Imagine a world without advertising executives

[L00b]

I never said it did. What I said was that, in the current model, marketing is necessary for any company to get a hold in the market.

Marketing has always been necessary, since man was man and started barter trading

 

How else is the market to know that you, as a day one start-up, exist at all?

 

How else is the market to know why you, as a day one start-up, should be preferred over established competition?

 

<...>

 

After that, spending on marketing (at all), and either through an agency or doing it yourself, is a business and resource allocation choice.

Does what? guarantee success? I don't think so.

No?

 

Well, to stay with the automotive analogies, Dacia has had to try, and still is trying, very hard (and spend a lot of marketing €s in the process) educating European buyers out of the established 'staple' Vauxhall, Renault, Peugeot, Hyundai, <...> choices. They're very well engineered and put-together cars, and reliable according to surveys. But then, Dacia is a baby fresh marque barely anyone has heard of.

 

After so many decades of upholding premium levels of automotive engineering, Mercedes and BMW don't really have to try that hard, now, do they?

I see you've brought quality in.

No, you did:

<...>

I'd suggest improving the quality of the product.

I was only replying to your bringing it up as an alternative for competitive advantage in the marketplace ("how do you ensure customers buy yours instead of Mr Adidas, so you can trouser that profit instead of Mr Adidas?"), relative to marketing.

Marketing can and does, enable companies producing low quality products and services to prosper- that's part of the problem which would be eliminated by banning marketing/advertising companies, as, after that, companies would have to rely on the quality of their product/service to ensure profit.

Are you going to ban Poundland and Poudstretcher and similar low quality commodity product retailers (and, by extension, gradually force their suppliers out of business) as well, while you're at it? Edited May 12, 2017 by L00b

[Obelix]

Read a bike book?

 

Sounds a lot like marketing to me....

 

---------- Post added 12-05-2017 at 11:32 ----------

 

Well, to stay with the automotive analogies, Dacia has had to try, and still is trying, very hard (and spend a lot of marketing €s in the process) educating European buyers out of the established 'staple' Vauxhall, Renault, Peugeot, Hyundai, <...> choices. They're very well engineered and put-together cars, and reliable according to surveys. But then, Dacia is a baby fresh marque barely anyone has heard of.

 

And if they have heard of them it's a sneering put down "Oh that its ***** Romanian junk I'm not driving that" which is an image problem that marketing people are needed to fix. Or perhaps in OWD's world it's not allowed to correct misconceptions like that..

[onewheeldave]

Are you going to ban Poundland and Poudstretcher and similar low quality commodity product retailers (and, by extension, gradually force their suppliers out of business) as well, while you're at it?

No. As Obelix mentioned, low quality cheap produce is often useful. I'm wanting to ban marketing companies that misrepresent low quality products/services as being high quality.

 

---------- Post added 12-05-2017 at 10:34 ----------

 

Sounds a lot like marketing to me....

 

You think reading a book is marketing?!

[Obelix]

No but production would be marketing I'm sure and you banned that.

 

So the book wont exist to read will it....

[onewheeldave]

No but production would be marketing I'm sure and you banned that.

 

So the book wont exist to read will it....

 

I did predict this a few posts back

 

 

(I wouldn't be surprised if some apologist pops up to say I am advertising- I've heard marketing apologists in the past claim that everything is marketing )

[Obelix]

Ah so when the argument doest go your way you resort to abuse and labelling people as apologists.

 

Are you going to debate the issue? You've made no convincing case for banning advertising and marketing at all and haven't address the myriad objections that have already been show to you...

[Supertramp]

So I'd have to buy a book that wasn't advertised or marketed so I wouldn't know about said book so that I can discover that there's a new Samsung phone that has a feature I want.

 

Then I need to somehow find the best deal for the Samsung but I can't as there will be no marketing material online. So I have to go into every shop that sells the samsung mobile phone but I don't know which shops sell phones because they are not allowed to advertise.

 

Great! It'll be the best time ever

[onewheeldave]

So I'd have to buy a book that wasn't advertised or marketed so I wouldn't know about said book so that I can discover that there's a new Samsung phone that has a feature I want.

 

Then I need to somehow find the best deal for the Samsung but I can't as there will be no marketing material online. So I have to go into every shop that sells the samsung mobile phone but I don't know which shops sell phones because they are not allowed to advertise.

 

Great! It'll be the best time ever

Go to a library for the book? Go to a bookshop? Presumably you don't need a library advert to find the library, or a bookshop advert to find the bookshop?

 

For a Samsung, you'd be better off going online and reading some reviews.

 

Realise that we currently live in a world where marketing is so pervasive that most people are only aware of the top veneer of it.

 

Banning the companies responsible for it will not just be a 'change'- it will require a paradigm shift.

 

To predict exactly how things will be done post a paradigm shift, is virtually impossible.

 

(Although clearly, post the ban, companies currently putting 10-40% of their profit into marketing, just to stay afloat, will not need to do so, along with all the other social benefits previously mentioned, including that vast amount of money being potentially redirectable to health and social causes).

 

As we see on this thread, some people genuinely believe that information only comes from adverts. That is not true.

[L00b]

No. As Obelix mentioned, low quality cheap produce is often useful. I'm wanting to ban marketing companies that misrepresent low quality products/services as being high quality.

The (capitalistic) market sorts that misrepresentation out automatically, no need to ban anything. Statutory (typically, EU-) minima for quality and performance levels do the rest.

 

It's as pure a Darwinian process as it comes, outside the biological domain: you can polish that product/service turd all you want, prospective buyers very soon learn that it's still a turd all the same...and, if not through comparative tests by more-to-less objective third party sources and publications (from Which? to Autocar to What Hifi? to <...>), then in any case never faster than through nowaday's all-pervasive and always-on-everywhere social media.

 

It's a non-problem unworthy of (further) legislative attention.

 

Unless your name is Stalin/Brezhnev/<...>, in which case, of course, it's vitally important to misrepresent that Trabant as a Merc to keep buyers from chopping your head off (-too soon)

Edited May 12, 2017 by L00b

[Love2print]

I have wondered what the world would be like without advertising. For example if you find a tribe who live in a remote region of the world somewhere who has no access to TV, internet, etc. No concept/knowledge of any brands.

 

And because it was mentioned on this thread I will go with Nike and Adidas. So you show some of these people a pair of Adidas trainers, a pair of Nike trainers, a two pairs of generic unbranded trainers. Now which would they choose?

 

They would not choose based on a liking for a particular brand based on anything they had heard about the product from friends. They would not base it on any perceived quality of a brand or perceived fashionable quality based on advertising.

 

They could only base it on the products right there in front of them.

 

I don't think that marketing alone will make people buy a poor product. Well maybe in the short term it will but once a brand gets a poor reputation it is very hard to shake off. I do think there needs to be a good product underneath the good marketing.

 

I think it is the most interesting when you have very similar products but one is from a popular brand. For example iPhones, really how good is it for the money compared to Samsung or LG? What about brands like Huawei and Honor? When you think about price v quality/features/specifications which is the best value? Do people really buy an iPhone because its is the best price for the features you get or is because of the perceived image of an iPhone?