this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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So what you're saying is that marketing provides a sober, unbiased presentatiin of the benefits and drawbacks of the products they're trying to sell, and people make rational, informed decisions? No, like you said, most people behave little better than monkeys, and marketing caters to that, further skewing the norms and pushing people to buy things based on perceived benefits while ignoring the real drawbacks. Next you'll tell me the prescription opioid epidemic wasn't exacerbated by the claims that the new opioids were less addictive and pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe them more than necessary, a lot of words that boil down to 'marketing'.
Comparing opioids to a truck or a phone is wild. I guess if opioids was something you could just walk into a store and buy without a prescription you would be somewhat right but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. The situation you describe is more about physical availability than mental availability which I think is more to the point of what we are discussing here but sure I can concede that rugged phones being less visible than the sleeker phones leads to them being purchased less often. But again, Samsung once had a mainline galaxy phone that was rugged and it didn’t do well, so maybe people really don’t want an ugly brick of a phone and want what is more aesthetically pleasant.
Let me put it this way, if you do not trust that people can make good purchase decisions. Why do we allow people to make any decisions at all? Much less participate in things so important like democracy?
Your line of thinking, that of removing completely the responsibility of the individual in a free market dynamic will necessarily take you to one or two conclusions depending on what you value more: we accept that the masses will not necessarily make the best choices available but they are absolutely free to make said choices, or that we should divide society between enlightened and non enlightened and the enlightened will dictate how the non enlightened will live because obviously these monkeys need guidance in order to make good decisions.
I flip flop between one or the other, but I always settle in the former because I can’t guarantee that I won’t be lumped with the monkeys.
I don't remove responsibility from the people, but don't pretend that companies don't spend piles of cash on marketing when it has absolutely no influence on their customers' purchasing decisions. Also, don't pretend that marketing isn't pandering to appeal and not function.
I’m not pretending anything, I never stated that marketing pretends to present products as they factually are. Look selling a product that no one wants is really fricking hard, no matter how much budget you have. So in order for something to sell well, people most have already wanted it. It must solve a problem, increase productivity or just fill the daddy shaped holes in their hearts, but they must want it and they cannot be truly manipulated into buying it unless you flat out lie, which is not really a good model on which to build a long term company on.
All I’m saying is that if marketing convinces people to buy a shiny poop they are in all the freedom to do so. But marketing never had the ability to manipulate people into buying something for which there is no desire. The shiny poop might fulfill some inner desire of the masses, who cares? They wanted it, they got it.