
Selling What They Preach - cdvonstinkpot
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/selling-what-they-preach/519156/?single_page=true
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leggomylibro
I'm normally a big fan of The Atlantic's longform pieces, but this one really
missed the mark with me. It certainly doesn't justify its length, and it only
gave passing mention to the simple fact that companies sell what people want
to buy.

People seem to want hope right now, and there is endless hand-wringing about
how we can fight the rising nationalistic nastiness in the world. Rebuild
stronger local community ties? Be more mindful of small acts of kindness?
People have their own ideas, but that's what they want to buy, so that's what
companies are using in their ads.

I think the author got the causal relationship backwards. Marketers aren't
arbiters of what people think is good or right. They just do their best to
express those values as they see them in the current zeitgeist.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> companies sell what people want to buy

That doesn't really sum it up. There are lots of things people would love to
buy, but there are strong enough disincentives to marketing them that they
don't get sold. A simple example is raw milk, but there are myriad reasons why
a company would not sell a product, and often times those reasons line up
across an entire industry.

In marketing specifically, there are cultural practices that make certain
products easier to market than others. It's not that those products are
unmarketable, or that people don't want to buy them, the tools to do it just
don't exist.

For example, I could invent a marketing tool for marketing some of these
products, adding 0.01% to the typical marketing professional's revenue... but
learning that tool isn't really worth their time. They can manage maybe a half
dozen tools max. so each of those needs to provide tens of thousands of
revenue per year. If we start from a presumption that marketing will be done
by people earning $50-200k per year, only tools that fit into that lifestyle
can exist.

Of course, there could be a market of part time freelance marketers capturing
those smaller contracts, but there's no incentive for the existing marketing
industry to build the tools they'd need.

In fact there's disincentives: having a big step-up in the cost to get started
makes it harder for newcomers, which decreases competition for professional
marketers, which makes it easier for them to keep their contracts. And for the
tool builders (software companies, etc) it is just more manageable to focus on
one or two tools that capture the lions share of the market. Product teams get
bogged down in trying to build too much, so management has an incentive to
keep it simple.

A startup could capture that value, but as startups grow there is pressure for
them to go after the big fish clients, and again that causes them to turn away
from the long tail.

Open source will get to it, but the open source software development world is
still in its infancy compared to the IP-based software development world. And
OSS is currently in a crisis due to software shifting from downloadable
executables to software-as-a-service. We'll pull out of that, but until then
the end-user OSS market is languishing.

