less_retarded_wiki/marketing.md

Marketing

Self praise stinks. --Czech proverb

Marketing is an unethical practice, plentifully used in capitalism, of forcing a product or corporate propaganda by means of lying, manipulation, tricks, brainwashing, torture, exploiting psychological weaknesses of people and others. This manifests most visibly as advertisements and commercials in media but also in other ways such as fake product reviews, product placement in movies etc. Advertising is ever present and unavoidable in capitalism, billboards now run along the roads instead of trees, commercials yell from electronic devices that are present everywhere, ugly cheap ads, slogans and flashing lights now cover the art of architects -- indeed, there is a promise of ads being put in the sky, people's dreams and thoughts themselves once technology allows it (so called "progress"). Marketing is one of the greatest bullshit industries ever to have seen the light of world and is not only torturing the victims, but also wasting the enormous amount of effort of those who create it.

Specific practices used in marketing are:

• Lies and falsehoods. Every ad will present the product as the best, even though not all products can be best. Actors will be paid to lie about how the product changed their life etc. -- so called astroturfing. Many times numbers and "facts" whose source is difficult to trace will be completely made up. Fake discounts are something constantly presented in ads.
• Extreme repetition/spam: this includes repeating the same commercial over and over (e.g. every 10 minutes) as well as repeating the name of the product in a completely retarded way ("We recommend X because X is the best. For more info about X visit www.X.com. Remember, X is the best. Your X.").
• Psychological tricks such as abusing songs and shitty catchy melodies, often raping existing good music by for example changing the lyrics and then repeating it so many times you never want to even hear the original ever again. This abuses the fact that a song will stick in one's head and keep torturing the individual into thinking about the advertised product constantly. Similarly ads like to show food to people in attempts to rise appetite in overweight people and so literally posing a health risk to millions -- consider that most people in the first world are overweight and should try to eat less rather than more, ads are trying to force them to do the opposite (of course additionally forcing food that's not healthy at all). Super markets constantly change placement of items so that people always get lost, spend more time in the shop, see more items and are more likely to buy more things. Other tricks include shouting, fake empathy ("we care about you" etc.) or creating the "everyone does it" illusion ("look, all the cool teenagers in the world now switched to this product!").
• Misleading statistics, presentation and interpretation of data. For example any success rate will be presented as the upper bound as such a number will be higher, typically 99% or 100%, i.e. "our product is successful in up to 100% cases!" (which of course gives zero information and only says the product won't succeed in more than 100% cases). A company may also run its own competition for a "best product", e.g. on Facebook, in which all products are of course their products, and then the winning product will be seen on TV as a "contest winning product".
• Forcefully seizing attention: ads are present practically everywhere, even embedded in "art" (even in that which one pays for like magazines), in the sky (planes, blimps, drones, ...), they play on every radio you hear in every shop, they pop up on electronic devices one has paid for, they can't be turned off (and if you try to do it, you're called a thief). They are present in education materials and targeted at children. Audio of a commercial will be made louder to catch an attention when it starts playing on a commercial break.
• bribing celebrities/influencers. An influencer is nowadays a culturally accepted "job" whose sole work consists of lying, forcing products and spreading corporate propaganda.
• ...

These practices are not rare, not even close, they are not even a behavior of a minority, not even of a small majority, they are not illegal and people don't even see them as unusual or undesirable. Stop for a moment to think about how deeply fucked up this is. People in the US are so brainwashed they even pay to see commercials (Super Bowl). Under capitalism these practices are the norm and are getting worse and worse ever year. Boiling the frog works as expected.

A naive idea still present among people is that "ethical marketing" is possible or that it's something that can be fixed by some law, a petition or something similar. In late stage capitalism this is not possible as an "ethical" marketing is a non effective marketing. Deciding to drop the most efficient weapons in the market warfare will only lead to the company losing customers and making place for competition who embraces the unethical means, eventually going bankrupt and disappearing, leaving the throne to the bad guys. You want to do ethical marketing? You're simply out, next in the line gets a shot. Laws will not help as laws are made to firstly favor the market, corporations pay full time lobbyists and law makers themselves are owners of corporations. A law that fixes marketing would be a law that simply bans it -- do you think anyone is going to do that? Even if some small law against "unethical marketing" passes, the immense force and pressure of all the strongest corporations will work 24/7 on reverting the law and/or finding ways around it, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical. You have a few peasants with banners pleading the country's broken, corrupt non-working political system to shield them from world's strongest market entities with billions of dollars at hand and thousands of full time managers and layers who's only job it is to make marketing happen by any means necessary. If you believe in a happy end then it's incredible how naive you are, you must be more naive than a kindergarden baby.

Another extremely childish idea is that "marketing serves the people by informing them of new products" :D { I don't know, I always think capitalists have at least one brain cell, but they always manage to surprise me by saying something like this. ~drummyfish } This may not even need much comment (it seems weird, like trying to explain that a book dropped from a table will fall to the ground, feels extremely stupid) but let's see: maybe in times of caveman when market was just invented ads worked like this for exactly two days until one caveman realized he can lie on the ad and if he paints a bigger picture on the wall the other caveman customers will be more likely to buy his rocks than the competing caveman's rocks; exactly at this day ads seized to be about informing people and became solely used for forcing one's products and tricking people, and trying to find ways around laws that tried to prohibit this, spawning the endless bullshit war of advertisers and law makers. It's been thousands of years now that ads have absolutely 0% informative value -- imagine an informative ad on TV, a simple white screen with text: "there is a new shampoo in the shop". This literally doesn't even give any information to the consumer, everyone knows there are shampoos in the shop. Do you think there exists any marketing company in which they wouldn't shit themselves in uncontrollable laughter if some of their employee was like "we should make our ad less intrusive, it should only inform the consumer about our product"? Are you really this braindead now?

Marketing people are subhuman. Of course, let us be reminded we love all living beings, even subhuman, but the marketing trash not only doesn't show any signs of conscience or morals, they hardly seems conscious at all, they are just a robotic tool of capitalism, more akin monkeys -- however immoral shit they get into, they always just reply "just doing my job" and "it pays well" to anything. What can you say about someone who dedicates his life to bullshit? And not just any bullshit -- bullshit that makes other people more miserable. They make the worst kind of propaganda which literally kills people, they would mercilessly torture children to death if it was on their contract. A capitalist is screeching HAHAHA IT NOT THE SAME bcuz CHILREN ARE MAGICAL n economy is pwogwesss, so this invalid. Indeed, it doesn't make any sense -- a capitalist will stay what it is, the lowest class of brainwashed NPC incapable of thinking on its own. All in all, avoid anyone who has anything to do with marketing.

Good things don't need promotion (it's true even if you disagree). The bigger the promotion, the bigger shit it is.

No, there is no such thing as a "non-intrusive ad", fucking capitalists are trying to introduce a sense of guilt for not looking at what you don't wanna look. The only non-intrusive ad is that which you don't see or hear at all. Just block all that shit if you can.