| Large companies should have a harder time advertising than smaller ones. The truly great companies will spread by word of mouth alone. Unscrupulous and destructive companies will find it much harder to get a footing when they can't manipulate people into buying their trash. In re to your example. If you were to pay your family members (in any way) that would be wrong in my book. If your family does this out of the goodness of their hearts then so be it. It's their unpaid labor. I fully realize that no solution will stop every avenue of abuse. However, seeding crowds with people up selling your widgets only works for so long. you'll never be able to reach scale with those methods because eventually the irs will audit you or your family members and even though you wouldn't go down for illegal advertising you would go down for not paying taxes. Or you'd find that having enough family family members to seed every crowd is getting you unwanted attention, or is just too darn expensive. By banning all advertisements except advertising in person, at the location of sale and for only items sold at that location there would be very little room for manipulation. Obviously the time share/used car methods would still work, but I haven't ever seen a way to make that profitable with low margin items, where many consumers get fleeced by huge ad budgets. Basically, I think everything but shouting about your products from your shop should be illegal. I can see concessions made for websites that don't sell anything, and charge transparent/flat fees for listing their info in a web directory that is intentionally bland. However, writing legislation for that would be a whole lot harder to draft than what I've already stated. I realize my desires are unrealistic. That being said, advertisings days of doing whatever creepy crap they want to without punishment are numbered. Either the industry will reform itself (unlikely, it's too easy to delude oneself when pulling $500k for selling fidget spinners) or, eventually, some people are going to be nailed to the walls of Congress as examples. |
For instance, I find that the advertising done by Facebook and Instagram very effective for me. The advertising tends to cater to niche things I have actually gotten real use from (in my case, it's soundkits containing midi files, and/or software musical instruments).
I've purchased many of these and have been quite happy with both the offerings and the purchases.
Sometimes these are by small companies (one to two man shops, or 10 people companies), and sometimes well known large companies.
Under your thinking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this sort of thing would be illegal.
Word of mouth wouldn't work for me in cases like this, since it's particularly directed towards things I like, but I don't have very many friends in the music producer community (learning it for less than a year), and it seems in my case, I've really only been "scammed" once, which was easily disputed and rectified via PayPal.
Now, I've been scammed before, online and off, with shady advertising, but this current model greatly benefits me.
If I'm correct in assuming that you're against this sort of advertising, is there a substitute that would work, while still bringing the benefits to both sides?
Because it appears to me that anything will have it's abuses and negative forms, but it really comes down to, is the advertising to blame, or the malignant folks who abuse it?