Marketing and the Close Friend

A few days ago, I read a comment about how marketing was manipulative, greedy, and deceptive, designed to coerce or trick people into thinking they need or want things that they would otherwise have no use for.

It's kind of the standard modern attitude on marketing: an adversarial relationship where consumers don't want to see ads because they're at best a waste of their time and attention, if not some outright scam.

It made me sad, and reminded me of why it's so difficult for so many people to self-promote. Because we're conditioned to dislike advertising, to think of it is a selfish/manipulative/scammy.

As a person who writes books that I ask other people to buy: I do not want to trick or mislead anyone into buying my books. I want them to be purchased by people who will read and enjoy them (or give them as gifts to someone who will enjoy them, that's good too). I do not believe that I have anything to gain in the long run, including from a purely financial point of view, by deception. A happy customer is a repeat customer. An unhappy customer is just a bad review. After I noticed that people complained in reviews of A Rational Arrangement that they didn't realize it was polyamorous or fantasy when they bought it, I changed the blurb to close with "This novel is a standalone polyamorous fantasy romance." I want my purchasers to know what they're getting, not buy it thinking it'll be something else.

But the thing is, marketing is a major way that people find out that things exist that they would enjoy having.

Imagine that you've got a close friend who knows your tastes and interests. Every now and then, they message you excitedly: "I just found out about this cool new tech gizmo/book/movie/kitchen gadget/game/etc. and I think you'll love it because [reasons]!" And these things your friend tells you about do, in fact, align with your tastes and interests and are the sorts of things you want to know about. Not every time, of course. Sometimes you look into it and you're like "nah, not for me." Sometimes you already knew about it. But let's say 90% of the time it's something you didn't know about and are glad to know exists.

You're unlikely to react to this with "UGH STOP SELLING ME THINGS". You might tell your friend things like, "that's great but I already have 38 books on my TBR pile and it's stressing me out. So no more book recs until I clear it out, OK?" And then, because they're your friend, they would stop with the book recs until you asked for them again.

From actual friends, this is basically a service: not something grudgingly tolerated but something that feels thoughtful and considerate: your friend, in whom you have confided about what you like and dislike, thinking about you and showing you this product based on their knowledge of both you and it.

Most of us don't have friends who know us well enough to (a) know what we'd want and (b) know if we don't know about it yet. But we'd be pleased if we did. Because, yes, we can search out information about products when we're interested in making a purchase -- but we don't usually look for things when we don't know something like them even exists. Sometimes you really do want information pushed to you.

And then you have modern targeted marketing, which is not so much a friend who recommends things because they think you'll enjoy them, and more like a creepy stalker that's been spying on you to figure out where they can find you and determine which of the fliers they're paid to shove in front of people's faces would be best to shove in your face.

But the thing is, if marketing could act like the close friend that knows you and pretty much only tells you about things that are genuinely of value to you, it would arguably be in not just your best interests, but also those of the marketers and the companies they represent and the media through which they advertise. Maybe resorting to trickery and scams and manipulation works sometimes, but that's not saying it works better than 'selling a product to people who value and want it'.

Even so, the likelihood of getting from our present hellscape of "stalkers who spy on your habits, are nonetheless bad at knowing what you want, and shove things at you when you'd rather not see them" to "trustworthy service that accurately predicts what product information you'd want and when you want it, then provides that" is basically nil. The corporations that run advertising platforms and the corporations that market on them are not deserving of trust. And even though their long-term interests would be best served by becoming trustworthy, there are too many short-term pressures on them to make a quick buck through skeevy tactics to overcome that. It ought to be possible to get from here to there, and it ought to be advantageous for all parties to do so. Like the utopian version is right there where we can see it, and yet somehow we're gonna keep barreling on towards dystopian version anyway.