Would you be offended if you found out that a hand-written note you received was actually written by someone's secretary? Because that's pretty standard stuff most people wouldn't consider an ethical breach.

Traditionally if you wrote a letter on someone's behalf (eg they instruct you by phone on what to say and to get it in the mail as fast as possible), you sign is 'PP J. Smith'. PP is short for 'per procurationem' meaning 'by the agency of'. You don't need to know Latin, just that 'PP [name]' means it was sent on someone's behalf.

If I got a letter with no indicator and it turned out to be someone's secretary I wouldn't be offended exactly but it would make me a little wary until I was more familiar with the person and their working habits, eg maybe they have total trust in their secretary, but the secretary isn't familiar with this convention.

Obviously I'm a bit old-fashioned about these things, bt these conventions came into being for good reason.

Today, no. But if I lived in a time when you could expect that a handwritten letter from the CEO was actually handwritten by the CEO, then maybe I would, because in that time, doing that would have been deceptive.

Did that time ever exist? I've gotten the impression that dictating a letter to one's secretary has been a pretty standard thing for at least the last hundred years.

Depends on context, but at a smaller company we did receive them during fund drives and such. Wasn't thrown on a copier or whatnot, but then he only had to do about two dozen. Slight variations but he did follow a script.

So I would put it down to scale and what they feel is important. In that case it was for the local children's hospital. Secretaries are great when you need it written right, not only correct.

More like three or four hundred. And before that, replace "secretary" with "scribe."

DirecTV and credit card companies do this to me all the time. I'll receive a letter that looks like some kind of greeting card or invite with no identifier but an address. The font used on the outside mimicks human handwriting, so it looks authentic if you're not really paying attention.

I kinda get excited I'm getting invited to something, I open it up, and its a fucking ad.

I don't understand how people do business with businesses that mislead you like this. I mean, if they think of you so little before you're a customer, imagine how badly they will treat you when you are one.

I've noticed the dead give away for those is that they come with a "Pre-sorted Standard" stamp instead of the first class postage that most personal mail uses.

I keep getting the same one from a certain car dealership every few months. Apparently handwritten address on envelope, real ordinary first-class postage stamp (even placed at a slight angle, so it doesn't look like a machine did it). Postmarked from a different state than the dealership is in. No return address.

Open it up though, and the deception ends immediately. Just your usual tacky, glossy printed brochure.

You should make Rick Astley postcards, and send them back to them the same way.

I recently moved in a new neighborhood and I think it was Direct TV that sent me one addressed to "Our New Neighbor." At first I was like, well this is awesome, I must have at least one nice neighbor. Opening it was followed by a "dirty fuckers" sighed under my breath.

They have since did it a second time, but I will not be fooled again.

You can always tell by comparing two of the same letters.

For example, if two lowercase 'e's are exact clones of each other, you know it's a computer font.

You didn't read the story, did you?

> The best handwriting machines already vary some letters to avoid seeming too repetitive. Check out "offer" in the third line of that letter above: The "f"s are different from each other. The bot has been programmed to pen that letter a few different ways, the better to fool readers.

Even high end handwriting fonts for print has multiple variations of each letter.

One of these "cards" was exactly what put DirecTv on my "don't do business with" list.

What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?

I got one of those and at the bottom it said "do not reply to this email." I thought that was pretty funny.

I have the opposite issue, I'm constantly sending out personal emails asking to help people with getting setup (it's for Heroku SSL stuff and people often misconfigure things) and can't get a response from them.

Write a really short sentence and your signature should say "sent from my iPhone"

This. More generally, the less attention that goes into perfecting the layout and wording, the more likely the reader is to believe you're on a busy human's to do list and not a mailing list.

HTML layout very bad, neat little bullet points bad, good copy bad, lack of line spacing and excessive terseness good.

So basically be as inefficient as possible

Be as efficient as possible.

Don't waste time on presentation, so you don't feel like a marketroid.

When it's pretty obviously a form letter it doesn't bother me much. The nature of email is such that I know the same letter may be going to many thousands of people, or that large chunks of it might have been cut-n-pasted.

What I'm saying is that the more personal-seeming it appears, the more attention the reader is likely to pay. An actual handwritten letter presents as a highly personal communication. Even where it's justa courtesy note, it says that the other person values your business enough to take time to literally put pen to paper. For example, a few times I've bough a used book via Amazon and it arrived with a hand-written note of the 'thank you, hope you enjoy it' variety. It may be done by some junior employee, but any firm that does that goes straight into my 'preferred sellers' list because it's a rare flourish of personal courtesy in a world where most things are mass produced and commoditized.

I don't get offended like above poster but I do think that if something is "signed" by a person in a position of power then that person should be aware what is being said in his name and be fully responsible to deal with whatever consequence it entails.

> Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.

Well, yes, but they do what works. They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Which means they manage to connect with something deep inside our minds. So, when you make statements about what marketers do, you're really commenting on how the human mind works - a jumbled, impromptu, cobbled-up-in-a-hurry mess (that somehow still manages to put rockets on Mars, by some incomprehensible miracle).

