For more than fifteen years I helped companies sell their products or services. I had studied marketing and wholesale and foreign trade, and I built and ran a global trading company for fifteen years. I knew the mechanisms, the markets and the way people decide what to buy. I could tell a story creative enough that people bought into it. That was my job, and I enjoyed it.
The joy in that creativity wore down slowly, over years. I designed campaigns that invented problems nobody actually had, and promised outcomes everyone in the room knew did not exist. I thought this was ordinary. That is how marketing works, I told myself; most industries run on it, and nobody takes advertising copy literally anyway.
The unspoken agreement
Marketing, or more precisely commercial communication, is built on a tacit agreement. You exaggerate, and the audience accepts the exaggeration as part of the exchange. No product performs as well as its advertising claims. A paid testimonial is never as candid as it pretends to be. It is subtler than fraud in the legal sense: a slow shift of the line between what is actually true and what sells better.
I went along with that shift for a long time without questioning it. I treated the work as a craft, the ordinary skill of the job rather than a scheme. The claims I wrote were artificial, some distance from the underlying reality, and I took that distance for granted. Polishing reality was the job description. Honesty was the ideal I praised too, the same as everyone else, though I never built a business model on it.
Reading my own copy
At some point I started reading my own text differently. Instead of ordinary communication between a brand and a customer, I began treating each line as a claim, true or false, the way I would read a contract. I asked myself why I was stating something that was not the case. Would I say the same words to a friend, and stand behind them if that friend later held me to it? The answer was no.
That is where I stopped calling myself a marketing expert. Marketing still has a place. People should know that something exists which could help them or bring them pleasure, and telling them so is a real function. That function is facilitation: delivering an accurate account of reality from the maker to the person who might need it. It rules out inventing a want for someone who does not have it.
The glass of water
When I sell a glass of water today, the person who is thirsty comes. I no longer try to convince anyone who is not thirsty. In an industry built on manufactured thirst that line sounds naive. I have more than thirty years by now telling the difference between a real need, where an actual problem has to be solved, and a fictional persona who first has to be talked into having the problem at all.
Most of the entrepreneurs I know need a steadier foundation more than better marketing, one that matches the honesty their products already deserve. Marketing takes less effort once you stop needing a new trick every quarter.
I no longer call myself a marketing expert. What is left is someone who has done and studied enough marketing to recognise the point where exaggeration turns into a lie. Reaching that point needed no expert’s title. It is the conclusion thirty years in the profession left me with.