[malshe]

I am well aware that on HN marketing is looked down upon but marketing is about creating and delivering value to customers. If someone is doing that better than others and getting paid a lot for that, there is nothing wrong with it.

[ben509]

Part of it is a big chunk of the HN crowd hasn't been in business, and part of it is that marketing is an ethical mess.

And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond.

But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store than sitting in a warehouse, thus a person driving a delivery truck is adding value.

And the mutual gain from the transaction is realized when questions are answered and the transaction is settled, so the cashier is adding value.

Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen.

But I've got no proof beyond the observation that people get paid to do these things, and it could be that some or all of these jobs really are redundant. Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though.

[buckminster]

> Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though

Advertising might be a zero-sum game. Or even net negative. Yet a business without it will likely fail if other businesses use it. In other words, if advertising adds value like Mafia protection adds value then the empirical test proves nothing.

[malshe]

> Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen.

This is reducing marketing to advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing research may begin even before a product exists.

[ben509]

That's fair, I was trying to keep it simple to explain my train of thought better.