Except that it's rarely "what works" as much as it is "what we can convince somebody else works, so they pay us to do it." There is shockingly little measurement and followup in the marketing world, despite what the industry would like you to believe.

Beating people to make them do what you want usually works too, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. I'm well aware that marketing is matter of doing what works, but I don't consider it ethically neutral - there are good and bad ways to go about it.

What if instead of employing an outside company these were in house employees?

It wouldn't bother me if they identified as such eg, eg 'Dear Mr X, I'm an account executive at BigCorp and I want your business because...' or even 'Dear Mr X, I'm writing on behalf of the CEO of BigCorp...'

It's the misrepresentation that bugs me. If I get a handwritten letter I expect it to be from the person who signs it, and to be able to call that person up directly. So if it purports to be a personal note from the CEO and turns out not to be, that's when I'd get offended.

"Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN.

It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

Hating on "marketing people" isn't just an HN thing, I think. I'm fairly sure most people hate marketers, particularly because it's their job to try and part you from your money. In fact, on HN we are probably more lenient because we are some of the people that are interested in separating people from their cash.

It's more than it being their job to part you from your money. Because that's a salesperson's job too, and yet they don't receive the same animosity.

The difference is small but crucial. The salesperson's job is - for the most part - to sell to you personally. And the salesperson typically has a personal stake in it - so this is a transaction between two people.

On the other hand, it's the marketer's job to manipulate[1] you[2] into buying an idea and accepting it as your own. Nothing is off-limits - any psychological tactic that a marketer can employ is considered an acceptable means to the end. Astroturfing, deceptive advertising, "submarine" stories -- these are just the tip of the iceburg, and all of them are perfectly OK in the mind of the marketers under discussion.

Ultimately, it comes down to ethics - marketers seem to me to be like behavioral psychologists with no ethical guidelines that prevent them (or even discourage them) from playing out their experiments on people. And the experiments are all geared towards finding the most effective ways to exploit the way our minds work, to the benefit of the owner of the product or idea being marketed. [3]

I am aware that there are some who do have ethics, and apply them scrupulously. But in the marketing that surrounds us every day, I see no indication that they have any significant voice.

For those not familiar with Heinlein, some of the ideas raised in "If This Goes On..." are disturbingly relevant.

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1. And this is the general "you", not typically one specific individual.

2. The salesperson, too, will naturally try to manipulate you - but a) it's typically an interaction between you and the salesperson. b) you can also use the same or similar tactics on the salesperson. c) foreknowledge of the tactics used by a salesperson are often enough to protect against their effectiveness - not so with marketing.

Tons of people can't stand "marketing people", it's why so many people laugh at things like Bill Hicks' monologue on the topic [0] funny.

I like shiny new things as much as the next person. But I don't like marketing and I don't like being sold to. If someone's sole job is to convince me I need something and my life is worse off without whatever they're selling, why would I like them?

http://www.fluffylinks.com/bill-hicks-on-marketing

I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. {EDIT: whenever you buy anything you're trying to get rid of that bit of money. This is true for poor people as well.}

The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement.

"When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you really want to read our unsolicited email".

> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it.

You can give it to me.

But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.

You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get something else you want more.

I think that's a good point, but for many people going shopping they are more or less trying to spend money. They have a minimum budget and will just buy more stuff or come back the next day if what they want is on sale or something. Suppose, you got everyone on your list a nice Christmas gift for 20$ total, would you really stop shopping at that point?

If there weren't anything else I wanted, yeah, I would. I don't know a lot of people who buy things they don't want just to get rid of money. Maybe the obscenely wealthy or very compulsive people, but most people I know only part with their money in exchange for things they want, and otherwise are glad to keep it until they find something they do want. (They may not be fastidious about how much of their money they're parting with compared to how much they want the things, but it doesn't seem like they part with money just to be rid of it.)

The focus is on the 'in return' part not the 'get rid of' part. If you got lucky and unexpectedly won a free TV of acceptable quality, you wouldn't feel burdened by having both the TV and the money you had intended to spend on it.

The problem is that marketers exist to make you buy a product that you otherwise wouldn't. The hat of a marketer is not always that of a professional liar, but frequently enough that you do well to be wary of them. Much like police have no obligation or incentive to serve and/or protect anyone but themselves, marketers don't exist to solve any problem except selling the product. Any benefit you receive from interacting with them is just a side effect, which is why the conventional wisdom is to avoid them if at all possible.

What I'm trying to say is: Never Talk To The Marketers.

Eh? It's a job that people go to work to do and work at all day long. Nobody, I hope, is completely defined by their work, but marketing person in a career, often titled with something dreadful but marketing-specific such as 'marketing executive' (whatever that may mean). Not a hat.

I hate marketers because they flood my mailbox with so much useless shit and paper that I miss mail from people I want to hear from. They've succeeded at making every form of communication that they touch useless, and I'm glad that it's illegal for them to call cell phones.