From violations of privacy, to the mainpulation or even maliciousness at its core, I think marketing at it’s current state is poison to society. But I also think it might be a necessary evil. What would be a good alternative implementation of advertising look like? Or do we even need it? If the former, how would advertising look in a non-capitalist society?
This is a great question! I too have come to the realization that marketing is highly damaging to society. Commercials, ads, spam, flyers, etc. So much waste and invasion of privacy.
I’ve been trying to imagine what a world without marketing would look like for months.
In cetain areas, the consumer experience is greatly improved. No interruptions of TV or podcasts. Less bandwidth, ram, and cpu used when browsing web pages. No invasive individual tracking anywhere.
But the two major changes that require additional consideration:
How do businesses today that rely on ad revenue (web search, podcasts, etc) continue to exist and pay salaries and other expenses? A. These would all require a move to direct payment models. Either a usage fee or a subscription fee.
How do businesses source customers? Especially important for new businesses or new products that customers dont know about.
A. I dont have a clear solution here. But I would like to see two possible ways that are not mutually exclusive:
a. The Phone Book. It basically went extinct when the internet and web search became ubiquitous. But I’d like to see it return.
b. Service Brokers. Similar to above but businesses or humans in the loop to assist with supporting mapping of request to service provider.
With a., its pretty easy to make this physical, standardized and regulated to be fair/utilitarian
With b., it will require conscious effort to regulate and ensure consumers arent tracked and no business is given and unfair advantage.
Given the shift towards online shopping, the businesses can easily provide the necessary information along with the product they are selling. In that case, only those customer who are looking for a specific type of product get to see the information. Retains the necessary elements of advertising & marketing without the unnecessary element of consumerism.
On their own it would probably not work for everyone, but groups of paid services might work. Although I’m not sure how I would feel if everything started having a paywall…
Also I like both ideas. Would likely make consuming stuff more informative than persuasive.