At a gut level, I agree with the way you both characterize the conventional sales/marketing mode of communication which has as its clearly intended goal: exchange of a good or service for your money. While I believe that no form of communication is free of intention, this one often appears to cross the line from influencing decisions to crass manipulation.

Connie makes a good point, however. People actually do have needs, desires, and ambitions and they are willing to pay money to achieve or attain them. Marketing content can help people meet these needs and realize their ambitions by letting them know what their options are. However, as you point out Katherine, this information is inherently biased to the benefit of the author: people marketing a product.

Marketing has changed in two critical ways. On the one hand, everybody already equates marketing with manipulation so companies, some anyway, have responded by becoming more open, more engaging, more “real.”

On the other hand, and this is key, they have invited people to comment freely on their products realizing full well that a third-party recommendation (a good review, perhaps, on Amazon or Yelp or one of a million different forums) can be more valuable – more influential – than any copy or content they could generate themselves.

Are marketers being manipulative when they allow for reasonably moderated comments on their blogs or sell their products through Amazon where they can’t control the comments at all? On the contrary. If education involves the free exchange of ideas on subjects of mutual interest, then that’s what the marketers making these decisions are allowing to happen.

The best thing that could come of this is that products will really just compete on quality or their specific merits and differences, not on the psychological/emotional “tugs” promulgated by the agency.

Though that raises a question. What if there actually are social benefits to using certain products? If a product not only meets a physical need (“I’ve got to wear clothes”), but also meets a social need (“Look at that suit! That guy must be loaded!”), isn’t that social piece part of what the product does?