[joecasson]

Marketers are brought into a company to help bring awareness to the company’s services. Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers. There are good and bad marketers, just like anything else other profession.

Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.

[embedding-shape]

> Without marketing in some form, your product never makes it to your customers.

I guess if "Being good enough that people recommend it to others" is marketing, then yeah I suppose I'd agree. But when people talk "marketing", they generally refer to outbound one, and we could easily live without that and still find products, just like we did before "marketing" was the pest it's identified as today.

With that said, everyone believes they're a good person, every single individual on the planet probably, within their reality and their perspective. Including marketers, unbelievable as it sounds.

[Cytobit]

People seek out services when a need arises. Marketers' job to invent new needs that didn't exist before

[cassianoleal]

Exactly that. Their job is to manipulate me into believing I need something that has never missed in my life - enough for me to trade my own health (in the form of work hours, which I exchange for money) for it. Literally trying to convince me that a thing I never wanted or needed is worth dying a little in exchange for it.

[joecasson]

A plumber puts an ad in the paper / Google for their services in your area. This makes you aware of their services. This is marketing their services to you. By seeing the ad, are you manipulated into using their services?

[Izkata]

Scroll back up and notice most of these comments are distinguishing "marketing" from "marketers". I think a lot of people also wouldn't consider just an ad as marketing without some further details (such as the comment you replied to).

[plomme]

Ok. How do people find the required service when the need arises? Surely the company will need to have a website that displays what they offer? Or a physical storefront showing what goods they sell? That is marketing, and, I would say, not evil. The “evil” arises as a consequence of the market and medium where an infinite number of competitors are trying to survive. Marketers need to eat and feed their families, too, and so they try to market more efficiently.

I don’t like advertising, but I think calling the act of or working in marketing evil is really reductive vilification. Try to take their point of view, and realize almost nobody is trying to make the world a worse place.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Saying that it’s “evil” and wondering “how they sleep at night” is unfair to your own intelligence and its ability assess the value of this function.

Yeah, this is just absurd. From the other side, probably marketers wonder how anyone implements these incredibly user hostile interfaces to make it hard for people to cancel, and how anyone could work on products such as Google and Facebook (even as they use them for work).

It's easy to scapegoat a group you're not part of, but it's generally not correct. Things are more complicated than you imagine.