I think we'll simply have to agree to disagree, because we're seeing the same facts and reaching different conclusions. The polio campaign included heavy use of marketing. Its story demonstrates that marketing isn't intrinsically bad; it can be used to bad ends. And any policy separating the baby from the bathwater in this regard will, I think, be a major challenge to implement correctly without risking making something like the polio campaign illegal.
Polio vaccination had to be sold as a concept. The public had to be taught, cajoled, coerced, and door-to-door-campaigned to volunteer to get stabbed with a cocktail of virus parts to protect them from a disease that hardly ever proved fatal or permanently debilitating. They had to be told their friends were doing it, their neighbors were doing it, all the "cool kids" were into it.
There were, of course, additional circumstances (having a President that is visibly impaired by the disease, though his people did their best to hide it, certainly mattered), but the March of Dimes absolutely promoted, sold, and aided in distribution of a service. Hell, the name March of Dimes was coined as a more marketable name than "National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis" because they were trying to convince everyone to chip in 10 cents to pay for the project (https://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/eddie-cantor-and-the-or...). It's every bit as much a sell as Sarah McLachlan showing up and singing over pictures of very sad puppies is today.
(And to be clear... Thank God it worked. It's great to live in one of the decades where my fear of polio is practically nil. But the point is: without marketing, none of that was a given. People didn't just wake up one day and go "I'm going to go get stabbed by a stranger with a needle full of disease-juice..." a vast marketing campaign convinced them that was the right thing to do. Same techniques that were being used to convince them they should drive to the injection site in their shiny new Ford because walking was for suckers).
I would much sooner label 'the march of dimes' a charity and a PSA than marketing, but each to their own. Also: note that exactly those things are trotted out by the marketing people to prove that "hey, marketing isn't all evil" when actually they have to reach back decades into history for an example that people will recognize and that has nothing to do with selling un-necessary stuff, which is the thing they are as a rule heavily engaged in.
I mean, you can, but then you should probably tell Cindy Rahman, their SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, that her job title makes no sense. And the IRS that the 4.9 million-odd they claimed they spent on advertising on their Federal 990 form in 2020 was mis-labeled.
The March of Dimes is and was in the marketing business.
> actually they have to reach back decades
March of Dimes is still here. It's a modern example as well as a decades-old one. Their primary purpose all but accomplished, they've re-targeted their efforts into information, support of families in NICU, and general patient advocacy.
I could have pulled a more recent example, but the polio campaign has the advantages of lack of ambiguity, common understanding, and the historical perspective to come to general agreement that it was an more-or-less un-alloyed good thing that we can avoid getting bogged down in those dimensions.
Nowadays, I'd point to the billions spent on COVID-19 vaccination advocacy and messaging as the good marketing can do, but I didn't really want to drag the modern-era anti-vaxxers out of the woodwork.
But: you are still stuck on the same theme: health related, charities and so on. The fact that charities have marketing is by itself a negative, often enough this translates into them spending a very large fraction of their donation on soliciting more donations. And there are quite a few examples of that being the larger part of the total collected, which shouldn't really happen.
We did not start the discussion about the march of dimes or any such project, that's just a convenient fig leaf, what matters here is companies selling commercial products and services that people don't need while using armies of psychologists and a continuous barrage of media expressions to battle down the natural defenses to get people to act against their own interest.
If you want to have a side discussion that there are some applications of those same techniques that may have positive effect then you're free to do so but preferably not with me.
Like I said, you don't hate marketing; you hate that most of what is marketed sucks.
Take away the marketing and we have a world where most products still suck, and when we seek one out at random we'd be statistically likely to lay hands on something we don't need.
'You don't hate guns, you just hate what they are used for' -> No, sorry, I really do hate guns and I have a very low opinion of everything related to marketing.
Polio vaccination had to be sold as a concept. The public had to be taught, cajoled, coerced, and door-to-door-campaigned to volunteer to get stabbed with a cocktail of virus parts to protect them from a disease that hardly ever proved fatal or permanently debilitating. They had to be told their friends were doing it, their neighbors were doing it, all the "cool kids" were into it.
It looked like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1XpNTjWQAIRb_y.jpg
https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2013/03/26/20d5929c-...
https://www.neh.gov/sites/default/files/styles/1000x1000_squ...
There were, of course, additional circumstances (having a President that is visibly impaired by the disease, though his people did their best to hide it, certainly mattered), but the March of Dimes absolutely promoted, sold, and aided in distribution of a service. Hell, the name March of Dimes was coined as a more marketable name than "National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis" because they were trying to convince everyone to chip in 10 cents to pay for the project (https://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/eddie-cantor-and-the-or...). It's every bit as much a sell as Sarah McLachlan showing up and singing over pictures of very sad puppies is today.
(And to be clear... Thank God it worked. It's great to live in one of the decades where my fear of polio is practically nil. But the point is: without marketing, none of that was a given. People didn't just wake up one day and go "I'm going to go get stabbed by a stranger with a needle full of disease-juice..." a vast marketing campaign convinced them that was the right thing to do. Same techniques that were being used to convince them they should drive to the injection site in their shiny new Ford because walking was for suckers).