
Ask HN: Anyone else feel people here are a bit too harsh on advertising? - CM30
Or marketing in general?<p>Because from what I&#x27;ve seen it, it seems like a decent chunk of Hacker News users think marketing is evil incarnate, some unethical manipulation tactic that&#x27;s outright damaging to society. For example, in the comments here:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18377296<p>Or here:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18334263<p>But I&#x27;m not sure I agree with this. For one thing, not all (or to be honest, even most) marketing or advertising is necessarily dishonest, sometimes it&#x27;s just mentioning what exists and showing how it works.<p>Quite a lot of media trailers are that way really. Virtually every major Nintendo Switch game trailer is about as straight forward as you can get.<p>I also think people forget exactly how much comes under advertising in general. A company&#x27;s website is a marketing arm for them. The packaging of the product is. Obviously any trailers or presentations they hold (<i>looks at Apple</i>) are. Is that a bad thing? Not sure I&#x27;d say Apple having a flashier website is a negative for society.<p>I also feel a lot of people put too much stock in people magically choosing some materially &#x27;best&#x27; option. Like if ads were gone, word of mouth would somehow mean only the best products and services won.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;d be the case to be honest. People are creatures of habit, and a lot of the time, they&#x27;ll stick to a product or brand simply for familiarity rather than because it&#x27;s the best option at that time. It&#x27;s why quite a few big chains have an audience at all.<p>Without advertising or marketing, I suspect the situation wouldn&#x27;t change much from how it is now. Those with more name recognition get the lion&#x27;s share of the market, and the rest fight for scraps.<p>But what do you think?
======
chmaynard
This seems like an abuse of the Ask HN convention. Please write a blog post
and post a link to it. Thanks!

