My Problems With Marketing
By: Reda Attarça
Tags: Personal, Psychology, Opinion, Problem Solving, Marketing

My Problems With Marketing

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I … have a problem with marketing. I just don’t get it. I may be naive, but over a certain point needed to have a brand known to some customers, I have the feeling that marketing isn’t useful.

I know most people reading on medium love marketing strategy, business development, SEO optimization, and shit. But I can’t help it, the more I think about marketing, the more I think it’s just bad for the world…

Hear me out.

Marketing is an art. The art, not to sell , but to make people buy.

That’s important, because marketing is often label as a scientific field, and people buy it.

Marketing was able to pick up concepts from the scientific field and make them their own. Psychology, dialectic, statistics are all used and badly teach in marketing classes.

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The concepts are rewritten to sounds cooler and less academic.

Dialectic is the study of speeches and how languages can convince people, it’s so old, it can be traced back to ancient Greece. The field is full of complex concepts that theorize what makes a good speech, a good text, make people believe in you or not.

And you know it under the word “copywriting”.

Marketing is this guy that read half a book once, rename all the concepts because he couldn’t remember the exact names, and seems smart because he spread his knowledge with confidence.

I hate the idea to break with a scientific field’s history just to use the points useful at the moment. It wrongly justifies the “why” company should do this or that with incomplete concepts that required years of scientific researches.

I wish marketing would focus deeply on the scientific field it uses.

Some companies resolve this point by hiring people with various background to work as specialists in their marketing department, but this only happen with big companies.

The deontology is stripped down

Psychologists have a deontological code to respect. As they learned how humans think and behave, it’s the psychologists’ duty to help their patients and more importantly, not take advantage of their position.

But marketing didn’t swear on any shitty code, so let’s take advantage of every weakness possible!

As someone that studied psychology, this is how I see the marketing department. How many times do they use cognitive bias or trigger anxiety to have people panic buying something?

The most known strategy would certainly be the “limited in time offer” and “false reduction”. They both use the psychological weakness of humans to make people feel like they are closing a good deal when in reality they bought something without thinking.

It’s a shame that a whole profession sees its knowledge used by people that don’t care about ethics and deontology.

Except to have people working in marketing swear to respect deontological codes from other profession, I don’t know how we could solve this aspect of marketing.

which leads to my last point.

Marketing needs an ethical and deontological code

Brands all want to have a good image. It’s a crucial point to develop a business. Your clients must see you as reliable and full of good points.

And that’s a problem.

Companies refuse to recognize their flaws, they refuse to recognize that their product is not the pinnacle of humanity.

Take any ads for car, it’s always displaying empty streets, empty roads, the wildness of the ride, but once you have your car, it’s a traffic jam and speed limitations.

Of course, brands won’t make negative ads showing how lame it is to have their product, but a little bit of honesty would be welcome.

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It’s partially what led us to Diesel gate: car brands testing their vehicle’s carbon footprints on the laboratory at 15km/h and telling customers it’s so low on emissions.

All the greenwashing is due to marketing, brand surfing on the ecologist wave to look greater.

Heck, if a neo-nazi party had enough money to put on the table, marketing could make it look like the best possible thing to have ever happened on earth.

If marketing was more honest, we would live in a cleaner world.

Marketing needs limitations : - Not use cognitive biases on customers - Be more transparent when numbers are given - Not promote product or services that are hurting the planet - Promote real innovation

Because if tomorrow teleportation is invented and the creator doesn’t have a good enough marketing strategy people will continue to buy the car and teleportation will be seen as a stupid idea.

If at this point you are hurt by the negative view I have on marketing, try to see it as a stepstone to better your marketing campaigns.

People are more willing to buy off a humble brand recognizing its flaw than a brand they, later on, discover scandals and partial lies about.

Promote greatness over money, the world will thank you.