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I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing.

If you think that, you probably don't understand what "marketing" actually is. Marketing is really just everything you do to communicate with your customers, to find out what they need, and communicate to them that you have a solution for them. There's nothing inherently "scummy" about marketing.

Let's say you talk to your barber about scheduling software. That's marketing. Let's say you write some scheduling software and put it up on GitHub. That's marketing. Let's say you go further and post a "Show HN: My Rad New Barbershop Scheduling Package". That's marketing.

Or maybe you go to the National Barber's Association Annual Convention and rent space for a both, and setup a PC (or iPad or whatever) to demo software, and as people walk by you talk to them about their problems and your solution. Again, that's marketing. Or maybe you buy some Google Adwords for your software. Marketing.

Let's say your thing really blows up and you're making money hand over fist and you buy an ad during next year's Super Bowl. That's marketing. Now maybe you find sales are dropping off, and you don't know why, so you create a SurveyMonkey survey asking about Barbershop issues, and email it to all of your existing customers. That's marketing. But maybe that doesn't generate enough responses, so you Tweet the link along with hashtag #barbershops and buy a couple of Facebook ads, and maybe share the link on LinkedIn. That's all marketing.

Running a few focus groups to solicit customer feedback? Marketing. Replying to blog posts related to your topic? Marketing. Blogging about your topic? Marketing.

There's just so much to marketing, and nothing about any of it requires unethical behavior or typical "used car salesman" stuff.

"Marketing" is also strategy... segmenting your market for example, by, say, geography and demographics: deciding "We're only targeting barbershops in the Southeast USA, in cities with at least 40,000 people". And that decision was probably based on market research, which is also part of marketing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing




That's just one side of marketing. A large part of marketing is in understanding how to manipulate the thoughts, desires and behaviors of people. If Coca-Cola was focused on finding out what their customers needed they would be out of business. If their marketing consisted of honestly informing the public of what their product is, their market share would be a fraction of the size it is now.

I agree, marketing doesn't require unethical behavior. But marketing in an unethical way is required for many (most?) large business to grow.


I would consider what super-huge companies like Coca-Cola and GM do, to be outliers. Most companies aren't Coke or GM or whatever. Sure, some companies do unethical things, and I'll agree that things like "neuro-marketing" leave some interesting questions open. But I don't have any problem with marketing in the general sense.


I've always considered marketing by super-huge companies to be the majority of marketing. When you consider the number of brands owned by Yum!, GM, InBev, and the ones in the financial industry, that's a ton of marketing efforts done in an unethical way. I haven't seen numbers so my assumptions might be way off. Maybe it's different if you're considering the dollars spent vs the actual number of marketing pieces.

But it's not just super-huge companies. Listen to conservative talk radio and it's not long before you hear local ads using fear mongering, anger inciting, self loathing or inadequacy inducing marketing to sell whatever version of local or small time (when compared to super-huge conglomerates) snake oil they have.

Is this advertising? Is advertising separate from sales and marketing and is where most of the evil is introduced? If so it still doesn't give Yum! and the financial industry a pass for what they sell and how they sell it.




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