This one in particular grates on me. The company is in effect using you as a billboard. Unfortunately there are some types of products where this is virtually ubiquitous, even at the high end. Cycling gear is a good example.

I really just don't feel it's a big deal and I tend to avoid big brands. It's not time efficient to scrutinise every small purchase anyway when most of those kinds of products are roughly the same. I'm not going to get tricked into spending so much money on toothpaste, shampoo etc. that it will have an negative impact on my life.

Yes, I understand ads influence, but I think people go really over the top about it using terms like "brainwashing" and "unethical".

Absolutely they do, that's their entire purpose. It has various names such as 'acquired need', a prime example that gained universal acceptance being fabric conditioner.

Sugared water is another prime example, I'm sure you can name some brands and mentally picture their bottles lying in a bed of ice cubes.

From my experience, it's bad if exploited but there's little benefits of lying to/tricking people and defraud their expectations.

In fact I'm pretty sure you (and I, and everyone) have plenty of brands that destroyed our trust in them and we would NEVER buy from them again - either because you had bad customer service, or they wasted your time to deliver a bad product/experience... so it's not a good practice to manipulate and lie to people, it will only work in the short term, but it does happen.

We don't do well we betrayal.

But for example, for fine art collection, people can do it simply because they like and artist body of work and see value in it, others because it would fit their collection (because they might be trying to get a slice of a specific artistic movement), others because they believe it's where art is moving to (represents a form a progress), other because their art dealer told them it's a good investment and the artist is growing in specific circles... I've been trying to help an artist with marketing, and it's not easy at all.

It may sound like non-sense, but fine art should be more present in our lives, and surround us, even if it's for something as simple as "I like this paint"!

Which is to say, it's not.

That's the point.

There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming.

Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that.

You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.

Key phrase: more convenient.

We haven't been sold products as much as we've bought into convenience matters above all else. Marketers can market all they want. Some times they do well, others not so well. Evidently they've been most successful selling the idea that we as individuals aren't responsible and/or accountable for our (consumer) decisions.

Blame the razor manufacturers. Blame Walmart. Blame Amazon. For what exactly, meeting a need in the market? I'm certainly not in favor of these outfits, but they're not making our collective decisions either.

I honestly don't understand the confidence with which people claim this is universally true for absolutely everyone. I have no doubt that many or most people fall back on brand recognition, but it's really not that hard to avoid. To be clear, I don't doubt that brand awareness is driven largely by advertising, but no one has ever made a good case to me for why that necessarily affects purchase.

When I buy a commodity item (soap, tp. etc), I usually buy the cheapest one that I haven't already found to be lacking (or if I hit upon a particular product that I found works well for me, I continue buying that). When I buy a big ticket item, it's almost by definition worth spending an hour doing research on, and for expensive items there are almost always ample reviews and articles representing both sides[1].

[1] I'm aware that ethics breaches like undisclosed payola have the ability to corrupt this line of investigation but it doesn't have to do with susceptibility to advertising signaling.

Yet again modern capitalism is blamed for its users' lack of taste: people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items. This is the same with Tik Tok algos, tailors being unpopular compared to fast fashion and even overpriced luxury brands, fast food vs cooking, etc.

Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former.

Capitalism merely holds up a mirror to our preferences. As it turns out, we really don't like it.

Saying you're imune to marketing it's like saying you're imune to pricing, or buying things at a particular store. I'll dare to say that whenever there's an exchange of value most likely there is marketing involved, even if it was not thought that way. For example content marketing, some is designed to be content marketing, other content happens to be content marketing.. which has been done for centuries.

Simply recognizing the fact that you are influenced, and that you influence others, is already a win.

>I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product

Here alone you're saying that price is something you value (which is one of the classical 4 P's of the Marketing mix - Product, Price, Placement, Promotion). The ingredients are also chosen deliberately, especially nowadays with brands that know some people value foods without added sugars, or that are processed, etc.

So basically you mentioned 2 marketing variables that influence your decision. You might think that, "oh no, it just happens to be that those products were on the shelves/website!", except everything about those products are deliberate decisions: the marketplace, price, packaging, ingredients, even the font size for the ingredients, the list goes on, nothing is left to random chance.

>Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money.

Don't look at it like that, a better frame would be that you are indifferent to some companies and treasured by other companies. Wastage of advertising is factored in it's costs, the less wastage of contacts the better of course, but it's part of the game - just like people that were shouting in markets selling fish, where people that hate fish would eventually pass by. TV ads are a great example of wastage that was worth it.

I'm sure there are products or services you use that you enjoy greatly, either for it's practical value or simply because how they make you feel, and somewhere along the line something brought such products/services to your attention, a friend, a coworker, a piece of content, a character in a movie, even maybe an ad you saw when you were a child.

This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Thankfully you find the products that suit you, that's good marketing on their part - even if they were lucky to come across you they had to do something right for you exchange your money for their product, like a simple 5 cent price drop to be first on the list of those who sort by "Cheapest".

With that said, of course there are scumbags, scammers, manipulators, that use this to take advantage of people, just like people lie to try to get something out of each other.

It's not ignorance, it's way too willful for that.

We know about local taxes, safety standards, patent and trademark licensing and the human and ecological damage caused by irresponsibly sourced materials... but happily ignore all of it because we save 30% off the co-branded resale imports, and 80% off the branded original.

It's not ignorance, it's the unadulterated marriage of consumerism and capitalism. Calculated greed.

You don't have to buy stuff you don't want.

You just can't buy the stuff you do want without it being bundled with stuff you don't want - the manufacturers have decided there's no market for it.

Evidently it's more profitable to persuade a large fraction of people that they are “consumers”, whose lives are a series of branded commercial experiences, than it is to cater to the unlucrative number of people who object.

As ever, the problem is consumerism.

It's rarely the exact same good in real life.

(If you like a bar you'll accept higher prices because they fund the bar. If you like an artist you'll buy their merch over a different artist even if they're the "same thing".)

Of course this is true for things like grocery stores, but if you see someone doing this in real life you should assume they have a reason for it.

A lot of marketing does not seem very educational and more manipulative.

Which is why it's so important for it to be as transparent as possible.

Marketers can't brag about being able to brainwash people and then get mad when people take offence to it.

For most products, you have the choice of multiple companies Y that make/sell said product. Some might differentiate themselves on reducing their packaging. In other cases, you might be able to reduce your packaging impact by buying said product used or (god forbid) going without something you want but don't need.

Phrased as if it was a good thing.

That's the best situation to be in, but people certainly often buy stuff just because they think it will benefit them in some way.

It's worthwhile to think about the sheer marketability of a product beyond its strict usefulness. Some things are easier to sell regardless of the actual functionality.

I wish.

What’s being resold and repackaged is telling other people how to make money by telling other people how to tell other people how to make money by telling other people how to make money.

Its probably playing on some peoples notions that marketing is evil, and therefore money shouldn't be spent on it. Obviously not true, but there is a general dislike for marketing.