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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

> I find marketing unethical

That’s a strange view. Taken to an extreme, that would be a restaurant without an exterior sign, menus, or even a waiter explaining the food. You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing. Marketing is the act of “bringing a product to market.” Marketing isn’t advertising. A farmer displaying tomatoes on a table at a farmers market is marketing. A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice.

Communicating about the availability of a product shouldn’t be considered unethical. Lying about that product on the other hand..

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>Lying about that product on the other hand..

What if things are not prove able? Like "most secure", but their metric is fastest patching. It's not actually secure, but they have logic.

Technically true, but intentionally misleading.

I don't suggest getting caught up in the Innocence of having a brick and mortar sign. This is not what we worry about.

What do we learn from a beer commercial showing hot girls? Or a tech commercial showing people dancing. These are feelings unrelated to the product.

These specific examples don't scratch the surface. The best marketing, you don't see.

You're, perhaps unintentionally, doing a bait-and-switch argument. Sure, communicating about the availability of a product is important; in fact, it's crucial for functioning of a market. But this is not what marketing, or advertising in particular, is about in the real world. It's not what people mean by these words.

I wrote about it some time ago at length[0]; skim the list and tell me how any of that - all of which is common practice and what you get to work on if you become a marketer - how any of that can be justified on the grounds of just "communicating about the availability of a product"?

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

> You would literally know nothing about any product or service without marketing.

We can hardly imagine such bliss.

Pop quiz: does anybody imagine marketing or advertising would exist in a) paradise, b) utopia, c) Heaven?

> A farmer buying billboard space with a photo of his tomatoes is advertising. There isn’t anything unethical about either practice.

Plastering every available surface by a road or in a common area, with adverts is tragedy of the commons material. How dare people litter like that, taking away our collective view of the world and replacing it to their advantage without our consent?

People wouldn't need to spend significant portions of their precious life making, moving, and selling things to others in paradise, utopia, or Heaven. Of course there would be no advertising, there'd be no treadmill of consumerism to necessitate such a thing.

Now, what that says about how far we are from paradise, heaven, or utopia here...

After writing that, I wondered about how we always portray "paradise" as a desert island, beach, tropical exotic location far from civilization and 'unspoilt', and portray a dystopia as a heavily urbanized and dirty city full of neon signs and billboards and industrial pollution.

Then the we talk reverses that, as if industrialization and capitalism as if bringing more products into our lives is making life better (read: closer to paradise), and so advertising and marketing are the heralds of all that's good about the future - if only you'd simply concede to stop whining and pay attention - it's for your own good after all.

I can't deny the short-lived excitement of novelty, but perhaps if we overall stopped making daily life so dystopian and unpleasant, we'd have fewer dreams of escaping it. What would a country look like if tens of millions of people didn't spend decades looking forward to retirement and gambling to get there quicker and dreaming of travel and products as temporary escapes from such unpleasant daily surroundings as need escaping from?

That’s actually how the world used to be.

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