@h4kor one of my crazy ideas is to cap money companies are allowed to spend on Marketing once they reach a certain size. It would encourage a better form of decentralized capitalism and prevent monopolies
This could easily turn out to be counterproductive. It would provide an additional incentive to hide marketing in all kinds of other business activities rather than openly advertise what's on offer.
Marketing is already difficult to tell apart from other company communications, product documentation, etc. What about a company blog showing how to use their products? Is that marketing or product documentation?
The point is that "openly" advertising would be capped. That would reduce the price of doing so, making it more affordable to smaller players and removing the insane profits ad monopolists enjoy today. Plus, "openly" advertising is one of the most effective ways of advertising. Lastly, by diverting marketing budgets to non-traditional routes (charity donations, etc), the economy would benefit as money would be spread more evenly across
I wonder if there’s some sort of automatic stabilizer that could be applied instead.
Tax ad companies, and spend that money on education. The better ad companies are doing, the more we spend on education, the fewer gullible marks we produce, the worse ad companies will do.
sure, but what do you consider to be an ad company? is a newspaper that places sponsored articles an ad company? accounting for "marketing" expenses might be easier to track and at the end of the day, companies use accountants that are liable and so need to report accurately
Exactly, it’s the mechanism for exchanging information in a capitalist economy.
Conversely, in Communist systems they could never get this right. Factories were just told to produce 5 or 10% more than last year, didn’t matter if the product quality was worse or if people didn’t want it.
There was some competition amongst consumer goods producers and TV and other ads in the UUSR. High scarcity of good quality stuff meant they didn’t need to advertise but there was also an oversupply of junk nobody needed. Those companies has to move their inventories somehow since it was much harder for them to go bankrupt.
