Why study marketing?

What is the point of knowing how to sell things? It just proves that nothing is real. Coke is no better than Pepsi, it’s all an illusion. I used to think I was happier buying the more flavor fresh brand, but then I found out there is a science behind it, and it’s just a way to manipulate me. I go work, I stop at the store, I buy the bigger, newer thing, then I go home, repeat. Now I’m depressed. I keep buying things because they say I will smell better and get the girl, but I know it’s not true. Why?

As I recall from my time at San Antonio College in the 1980s, people who couldn’t cut it in journalism classes switched to marketing and made more money than those of us who stayed with journalism. It’s all about the dinero.

But I want the things, but I know I’m being made to want the things by something. But I can’t shake wanting the things. I’d just want the things and not know that I’m being made to want the things. I want to just want them, like the good old days.

Did you have a Titanomachina personality transfusion?
Marketing is the art of creating a desire for stuff we don’t need. OK, sometimes they sell us stuff we need, such as laundry detergent, but quite often marketers useless push stuff on us, such as whitening toothpaste. People study marketing so they can get paid. That’s it.

Yes, he’s got into my head and I can’t get him out. I think that was his plan all along, to share his misery.

Actually I think you answered yourself in your initial post. It’s all about learning manipulation. :wink:

I find it interesting that marketing people claim they do what they do to “make the world a better place” or they believe the product they’ve been charged with the task of marketing is to “improve the lives of people.” Like when major banks relentlessly try to market a particular credit card to me, they try to frame it as “they just want me to be happy and experience financial happiness.” Marketing seems really twisted…some of it is valid, but some of it doesn’t seem like I could do it with a straight face.

I worked at a small company that was starting up a new marketing product once. 3 of us were working on a Saturday so there was some BS’ing going on. One was a young woman, who had her baby there (so 3 and 1/2, anyway). Somehow the topic of marketing cigarettes to children came up, which obviously I’m opposed to. The young and not too bright woman defended the action, saying it was the job of those people to sell that product, and they should do the best they could to increase their market. Not too long after that I changed to subject to kittens.