[RunSet]

Marketing is like juicing in athletics.

It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.

[pakitan]

One of the dumbest takes I've seen in a while. Good customer service is like juicing in athletics. You can get away just fine without it but once those pesky competitors stop yelling at their customers, you're kinda forced to do the same as well. Not to any benefit but just to maintain the status quo.

[RunSet]

Diligent readers will observe which aspect(s) of your attempted equivalence do not pertain.

[MadnessASAP]

Unfortunately we don't live in the land of omniscient rational actors.

Being able to find customers and explain your products value to them, that being marketing, is an essential part of producing a product.

[paulryanrogers]

If only marketing stopped at explaining the (actual) value...

[MadnessASAP]

If you can find a meaningful and clear line suitable for use in regulations I'm sure there's some people who would like to hear it.

[gorlilla]

Pretty sure the bright-line has always just been caveat emptor.

[Veuxdo]

> Marketing is like juicing in athletics.

This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.

[yojo]

As a single business, marketing is a totally rational way to boost sales. Collectively, it’s just a tax.

If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.

Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.

[Veuxdo]

> If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top.

I think that's far from guaranteed. It could very well be the case that the oldest, most established, solutions would dominate the top, for instance.

[pakitan]

You're confusing paid advertising with marketing. Marketing is interweaved in almost any business activity. No marketing means you literally register a company and then wait in your house for someone to randomly walk in and pay you for you services. And if that miraculously happens, you treat them as badly as you can and do the worst possible job, just to make sure you don't inadvertently get some word of mouth referrals.

[Veuxdo]

This is a good point that I'm glad you called out. Having a logo is marketing. Having a website is marketing. Every blog post, tweet, like, reshare, etc. is marketing. This comment could be considered marketing if you look hard enough.

[imtringued]

Marketing is the act of bringing a product to the market in such a way that it is received well.

Product, price, place, promotion.

All of those are marketing. Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.

[yojo]

You’re right that I was implicitly referring to top of funnel marketing - things you do to make people aware of your business and get them to your business. And yes, I was most focused on advertising.

I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.

I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.

[thfuran]

>You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.

I think the situation is almost guaranteed to be worse because there are now stronger incentives to manipulate and deceive.

[thfuran]

Training actually improves the product (athletic performance). Does an athlete going on a commercial to hawk shoes make them a better athlete or make the shoes better? Would the answer be different once we change domains back to software? Marketing may be a necessary business activity in the current environment, but it is not at all like training in its fundamental effect on the quality of the product. (Though in that regard, I think juicing was a bit awkward as an analogy)

[_1kfq]

There are really two types of "marketing":

- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"

- "Drink Coca Cola"

The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.

But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.

[mrmanner]

This assumes all potential customers know all products and services somehow, without the enterprises communicating their existence? Without marketing, how would we know that website analytics as a service even exists?

Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.

[imtringued]

I wouldn't call that marketing if you truly dial random numbers. Meanwhile if you put your number in a phone book, I would count that.

[AYBABTME]

Bringing attention to the existence of a thing isn't juicing, it's a necessary part of making something useful. If you build something that's potentially useful but no one ever hears of it, it isn't actually useful until someone hears of it.

[RunSet]

Honest, unpaid word of mouth might serve that function if not for the hired shouters and resultant ambient dishonesty.

Flipping the microscope, paid promotions distract from honest testimonials with no profit motive.

"We are improving your search results by prepending sales brochures."

[AYBABTME]

Ignoring financial incentives, you're claiming that a specific method of dissemination (word of mouth) is all that anyone could ever need, or some such. This doesn't make much sense. How can only one very specific communication method be the end of all that be, when it comes to a multimedia world. It's like saying one ever only needs masks to mitigate every communicable respiratory diseases. Masks are effective but far from reasonably being the end of the tech tree, the pinacle of all methods that ever will be.

Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.

[imtringued]

That only applies to heavily saturated markets and it's only "zero sum", because the market isn't growing anymore, not because marketing is bad.

When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.