Follow-up: A World Without Marketing

This is a hard post to write because I have friends in marketing. Having said that, the big picture is that the majority of people dislike marketing. It's something they put up with. That's partly why I've always felt uneasy doing marketing. It has always been a chore for me, a necessary evil. I was being rewarded for how much I could get in people's faces about my products. Probably the only reason marketing guru Seth Godin is palpable to me, is because he engages in a clever doublethink, wherein making excellent products is marketing.

If the App Store had its golden days, it was between apps 1-10,000. Back then, no marketing was required. Good apps surfaced immediately, and for a while I thought that somehow, Apple broke the formula completely. A solo developer who was skilled enough could get rewarded directly by the market in proportion to how good their App actually was.

Today, as a person who interviews iPhone developers every day, I see many brilliant programmers who tried to hack it in the App Store, but were blocked out because they couldn't hack it in marketing.

This seems somehow unfair or a situation that if improved, would be for the better good. Does the march of progress mean that those golden days could be permanent? That marketing could becomes unecessary?

I used to enjoying reading AdBusters, and one time they put together a portfolio of billboards that were torn down, revealing beautiful blue skies. A few years later:

On January 1, 2007, Sao Paulo's rightwing populist mayor made a striking proclamation: no outdoor advertising anywhere in the city. Suddenly, the city of 11 million people had no visible billboards, illegal street posters, kiosk ads, or neon signs -- not even the Goodyear Blimp could pass muster. " Within months," as On the Media put it, "the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past." The "visual pollution," in the mayor's words, was erased. The imagery, captured in a Flickr pool, is truly amazing.