| 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. |
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.