> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes
It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.
But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.
It should be, but it isn't in my experience. Marketing people care about onboarding and engagement numbers, and are a major driver of dark patterns - everything from popups to moving the 'close dialog' icon to unintuitive places like the bottom left of unasked-for video embeds.
I’m sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical, incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of terrible and dumb things without creating universal truths about programmers.
I don't think so; I said marketing people frequently do bad stuff, which is not the same as saying they're all bad. I stand by 'frequently', because just look at how much terrible adware, clickbait, spam etc there is on the web. It's a Gresham's law-type situation.
Of course marketing people do a valuable job in terms of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap between producers and customers. But - just like engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people who work in that industry who make things worse for everyone else. By contrast, I can't think of any society that is suffering because they don't have enough advertising.
Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning and messaging) is why people can find the right products and services, why small businesses can compete, and why entire industries grow. It's unequivocally a good.
If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.
Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning and messaging) is why people can find the right products and services
If that's your metric, I can confirm the GP's statement, at least when it comes to online marketing people. Increasingly, I can not find the right products and services online.
> If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.
Except, marketing too is a market for lemons. Scammy marketing outcompetes good marketing. Simple as that.
Scammy marketing can sometimes be effective in the short term, but the problem with it it’s inherently self-limiting.
Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer trust, and either get regulated out of existence or collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile, companies that invest in clear, honest positioning, strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value consistently outperform in the long run. Apple, Patagonia, and Tesla aren’t winning because they spam pop-ups.
If marketing were purely a race to the bottom, all successful brands would look like clickbait farms. They don’t.
It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.
But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.