No Marketing Expert

For more than 15 years I helped companies sell their products or services. I had studied marketing and wholesale and foreign trade, built and ran a global trading company for 15 years, and I know my way around different mechanisms, different markets and consumers. I knew how to tell a story creatively so that people would buy. That was my profession and I enjoyed it.

But the joy in creativity slowly gave way to the question of whether this isn’t manipulation, and joy turned into doubt.

It didn’t come overnight, it came gradually over the years. I designed campaigns that invented problems nobody had, and promised wonders everyone knew didn’t exist. I thought that was completely normal. Marketing, that’s how it is. Everyone does it this way, and most industries only work this way. Everyone knows that, and I firmly assumed that nobody takes these ad texts literally anyway.

Because marketing, or more accurately communication, rests on a quiet agreement: we exaggerate, and everyone finds it acceptable. No product is as good as the advertising claims. Paid testimonials are never as honest as they pretend to be. That isn’t fraud in a legal sense, it’s something much more subtle. It’s the shifting of the line between what really is true and what sells better.

I went along with it for a long time without questioning it at all. I even thought of it as art. Not out of cynicism, but because I thought it just belonged to the job. They were artificial claims, all miles away from reality. Professional marketing means polishing reality. Honesty is everyone’s ideal, but it’s not a good business model.

At some point I started reading my own texts differently. Not as marketing material and communication between brand and customer, but as valid or not-valid statements. Why did I claim something that wasn’t true? Would I say this to a friend and really stand by it, if it were about someone taking me at my word? The answer was no.

And that was the point at which I stopped calling myself a marketing expert. Not because marketing has no place. People should know that something exists that might help them or bring them joy. That’s an important function. But the function is facilitation, not manipulation. Facilitation means conveying reality truthfully and not inventing anything just because someone wants to hear it.

When I sell a glass of water today, the one who is thirsty comes. But I no longer convince anyone who isn’t thirsty. In an industry built on artificial thirst, that sounds naive at first. But I now have more than thirty years of experience in telling the difference between real need, where an actual problem has to be solved, and the fictional personas who have to be talked into having the problem first.

Most of the business owners I know don’t need better marketing, they need a more stable foundation. One that carries the honesty with which they should be offering their products. Because marketing gets easier and more bearable when you don’t have to constantly invent better tricks.

I’m no longer a marketing expert today. I’m someone who has done and analysed enough marketing to know when it starts becoming a lie. You don’t need to be an expert for that, and it isn’t a step back, it’s my honest conclusion.