I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

I wish every product everywhere was evaluated based on merit, efficacy, etc alone...but...i bet most of us lean towards products in a grocery store with more appealing labels. The unfortunate reality is that customer psychology matters and your great product can die because of it.

Marketing is just a proxy for the underlying goal: growing profit. So any evil done by marketing is driven by the pursuit of wealth. Greed underlies anything marketing does as a purer form of evil.

There’s plenty of marketing out there that just tries to make information about a product and service available without focusing on driving home higher revenue at any cost. That’s usually advertising, not marketing though, but it does exist.

100% agree. It is the source of so much waste and so many ills.

I love this observation and this thread in general.

Marketing is just an attempt at persuasion. It's the most fundamental form of communication. It's intrinsic to being human and interacting with other humans, and drives the reproduction function for basically all living things.

You have, in fact, just engaged in it in your comment by offering an opinion in hopes that others will read and adopt that opinion. In fact, you posted your comment on the marketing website of a well known private equity firm.

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I'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.