

Also, lol @ commenting on Hacker News to rail against marketing. This is literally a lead-gen site for YC

Jesus surrounded himself with lepers, whores and thieves. I'm sincerely not trolling here, I just don't see a point in preaching only to the choir. I respect values of information here, like how Snowden landing in Honk Kong was announced here before any other website. But comfort zones, echo chambers, safe spaces and news bubbles are the same as any gated community, in that they block out most of reality by design. Including quite a lot of truth.

Thirty years ago nobody knew why they should care about the internet. Fifteen years ago nobody understood why they should get a smartphone. New technology often has to initially answer the question of "Why should I care", even if it's obvious in retrospect. You could wait around for people to figure it out on their own, or you could help them.

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.

> or you could help them.

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".

Quite, but those aren't the only things being done by companies (or indeed smartphones!)

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.

Exactly, we've all been shepherded here and now have nothing to show for it but increased rates of cancer, illiteracy and suicide. All thanks to PR.

> this was one of their big challenges. We made something brilliant, but hardly anyone understands why it matters.

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?

> Marketing isn't intrinsically evil.

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.

Marketing is a subset of the Exploitation Economy, which is effectively a global cult now.

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.

How exactly is exploitation defined? That term has been awfully watered down to the point a miller buying wheat, grinding it to flour, and then selling the flour qualifies because the farmer doesn't get paid a second time - despite doing the miller doing useful work and the fact a farmer can always mill themselves with just flat stones if the deal is so bad.