Marketing is perceived less as a tool and more as a tell, a sign of weakness, struggle, or even social desperation. Could this be related to class?
Spend time with Veblen’s ”Theory of The Leisure Class” and “The Culture of Contentment” by JK Galbraith, and you’ll see there’s something iconically wrong with American idealism around wealth and leisure. Both seminal works reveal wealth’s strangest effect: how it creates a kind of reality distortion field where the rich, cushioned from consequence, mistake their insular worldview for objective wisdom.
I think, a kennel club kinda snub-nosed thinking around marketing has been bred into the upper echelons, which makes up the executives who then bring this strain of thinking to advertising/business, and it’s essentially summed up in this quote from a corn ghost in the 1989 film, “Field of Dreams”:
“If you build it, they will come.”
In a conversation online the other day, someone mentioned that the C-Suite views marketing as a “dark art,“ summoning sales out of a crop circle. But I wonder, among certain strains of the “business class,” if marketing is seen as a pricey thing you have to do if you don’t have a corn ghost and you’re unpopular? The thought is, do as little as possible because if you try too hard, you look like you’re struggling.
Marketing is sales leaving the body.
Marketing is a sign of weakness if you’re not surrounded by marketing. Are rich people watching a bunch of ads, or are they paying to avoid them? They famously don’t know the price of milk. You don’t see a bunch of flyers in the hallways of a country clubhouse.
Is it so far off to think, some of this thinking is gonna leak into the business brain?
Why Marketing Could Be Seen a Sign of Weakness
In a land of top-shelf brands and luxury labels, it’s hard to make the case that the upper crust doesn’t believe in the power of marketing and persuasion. Scott Galloway has famously and numerously stated that advertising is a tax on the poor. I think the view of marketing as weakness comes from a few things:
Paying to avoid ads.
Wealth buys distance from marketing. You pay for ad-free platforms, private clubs, exclusive access. This creates a class-based empathy gap. If people aren’t experiencing marketing like the gen pop does, they start to devalue its necessity or misjudge its utility.
Thinking great products “sell themselves.”
Wealthy folks (especially those who’ve inherited or bought into growth machines) tend to conflate visibility with inevitability. (read: “The Product Delusion”) If something is good, it will succeed. If it needs marketing, there must be something wrong with it.
Marketing is associated with struggle.
To advertise is to admit you’re not in demand. There’s a whisper of “if you were really that good, people would come to you.” Which is, of course, a fantasy, but a disastrously powerful one.
There’s a performative power in effortlessness.
In luxury culture and the leisure class, trying too hard is taboo. And that thinking leaks into how business is done. Flashy marketing feels try-hard. Quiet exclusivity feels “earned.”
This Belief Trickles into the Business Class
When marketing is seen as something only needy brands or weak businesses do, the entire strategy gets deprioritized, especially by those in control of the purse strings. Because of the whispers of the corn ghost, the directive is:
“Don’t look desperate.”
That’s the aestheticization of success and hard work, not the actual practice of it, again, a theme that is hammered into a class-based truth by Galbraith. And it is deeply at odds with the real mechanics of brand growth, which we know from Ehrenberg-Bass and marketing science research:
Visibility matters.
Familiarity breeds favorability.
Mimesis (people copying others) is the foundation of culture and purchase behavior.
Step Up To The Plate
Stop waiting for a corn ghost to tell you to build the perfect thing, and stop thinking advertising is just expensive sign twirling for clowns. You don’t need to market like you’re struggling, but you do need to market like you exist. You have to reframe marketing as a memory game, not a shame game:
You’re laying breadcrumbs for future relevance, not begging for attention.
It’s not “trying too hard” if you’re building a mental and physical presence for the light buyers who won’t care about you until they do.
Rich people may avoid ads—but even rich people buy things they’ve seen before, especially if other rich people are using them. That’s mimesis. That’s marketing.
💡 What This Means Practically
If you’re working inside or with a business where this stigma around marketing exists, here’s your approach:
Reframe marketing not as a cost, but as insurance.
You don’t buy fire insurance because you’re on fire. You buy it because you don’t want to be.Appeal to risk mitigation, not enthusiasm.
Don’t pitch marketing as a bold dream. Pitch it as prudent, proven, protective. Brand salience smoothes out sales cycles.Respect the status-seeking nature of business elites.
High-status people copy other high-status behaviors. That includes the brands they adopt. Marketing is mimesis; it’s biology.
From a certain vantage point, marketing can look like weakness—but in truth, not marketing is the actual liability.
The only way brand marketing can ever take off is by building a proper runway for memorability.
Walk backwards from “The Close”….people won’t buy your brand unless they’re convinced, they aren’t convinced because they have no brand preference, they don’t know if they like you or not because the majority aren’t even aware you exist.
Market dominance is always going to beat out “favoritism,” and yet we’re convinced that being someone’s “favorite” is the way to dominate a market. Most people’s “favorite” choice is a commercially dominant default that’s been drummed into their head as being the “smart move.”
Just like the mantra behind Catch and Release Marketing says; let your marketing be easy to see, easy to try, and easily thought worth it. That’s not weakness. That’s how you actually play the game.
POSMarketing 