# Marketing,  the art of buying customers

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2018/07/24/marketing-the-art-of-buying-customers/
- Published: 2018-07-24T19:54:54+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

![](https://draganescu.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/7dd88-1cn2rvl_w3dm65nr5xdltww.
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Marketing is meant to find out what people expect or want, deliver the results to
the product team, and then communicate the results of product development or innovation
to the people, so that people find out that their problems have been solved and 
expectations met. I’m sorry _that’s old news_.

**New news** is marketing is meant to _exploit psychological shortcuts enabled by
evolutionary mediated involuntary reaction to various stimuli to sell crap_, which
never gets better, despite deep market dissatisfaction.

Everything in the first commandment of good marketing, _know thy customer_, has 
been transferred to customer support, which in turn has been engulfed by PR machines.

PR, which was meant to _be the transparency channel where industry jargon, legal
conundrums, regulation and human mistake could find the path of decent discourse
and clarity_, is another shameful activity aimed at disguising propaganda and flat
lies in the universal mask of press intoxication.

Thus, between the customer support activity, which was meant to _actually solve 
customer’s issues_, that is people whose money have been taken and cannot be returned,
and PR the Frankenstein of “**customer happiness**” was brought to life, a kind 
of brainwashed auto reply self reinforcing engine, where problems are treated with
canned replies given by real people about whom you end up having serious doubts 
that they are real.

With this damned marriage, of CS and PR, nobody has to actually fix their crap, 
there is no actual innovation other than gimmicks that may be technically sound,
but only useful for mediocre advertising. True innovation is rare and makes few 
bucks, because those who have hoses of money to cover everything with their noise
continue to sell shit.

The second commandment of marketing,_ educate thy market_, is all but completely
forgotten. We follow the exact opposite, don’t educate them fools, give them all
the crap they expect with their puny little instinctive guts. Anybody complains,
solve it with advertising. People don’t respond? More advertising. Nothing? Track
them. Still nothig? Annoy them. Less than expected? Invade them.

All marketing has become, and that is especially true online and less so offline,
yet nevertheless still a solid trend, is a tool of stagnation and business sickness.
There are countless products who live on hype and don’t thrive. The businesses trade
faith and their customers disillusionment.

**But it sells**, I hear you say.

Of course, _status and group association are more powerful marketing strategies 
than exquisite execution or great added value_ simply because all capitalist marketing
has gone crazy **buying customers** for so many decades, and it will go worse the
more impersonal all trade grows.

The internet made it worse, and it makes it worse by the day. Maybe this whole article
is bitter envy green venom thrown at an honest industry. Of course not all marketers
and not all PR people and not all CS … yada yada yada, but **the performance measurements**
of these industries point to the fact that_ all marketers and all PR people and 
all CS folk follow cut throat KPIs _and in doing so deliver vain promises and flat
out disastrous long term results for CSR or common sense, but do great for the quick
buck of quarterly reports.

Contrary to _the proven fact of greater long term profitability brought by sustainability_
the MK, PR, CS trifecta decimate it and get bonuses for it. This is not an issue
of shame, it is a problem of short sighted executives and uninvolved board members
and stock holders. All the same, deregulation enables an economy made of a Ponzi
scheme of bets on top of bets and fiscal aberrations, which enrich large corporations
year after year, create a climate of impossible business for grassroots innovation.

But this is not an article about economics or politics, it is one about the fact
that **consumers are hooked not marketed**, an abomination which gets only worse
with every click, like and share.

I hope this new generation of swipe-loving-ad-hating-maxed-out-expectations consumer
youth has a chance.