A lefty friend was upset about advertisers who "sell us shit we don't need." To use a technical marketing term, demand "agitation." This has, of course, been a common left-wing complaint for at least a century.
My response is, look, we're all old enough to know that humans use persuasion. They do it at work, at play, in romance, in child-raising, everything in-between. The ancients called it rhetoric, today we call it marketing or politics. You may not like it but -- unless you've got a secret stash of angels -- the only way to police persuasion is by handing guns to another bunch of guys who, ironically, also used persuasion to acquire those guns.
So take your pick: liars without guns who you're free to ignore or refute, or liars with guns who you're compelled to obey and support. In the real world, those are the only 2 choices.
As a "marketer" myself, I've always had a lot of limiting beliefs when it comes to the ethics of selling. Sure, a lot of marketing is hogwash -- however, what's come to help me is reframing marketing into a way of true service. If you have a genuinely good product or service, marketing is just a tool to HELP people. Sure, there is an exchange of money there, but it helps everyone in the end.
Not only that, but many times people don't know what they want until you tell them about it. I used to sell debt collection services, and now in my spare time I sell my books, two very different products, but you sell them in fundamentally the same way. Someone has a desire that is not being fulfilled, sometimes they can't even put their finger on what that desire is, but when you explain what it is you have to offer, you see their eyes light up as they think, "Yes, that can help satisfy me." No trickery or browbeating required.
Or they shrug their shoulders and walk away, because it doesn't satisfy their desires. If only marketing was as powerful as these leftists claim! I'd be relaxing on a tropical beach now instead of sitting in my office, typing comments on Steemit!
Agree, that's the way to look at it. Either your product genuinely helps people today, or get to work improving it so it does.
Nobody "needs" anything except the immediate necessities of the moment: enough food and water to survive on, shelter from storms and predators and the like. Life would be very miserable if we only had what we "needed", and we'd waste our lives away trying to subsist from moment to moment -- and die very early from the struggle.
On the other hand, satisfying people's desires in addition to their needs, and doing it through the mutually beneficial exchange called trade, has created so much wealth that today billions of people won't ever have to seriously worry about diseases that once wiped out half the population of the planet, let alone starving or freezing to death.
I'll take that deal over the complaints of leftists with high time preferences and an inability to control their spending any day.