More often than not, in fairly diverse contexts, I’ve found myself meeting new people who ask me what I do for a living. When you work in marketing, regardless of your specific subfield, depending on who you’re talking to, it can become surprisingly difficult to explain what you actually do. My grandmother, God rest her soul, probably passed away without ever truly understanding what my work was about. All she really knew was that I had graduated from an engineering school and that I had my own company.
For a generation that lived through World War II in Romania, it’s understandably difficult to grasp what marketing even is. But as we move closer to younger generations, people with at least twelve years of formal education, and even highly educated individuals holding positions of power in private companies or public administration, there is still a deeply rooted preconception about marketing, especially about good marketing. I don’t know whether this is something specific to our local culture, but based on my experience so far, this is roughly how it goes: “You work in marketing? And you’re good at it? Aha… so you must be pulling some kind of trick to fool a few suckers into buying from you.” Even if they don’t say it outright, the look they give you communicates exactly that message.
This got me thinking. Why is the idea so deeply imprinted in our collective mindset that marketing is a business function designed to deceive customers? Is that what I do every day? Because if that’s the case, I have a moral problem, with myself. In this article, I try to briefly analyze the source of this perception around marketing, which, unsurprisingly, is based on a half-truth.
First, I want to address how opinions are formed. How do people usually form opinions about things they don’t really understand, politics or football, for example? As Daniel Kahneman explains in his brilliant book Thinking, Fast and Slow, there is a concept called the peak–end rule. Simply put, we tend to remember experiences based on the most recent moments and the most emotionally intense ones. This concept applies especially to experiences that come from areas we don’t deeply understand. Keeping this in mind, let me ask a simple question: when was the last time you felt deceived? Whether it was a plane ticket you bought at an inflated price, a ridesharing trip, a food delivery fee, or perhaps an online product that turned out to be very poor in quality, you felt cheated. Or more precisely, your expectations weren’t met, and as a result, you felt wronged. Especially in a culture like ours, where trust is at historic lows, you’re even more inclined to believe that everyone else is trying to trick you. And what do you do when you feel cheated? You look for someone to blame, of course. It’s not your fault that you didn’t research enough or that you had unrealistic expectations, no. Usually, it’s the fault of those who promised something and didn’t deliver. Who are the culprits? The marketing people, obviously. And why do we remember this so vividly? Because the entire experience was emotionally intense. From that point on, every time we meet someone who works in marketing, we automatically assume they belong to the same breed as those who deceived us.
Up to this point, I’ve described one side of the theory, the one according to which generalized emotional perceptions paint this label onto marketers. But the honest follow-up question is: nobody actually is lying in marketing? Is everything just the result of overly sensitive consumers with unrealistic expectations? No. In my opinion, based on concrete experience, there is a significant number of companies that promise various benefits presented in a distorted or incomplete way. In short, they sell the bear’s skin before killing the bear, much like propaganda machines financed by certain states.The real question is: why does this happen? And even more importantly, why does this group of marketers, who understand all the mechanisms of influence, go along with these practices?
The short answer is simple: leadership. It may sound like I’m shifting the blame again, but please bear with me. What’s my perspective? I’m a marketer, but I’m also an entrepreneur. Marketing is a business function. Its stated purpose is to help a business sell its products and services. So far, I think we can all agree. From here on, nuances start to appear.
How does marketing help a business thrive? After all, every entrepreneur knows that business exists to generate profit. Without profit, a business disappears, no matter how noble its mission may be. From this, we can deduce that marketing ultimately aims to generate profit. But we also know that marketing is not alone in doing this, sales, production, logistics, finance, competitors, and market evolution all this elements can influence profit as well. Marketing, however, differs from all the above through its flexibility and malleability. Within legal limits, we can say almost anything about our product or service. It is far harder, and far more expensive, to change a production operation or a way of working to actually deliver something better. All of these changes cost money and impact profitability.
Now let’s return to leadership. Why do I say that the main reason companies end up promising things in marketing campaigns that they don’t deliver comes from the top? First of all, a high-performing leader has a long-term, holistic vision, while a weaker leader is focused on delivering the next quarter or surviving until the end of the year, otherwise, they’re out. A strong leader understands that at the center of everything the business does is the customer, and the customer wants to receive exactly what they need. That’s why a leader with long-term vision first studies their customer thoroughly, then develops a product or service that is genuinely useful, and only then uses marketing to repeatedly communicate the elements specifically built for that customer. This sequence means using marketing to grow sales on a real foundation, not on false promises. On the other hand, a leader who lacks time or willingness to think long term and needs profit now will use marketing to say whatever is necessary to get the market to buy, regardless of whether the product or service actually lives up to those promises. If we oversimplify, in the short term this creates spectacular growth; in the long term, it’s a recipe for bankruptcy. The problem becomes even bigger when, within a market, the majority of players normalize this behavior. When everyone promises and nobody delivers, it’s perfectly logical for people to think that marketers are a bunch of liars.
But what do you do as a marketer when you suddenly find yourself reporting to a leader under pressure, who explicitly asks you to orchestrate campaigns that promise the impossible? What do you do if you have a family, two children, and slightly ill parents? Given our local culture, you probably do what your boss tells you to do, but inside, you slowly start to hate yourself. On the other hand, you remain the family’s pillar, with a stable job, at a moral cost. Sure, there’s an ideal case, which I recommend, with the caveat that in a blog article anyone can recommend anything. Ideally, you’d look for your backbone, find it, and when such requests arise, first try to understand their cause. Then, you should look for a solution that doesn’t involve fantasy promises, but rather customer-centered actions that can sustainably lift the business. With that solution, you go to your boss, make your case clearly, and tell them, briefly, that they have three options: do nothing and bury the company; promise things they don’t have and bury the company later; or get back on track and, in the long run, possibly rebuild the company from where it stands.
Only then, I believe, could you truly call yourself a marketing director. In a civilized society of the 21st century, I don’t think our moral compass should be constantly bent by the need for profit.
Beyond this, I believe there is a third factor contributing to the consolidation of the urban legend that marketers aren’t exactly the most honest people, and that factor is the abundance, or rather the oversaturation, of consumers with ads and commercial content. We are bombarded daily with all kinds of advertising, from billboards to TV and radio ads, website banners, social media ads, ads are everywhere, and in overwhelming numbers. And because there are so many, they can’t realistically be useful; most of the time, they simply annoy you. Technology, in particular, has exponentially increased the volume of ads created and delivered, often without much sense.
Trying to reach a conclusion based on the three factors described above, the sequence of events leading to the statement that “marketing equals lies” probably looks like this: a business leader makes poor decisions and ends up in a difficult situation; from there, they push marketing to produce fantastic promises to boost sales; sales increase, but people don’t receive what they were promised; they label the experience as frustrating and emotionally intense; and from that point on, they attach this label to all advertising, advertising they are already overexposed to on a daily basis.
Can we stop this trend? I don’t think so. What we can do is preserve our moral compass and use it to do our job as marketers properly, with real, long-term results. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to stand up to a boss in crisis, and it’s not easy to deliver this kind of results for a business you don’t fully control. But nobody said it was easy, so I don’t know where that expectation comes from.In the long run, however, those who choose to work on the hard side of business, those who choose environments with healthy management, will have the chance to grow and perform at their true potential. Everyone else will conform, deliver promises without caring about reality, and most likely, thanks to them, some people will continue to judge all marketers as belonging to a not-so-honest tribe.
