Maybe we need a refresh on what marketing actually is

Is it advertising, word-of-mouth, placement, or something else? Because marketing may not be the same problem as the disruptive, socially and psychologically damaging advertising

Are exceptions warranted for orgs smaller than a certain number and isn’t a subsidiary of a much larger org?

In the old days, we put up posters or got a notice on one of the locally printed zines

Zines were entertaining and useful because of their focused scope

@cypnk it does seem like a lot of discussions of marketing snag early on questions of definition (or identity - i have friends who are marketers for a living, and they are understandably upset when i say that marketing is bad and should be stopped).

to my mind, marketing is something a lot more like an ideological system than it's a simple term for "trying to make people aware of your thing". the content varies, but it's become an entire way of understanding.

@cypnk it has its own language and its own system of values, and a vast set of largely unexamined beliefs. most of them almost impossible to challenge or even explicitly state in any setting where the ideological framework has really taken hold.

@brennen @cypnk marketing, if anything, is more of a way of "legitimizing" a product, brand, or idea, than necessarily promoting it. when you market it, you make it acceptable, and make it real. by presenting it in an acceptable (e.g. professional, polished, standardized) way to enough people, it becomes inserted into culture and enters the canon of 'known cultural artifacts', to some extent. usually the purpose of doing this is to make money, but a lot of people see that process as its own goal

@cypnk @brennen it makes sense, because having enormous wealth doesn't necessarily make people respected, well-known, or well-loved. but marketing/PR is the way you buy that, it's how you buy a place in the Halls of Culture

@jk @cypnk i'd say it's also a process by which many things are shaped in ways that just having to make money on the market don't achieve.

products which are merely "good" and "appeal to paying customers" are subordinated to (and destroyed by) the whim of professional marketing ideology a lot more often than gets recognized.

@brennen @cypnk 🤔 this is a tangent but:

i computer for a living and i totally understand and relate to anybody who says e.g. computers are bad and should be stopped

i wonder if this is a difference between the two fields, or if similar numbers of people exist in both fields whose identity would be threatened by criticism.

or who feel disillusioned by and trapped in an industry they joined with different motivations.

@pho4cexa @brennen @cypnk purely anecdotally, my wife had a student in the class she TA'd for last semester who switched from advertising to media studies because ethical squickiness

@cypnk

Advertising can be part of a marketing campaign, as can user groups, community organizing, training sessions, sales visits and, most importantly, face-to-face relationship building.

I once worked for small startup that built an image so far from what we were, we had to hold training sessions and customer meetings at a nearby hotel. If we let our customers see just how small and rag tag we really were, it could hurt our image. That is marketing.

@cypnk I'm getting a few "Are you my mummy?" vibes from that tbh. 😨