Marketing is spot on. It's funny how people seem to know this, and yet don't realize it in practice - most of marketing is actively malicious. It's not like a law of physics which you can understand and then learn to work around; marketing is done by humans who have decades of psychological research, hundreds of years of honed best practices and many billions of dollars of budget annually within the industry; you can't expect an average person to stand a chance against focused effort of so many people who don't care (or don't even think about) they may harm other people as long as they get their paychecks.
I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.
I think it's inappropriate to say that most marketing is actively malicious. I will agree that much of it is uncomfortable. I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.
The system is actively malicious - maybe not in the sense that it goes out of its way to be evil, but definitely in a sense that it's not a static system. It's not like gravity that always points you down and that you can learn to work around; it's constantly adapting, evolving and adjusting to be more effective at exploiting your weak sides. When we invented aeroplanes, the force of gravity did not suddenly triple. But marketing does react to people learning to work around its influence.
> I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.
Sure, in many cases it is true, and in some cases the product in fact has a lot of valuable properties and marketing may do a fair work of informing about them. But more often than not it is not the case.
My experience of working alongside marketing people (as a programmer who got transferred to a sales&marketing company) is that quite often they tune out the "irrelevant" issues like "is this product actually useful at all?" and focus on technicalities - on how to get people to buy it. So they may expound various features of the product and construct elaborate use cases, while conveniently ignoring that compared to the competition, the product is crap, or that the whole product idea is something the customer is better off staying away from.
(Oh and BTW, the amount of bullshiting I saw in social media marketing is beyond belief; I think I'll have to write a post about it one day. My experiences led me to believe that a lot of business happening in Internet marketing is people who understand absolutely nothing about maths & statistics using complex tools to bullshit themselves as well as their customers, who don't understand squat about statistics either, so the money flows, everyone is happy, but nothing of actual substance is happening for anyone.)
> I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.
Yeah, I understand. It's something you have to engage in - because everyone else does too, and those who refrain from it get outcompeted by those who don't. Personally, I value what you call "finesse and decency", as well as honesty, and try to gravitate towards people and companies not afraid to tell me their product may not be a best fit for my current use case.
Reousrces for this include anything you can get on Bernays ( the Adam Curtis "Century of the Self' is a decent survey ) and "The Hidden Persuaders." Also maybe Marshall MacLuhan.
Really, media/advertising literacy is pretty important. If you don't know who the sucker at the table is...
This being said, it may or may not be actively malicious per se but it certainly tries to hack your unconscious thinking to affect your behavior. I'm just not quite ready to broadly label that "malicious" just yet - although some of the anti smoking propaganda now makes me wonder that I should.
