I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day."
Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.
>I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy.
What you're really complaining about is astroturfing, not marketing.
The more dubious sort of marketing is Coca-Cola style marketing, where people already know that the product exists, and the ad just makes them feel vaguely good about it. But I suspect even this sort of marketing is surprisingly beneficial, because it incentivizes companies to make quality products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578277
My argument for Coca-Cola style brand marketing would go something like:
It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product.
If I see an ad for Acme Corp, it's statistical evidence that Acme won an auction for that slot against other players in its industry. Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
> There are a lot of old consumer brands, and there are a lot of brands known for junk, but there aren't a lot of old consumer brands that are known for junk.
This is why repeatedly buying old consumer brands and then turning them to junk is so insanely profitable. It takes years or decades for consumers to realize that a trusted brand is junk. The consumer never knows that the corporation that turned their brand to junk is currently looking for more brands to acquire.
I wonder if such acquirers tend to reduce marketing spend? This could make sense, if they're operating on a shorter time horizon. Seems a little silly to try to both accumulate and spend down brand equity at the same time.
If so, lack of advertising could be a handy indicator of dropping product quality ;-)
> Acme won the auction because it was able to bid more. It was able to bid more because it has better lifetime value per customer, i.e. it does a better job of satisfying customer needs.
This is obviously not true. What if they are backed by investors? And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I agree that could nix the argument about better lifetime value per customer. I think the overall argument ends up going through anyways, because investors want to invest in companies that make good products. Paul Graham is constantly emphasizing the importance of pleasing your customers.
>And there are a gazillion other reasons why they could spend more on that ad ...
I think ads are still statistical evidence though.
It depends on if you can make up for a crappy product by good advertising and end up with a net profit. That this is not possible is what you should prove.
> It's very silly to invest $billions in brand awareness and building market share, if your product is junk and customers will eventually find out. Marketing spend could be seen as the "peacock's tail" of the business world -- a credible signal that the company stands by their product.
Interesting, never thought about it that way. I often find that obviously expensive advertising lowers my expectations in the product and especially in the price performance ratio, since I can't stop thinking about having to pay for the advertising too, not just the actual product/service I want. Which I don't want to.
I'm mostly against the marketing where the company lies or misleads the customer. While this is bad if the product is new or existing, lies are easier if the audience based is uninformed about a subject. The major issue with marketing is that it's hard to trust someone when so many people marketing have a short term finical interest in stretching the truth as much as possible.
In this situation it's mostly harmless, but we see terrible examples of this in the health/supplements space.
I mean Coca-Cola is junk food, it's unhealthy and we know it is. They advertise to maintain the illusion that it leads to success and happiness. They can't afford for scientific understanding to win over the brainwashing of 'brand advertising'as that would be the death knell for the company (or 99% of it).
Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
>Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
And yet somehow we still reflexively choose it, because something in our brain associates it with big smiles, success, happiness, being fit, etc., almost as if we've been fed imagery every day of our lives to try to convince us of that fact.
If you honestly believe that people drink Coca-Cola because they subconsciously associate it with "big smiles" and physical fitness I really don't know what to tell you, man. Everyone I know who drinks it has one because they want a soda every now and then.
Plenty of people are entirely capable of knowing that drinking a thing is not an objectively healthy act - soda and alcohol are the two big ones that come to mind - without pathologizing the act or pretending that the people making money off of it are Mr. Burns-level caricatures or mustache-twirling super-villain billionaires.
You need to follow that chain of thought a little further. The unfortunate weak spot in a capitalist economy is that it's basically a Darwinistic system where the fittest survive, and "fit" means willing to do anything to make a dollar. Morals therefore become a weakness, and those who are guided by morals will be stomped out by those who don't really care. The guardrails are made of laws, not morals, and those who make the laws are often benefiting from the status quo. Like it or not, this is the jungle we find ourselves in.
The guardrails that work are made of brand awareness and reputation.
Laws are there to stop the company from harms that are too severe for waiting for people to suffer them and from harms to third parties that don't get a say on the decision.
Both of those kinds seem to be completely broken nowadays, everywhere. Getting the law back into working form seems easier, but it's not a viable alternative for most of the things you'll want companies to have morals about.
IMO there is a tension between tolerating gray areas and stomping out the faintest shadow with prejudice. In the long term societies with no trust or accountability will fall to those with higher trust and cohesion because the latter can be more efficient.
I don’t see ruined value in fables telling though, usually the meaning and mind perspectives provides a benefit to the reader. Same with portray and most images shown in museum.
I am not talking about fables, I am referring to lying in order to sell one’s self, perhaps for business, or love, or networking, or even just for a laugh. Maybe even because people are lying to themselves.
It's not unusual to do this. Especially when they're trying to get a retailer to carry their items. They'll create fake buzz. Stuff like getting all your friends to go to a store asking "Do you carry X?" soon after you've pitched X to the store is a method that's worked for over a century.
Maybe that's why I'm not rich? Because I am honest?
I think this culture of normalizing lying means that more and more humans are just garbage. Because being able to trust someone is telling the truth is just a fundamental part of integrity. Without integrity we have.. well I guess the world we live in.. dangerous, full of trash. Everything is bullshit.
Our big brains actually evolved because of lying - research by scientists like Robin Dunbar shows that figuring out who was lying and how to lie better may have driven the explosion of human intelligence. The same brain power that helped our ancestors outsmart each other is what lets us do amazing things today.
You're right that trust matters - that's why we created rules and systems to encourage honesty. But lying is as old as humanity itself.
I think a few years back someone examined the JS of one of those "XX people are looking at this product right now" or "ZZZ from YYY just purchased this product" and saw that it was basically randomly generated.
> I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".
I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either!
But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.
> something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.
That’s a broad and vague truth. Parent critics direct marketing.
Also as exceptions makes the rules: the best item I ever bought was a second hand bike on the local Craigslist. Super cheap (repair included) and commuted +10000km with it. The « marketing » was the descriptive pictures and honest description, I guess.
Making something available to purchase is all I want from marketers, but then the other 99% of marketers want to make money too so it's just a game of who can lie most convincingly
While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?
Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.
It is naive, yet it is still read, believed and scored (and score gives it more trust). The medium still seems trustworthy but the individuals within it are not. And as the internet has progressed, the percentage of trustworthiness has slipped, but can also not be intuited directly from the medium as there are no signals that have meaningfully changed in the medium.
Only anecdotes from outside the medium can inform us to be less naive. Or doing an analysis which takes effort, skill, and time per-person
If people on an entertainment site and entertained by the viral marketing, and they order a product knowing what it is and get the product they ordered, then what is the problem exactly?
Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day."
Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.