Marketing vs Humanity

Marketing truly is the bane of our existence. It really is just lies. Or at least a stretching of the truth so bad that it becomes seethrough. Why? Because the marketing department does not understand their product and they tell you to use the thing they are selling for … LITERALLY … everything.

Need a survival tool for the wilderness? Fantastic! You should buy our Data-in-Motion SaaS platform to ensure scalability and reliability.

“Wait, how is that going to help me survive?”

“Well, I can’t answer that, but I can say with certainty it can’t make things worse 😉”

What happened to sales

Sales used to be a legitimate job, grounded in logic and honesty. There are plenty of old jokes about people selling their mothers for an apple, but at its core, sales was about matching a product to a real need.

“Hello, potential customer. We have a product that helps you do X. Do you do X? Oh, you do? Let me tell you about our product.”

Products filled a need. Maybe that need was as simple as “looks pretty,” and that’s fine. The point is, there was a purpose. Salespeople found the people who could actually use the product, and everyone won.

Post-Value Based Economy

Products today have become symbols—of wealth, status, social standing. Maybe they always were, but not to this degree. Now, the symbol is often all that’s left; the usefulness is stripped away, leaving a husk of what was once a genuinely helpful thing.

Owning something doesn’t give it value. You don’t buy a painting just to have it. You buy it to look at, to hang on the wall, to spark an argument about whether “dogs playing poker” really fits the living room vibe. The value is in the use, not just the possession—or the hope of selling it later.

Things as Investments

One of the things that has ruined the relationship between people and products is the idea that everything must be an investment. Not in the sense of investing in your future or your skills, but in the sense that every object, every service, every fleeting digital asset is now a “store of value.”

You don’t buy a phone because it’s a good phone. You buy it because it’s a status symbol, or because you think if you don´t have it you will be lesser than. Sneakers, watches, even digital monkeys on something called a ‘blockchain’, everything is a potential lottery ticket. Or just the value it can be sold for. What is the value of a house that no one lives in? An investment for someone who does not need the extra money? To buy something just because you think you can sell it for more makes you a dropshipper, and I think if aliens came to earth and we explained what dropshipping is, they would turn around and leave, never to be seen again.

This mindset seeps into the technical world, too. Suddenly the CTO has decided that platform X is the best way forward and nothing can persuade them to change course. They have been to dinner with someone from the ‘customer acquisition’ team that have told them that platform X will solve all of our problems, So we will shoehorn solutions into platform X for the next year and a half.

Its people who wont have to deal with the decisions being made. They wont have to work with platform X but they are 100% certain that its the best thing ever. They have been promised everything by a sales rep and verified nothing because they might not know how. The CEO wont use the solution, he just wants the magic productivity number to go up. People making decisions that wont affect them when it comes to their day to day job.

The Death of Usefulness

We’ve lost the plot. Somewhere along the way, the actual usefulness of things became secondary to their perceived value. Marketing tells us that if we don’t have the latest, the greatest, the most hyped, we’re falling behind. But behind what? The endless treadmill of manufactured desire? A desire with manufactured obsolescence when the next thing comes along.

Even video games have become like this. Video games are supposed to be fun! That is the whole point. They are an art form that can tell stories and let you be a part of them. The value is in playing the game and having fun, or at least feeling something, not being rewarded with digital goods for playing. That is a job. The reward is supposed to be to play the game.

Gamers have become so numb after years and years of battle passes and manipulation of video games as a “product” that when a game comes out that is just about having fun and there isn’t a loot box in sight, they actually complain. The ‘industry’ has broken our brains. Youtuber Acerola has a great video about this that you can watch here.

Have I doomed to close to the sun?

Truth is, I don’t have a magic solution. But I do know this: the problem isn’t the people in sales or marketing, it’s the culture that rewards hype over substance, and image over impact. The best thing we can do is band together, support initiatives that value real utility, and push for rules and standards that encourage products to actually deliver on their promises. The “Stop Killing Games” initiative is a good example of this.

Corporations have shown us, time and again, that when left unchecked, they’ll sell us a soup with very little substance, just a marketing campaign that leads to great sales figures in Q2. Then they dump out the pot and move on to the next hyped soup.

Letting the ‘market’ decide has proven to be a shit idea. Maybe it’s time to set some rules for products that people buy, expecting them to provide real value.

Every day I realize more and more that… Johnny might have been right after all.