No Marketing Expert

For more than fifteen years I helped companies sell their products and services. I had studied marketing and international trade, built and managed a global trading company for fifteen years myself and know the mechanisms, the markets and the consumers quite well. I knew how to tell a story creatively so that people buy. That was my profession and I enjoyed it.

But the joy of being creative slowly gave way to the question of whether this was manipulation, and what started as joy turned into doubt.

It didn’t come overnight. It crept in over the years. I designed campaigns that invented problems nobody had, and promised miracles even though everyone knew these miracles didn’t exist. I thought that was perfectly normal. Marketing. That’s how everyone does it and most industries only work that way. Everyone knows this and I assumed nobody takes these ad copies literally anyway.

Because marketing, or communication rather, is based on a silent agreement: we exaggerate and everyone is fine with it. No product is as good as its advertising claims. The paid testimonials are never as honest as they pretend. This is not fraud in the legal sense but something much more subtle. It is the shifting of the line between what is actually true and what sells better.

I went along with it for a long time without questioning it even slightly. I even thought of it as art. Not out of cynicism but because I thought it was simply part of the deal. These were artificial claims, all miles away from reality. Professional marketing means polishing reality and honesty is everyone’s ideal but not a good business model.

At some point I started reading my own copy differently. Not as marketing material and communication between brand and customer but as valid or invalid statements. Why was I claiming something that wasn’t true? Would I say this to a friend and actually stand by it if someone held me to my word? The answer was no.

And that was the point where I stopped calling myself a marketing expert. Not because marketing has no justification. People should know that something exists that could help them or bring them joy. That is an important function. But the function is mediation, not manipulation. Mediation means representing reality truthfully and not making things up just because someone wants to hear it.

When I sell a glass of water today, the person who is thirsty comes. But I no longer try to convince someone who isn’t thirsty. That sounds naive in an industry built on artificial thirst. But I have more than thirty years of experience in recognizing the difference between real demand, meaning when there is a genuine problem to solve, and the fictional personas who first need to be talked into having the problem.

Most entrepreneurs I know don’t need better marketing. They need a more solid foundation. One that can carry the honesty with which they should offer their products. Because marketing becomes easier and more bearable when you don’t have to keep inventing better tricks.

I am no longer a marketing expert. I am someone who has done and analyzed enough marketing to know when it becomes a lie. You don’t need to be an expert for that and it’s not a step backward either. It is my honest assessment.