Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.

Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.

Ever wondered about programmers working for example for all the social media companies tearing our society apart?

They sleep just fine. Probably because they believe they do just a small part that's not harmful by itself and if they were not doing it it would be someone else.

>I wonder how most of them sleep at night.

i hate marketing. but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity.

or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes.

(edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someone grinding away in a cubicle is so objectionable to the people on the venture capital marketing forum, but alas, i have much to learn about the quirks of HN)

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

I wish the performance , achievements , honour , praise , and disdain we hold for people would be evaluated based on this instead of PR and Puff pieces.

Sure there will always be subjective differences , but a lot of negative impacts on this planet can be attributed to the distortion of actual merit and the distorted proportion of what should be correctly attributed to one individual .

By that definition, any form of philosophy or politics are subcategories of marketing. It's not marketing if they're not trying to sell you something for money.

To address your point - the flowery and innocent core promise of the field may have been true when it was first invented thousands of years ago. Exposing people who actually want to learn about goods and services to your offering in an attempt to establish a mutually productive relationship (they get something they want, you get money) is fine. But that stops short at about the 0.01% mark on the way to the beast that marketing became today. Modern marketing is about pure value extraction at any cost. Modern research and tech has enabled them to find loopholes in every relevant regulation, flood every empty crack of the internet with garbage if it means they get an extra cent out of it, study the flaws of the human mind to discover the best ways to abuse it into buying their thing, plaster every object in existence with screaming ads and audiovisual trash to force people to internalize their message. There is no natural cap on marketing, so we've long since moved past unobtrusive, good-natured promotion into full-blown insanity.

The difference being that this site is built for this kind of exchange, and parent poster is engaging exactly in the way it is designed for.

A lot of outrage in marketing comes when it stands in the way of your product experience. Think TV ads that interrupt. Or fake ratings that abuse a platform.

it's true. persuasion is the immoral core of marketing. personally i believe everyone should hate persuasion too but nobody will listen to me when i try to compel them!

Marketing is very often a dishonest attempt at persuasion. That's the whole issue. In the kindle example, the marketers aren't trying to persuade you to buy books by extolling their virtues, they're "gaming the system" to give themselves a leg up in ways that make the system worse and borderline unusable for good-faith actors.

Modern marketing frequently "rides the line" of what's legal and has little to no concern for ethics. Teach kids how to annoy their parents so they buy your toys? Sure![1] Prey on teenage girls' insecurities to sell them cosmetics? Of course![2] Lie to folks that they're going to "win big" with your gambling app? Why the hell not!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pester_power

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_advertising_on_teen...

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I literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.