What is Marketing

In short

Imagine you run a small bakery. Your bread is genuinely better than the supermarket's, but nobody walks past your door. Marketing is the work you do so the right people walk past, notice, try, and come back.

1. 01Even if you never sell a product, you market yourself, in interviews, dating profiles, asking for raises.
2. 02You stop wasting money on ads that don't work, because you can read them.
3. 03You spot the tricks (fake scarcity, manufactured reviews, anchored prices) before they get your wallet.
4. 04Anything good you make needs to be findable. Invisible good helps nobody.

In 2014, Apple put up giant billboards in cities everywhere. Each billboard was just one photo, taken by a regular person, on an iPhone, with their name printed at the bottom. No specs, no slogans, no "world's most advanced." Just: this picture, this phone, this neighbour. People started looking at their own phones and thinking "could I shoot something like that?" Almost no words, almost no claims, and yet it sold millions of phones. That's marketing, making the product its own evidence.

• Social proof→AI & Machine LearningSocial proof is an applied cognitive bias, same machinery you see in recommendation systems.
• Anchoring on price→Personal FinanceThe same bias that helps marketers helps you. Flagged before you buy, it loses its grip.