Why do you think some of the most advertised things are… predatory loans and gambling.
Honestly for me the worse of it is, basically on linkedin and similar, people pretending to be recruiters, opening with a fake job posting and asking for your resume, then to follow it up with "Hey you know I don’t think this resume is going to get by, can I put you in contact with my resume company, they will sharpen up your resume for $300. Umm… so yeah, don’t know if you guessed this, but I have no clue when my next paycheck is coming in, this isn’t the time to ask me to drop a large amount of money on something that may not do anything.
And nowdays you just know their $300 “service” is going to be “run it through an LLM.”
That’s the neat thing, they don’t.
Marketing looks like it is there to make you buy products, but it’s a well-known fact that this doesn’t work, and online ads specifically allow performance measurements, and they show that it’s not worth the money.
So what are ads actually there for then?
First, remember that the thing that marketing departments are best at is marketing their own importance to company management. They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse. So in this way, marketing is there to finance the marketing department, and everyone’s too scared to stop marketing, because if they do they will be seen as the biggest idiots ever.
Second, marketing is there to provide a small revenue stream to the platform where you see the ads, but more importantly to punish you for not paying premium. Youtube makes you watch a shitton of ads, not because they care about whether you buy anything from the ads, but to punish you for not paying premium and to get you to do so. A premium customer brings in orders of magnitude more money than an ad-only customer.
They are really good at convincing their companies that if they stop marketing, everything will collapse.
I hate that I’m going to defend marketing here, but if they do stop marketing then things will collapse (for many businesses). Do I like marketing, personally? No. That’s why I got out of marketing and am becoming an elementary school teacher to help others rather than spit propaganda but I digress…
Marketing isn’t always about generating a sale. Many times its reach and brand recall. We’re a global and digital economy now, so reach is massively important for survival. Stopping marketing limits who is exposed to your brand and the repetition makes your company synonymous with a product.
Why do we call tissues Kleenex? Why do we call cotton swabs a Qtip? Why do we call small sticky notepads Post-Its? Why do we call searching “Googling”? Why do we gravitate toward those brands even when cheaper and more generic options exist that are perfectly on par?
Making those brands the prime thing you think of when you use a specific thing so that no one thinks of using something else even when they have money. You want people to mention your product or think about it even if they aren’t buying it.
You’re drowning out the potential of your competition. That’s marketing, and if you stop then your competitor takes over or a small business won’t grow.
As an engineer who hated marketing, started my own business, which subsequently failed due to my lack of understanding for the importance and proper execution of the marketing mission… I now have a deep respect, and appreciation of a well-run marketing function.
I have a great business name and word of mouth carries me.
I feel like if you need marketing it’s because you have too many competitors all doing the same thing ie: no one needs your business.
That makes sense. My problem was I had zero competitors. It was a totally new product. No one knew why they needed it, so it never attracted any consumers. If there was an established product category you can rely on organic discovery.
If a business can not sustain itself without marketing, then the product is possibly not worth having.
Haha, yep, you’re exactly describing my long held belief! “A quality product sells itself”. I didn’t understand that when you have an entirely new product people don’t understand WHY they need it, since that thing never existed before. “Educating the market” can also be called “marketing”.
It’s not about buying, it’s about staying in your head, even if you don’t remember it explicitly.
This kinda boring, menial, repetitive propaganda doesn’t try to make you buy something straight away, it’s to make you numb to it, to know it, to receive it without thinking, so then it tries to affect you. It tries to turn nothing into anything resembling truth, it turns advertisement and news, into an endless cycle of boring things that get hammered by the “a lie told 1000 times turns into truth” line.
It doesn’t affect you when you’re watching it, it affects you when you see or do anything relating to it.
When you need to buy new tires, you know what to buy, you don’t buy based on technical sheets, you buy it knowing it, even not explicitly.
(A take from Adorno and Horkheimers “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, the part where they talk about the media, culture, art, etc)
Exactly this, its the main reason people around this corner of the internet push ad-blocking software so much. Its a slow toxin that warps your subjective processing.
Everyone is vulnerable to it, those that claim otherwise are deluded, and the only way to be free of it is to cut advertisment from your life in as many places as possible.
