> my default view is that I don't want to lie or over-promise
This is the greatest prejudice around marketing in the tech community. A simple exercise you can do that debunks that frame of thought: lies are unsustainable.
Unless you're a government or a monopoly that has their predictable flow of revenue, lies aren't affordable.
You can lie and scam people, but that's not a long term strategy, because you'll burn off customers, and complains, reports, refunds will start to creep in and - unless you're in China or some country that turns their sight away from these practices - you'll be burned.
What you might think of lies is the way one can phrase a, for example, value proposition of a product: just because a big slice of applications are CRUD apps, that doesn't define them. It doesn't help anyone when it comes to perception, because that's what you have to work with - and perception is as good as reality.
You can't work without the facts, because that's what people will have at the end.
Picking on your example, there's more to a car than MPG - and even those variables sometimes are compromises. Imagine the Toyota SUV has an higher MPG because the car weights more due to some security features, and they place the SUV in the market as a SAFE SUV FOR FAMILIES.
That's a fact (in our exercise). It's also a fact that it has high MPG, but you're not hiding it either, you have to display that information and you can even justify it, but you're not spending money to tell that.
Why? Because you can only say much to grab people's attention and to deliver the right message to them. Attention is precious, you have micro seconds to snatch it and seconds to sustain it and deliver a message.
Plus you can only factor in so many variables into a decision making process, you'll always make compromises as a customer. For a lot of people MPG isn't a problem. For some, it is. That's why there's so much variety in the market.
I'm not sure I'd call their promises lies. I think there's a subtle difference between a lie and an over-promise.
I think FSD will eventually happen, but Elon is very mistaken on the time frame. He always thinks we're 6 months away from it. I think we're closer to 6 years.
A lot of tech marketing boils down to dishonest comparisons- for example perhaps Product X is really inferior to Product Y except on some contrived workload or an unfair comparison (eg Product X was configured to optimize for the workload and Product Y wasn’t). A market doesn’t see a problem with that. It’s technically not a lie, just misleading, and I think most engineers would find it dishonest.
For an example with cars, imagine you said a Toyota Camry had better racing performance in a test race than a Tesla Roadster, because the Roadster was driven by a drunk person and had only 5% battery with deflated tires. That’s what a lot of tech comparisons are like.
But in some countries the law regarding comparisons between products (in advertising) it's very strict and it can easily blow on the faces of those who do it.
That's why there are laws and regulators, to keep marketing in check, and ethical - at least within the margins of the law...
... this is one of the major problems that paints marketing as a shady practice: apparently there's no Law online, and no regulators are acting on it. In their defense, it's probably impossible to regulate it as it stands today... it's left to Facebook and Google to do part of this job.
It's very common to see stuff that wouldn't even be put on air on TV, Radio, or printed in a magazine. But since it's online, all good.
Australia has good consumer-protection laws for advertising. In theory. In practice, smaller players ignore these with impunity, and even larger players can casually play around the edges of legality and strategically ignore them completely from time to time, managing it so that in the unlikely event of them actually getting fined they probably still come out ahead.
I know of one Clevo laptop manufacturer (frankly that’s enough to find them, but I’m not mentioning their name) that has perpetual discounts, never less than 20% off, mostly 30–40% off, half of the time in extensions of the offer. They do shuffle around which particular components have a discount at the current time, which I presume is a sneaky way of trying to satisfy the two-price advertising laws, but in years of monitoring them I have never seen them advertise any units at the nominal full price. What they’re doing is clearly against the spirit of the law, though that component pricing rotation might satisfy the letter of the law, though I doubt it. I complained to them once and was brushed off.
I know of an outdoors solar/battery/&c. manufacturer that has been advertising their own line of 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ at $489–469 every time I’ve looked since last July (eleven occasions), on an alleged RRP of $1,299, more recently $899. Such a permanent “markdown” is categorically illegal. But I don’t even feel it worth complaining to them or ACCC because I know nothing will come of it.
And probably the biggest name in that style of solar/battery stuff has through almost all that time maintained a struck-out price for their 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ battery of $900, but I’ve seen them selling it at a wide variety of prices in the range $630–830, and only once at $900, perhaps to maintain the validity of the magnitude of the “discount”.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and lies are even more sustainable than that. No end of terrible products have remained on the market for a long, long time because they can keep getting new customers that don’t yet know that they’re lying. And if people catch on, just rebrand. Building on lies you won’t be the much-beloved-but-potentially-niche brand, but you’ll make plenty of money so long as you’re actually good at lying.
Your position that lies are unsustainable is, in the business world at large, naive and quite wrong. Only in very small markets do lies become unsustainable.
But just because they use marketing tools to achieve that objective, it doesn't make marketing "evil" or "all about lies" - hell they're surely also using some tech stack to have the whole operation going.
Does that make tech evil, or a vehicle to spread lies, scams, frauds?
This is the greatest prejudice around marketing in the tech community. A simple exercise you can do that debunks that frame of thought: lies are unsustainable.
Unless you're a government or a monopoly that has their predictable flow of revenue, lies aren't affordable.
You can lie and scam people, but that's not a long term strategy, because you'll burn off customers, and complains, reports, refunds will start to creep in and - unless you're in China or some country that turns their sight away from these practices - you'll be burned.
What you might think of lies is the way one can phrase a, for example, value proposition of a product: just because a big slice of applications are CRUD apps, that doesn't define them. It doesn't help anyone when it comes to perception, because that's what you have to work with - and perception is as good as reality.
You can't work without the facts, because that's what people will have at the end.
Picking on your example, there's more to a car than MPG - and even those variables sometimes are compromises. Imagine the Toyota SUV has an higher MPG because the car weights more due to some security features, and they place the SUV in the market as a SAFE SUV FOR FAMILIES.
That's a fact (in our exercise). It's also a fact that it has high MPG, but you're not hiding it either, you have to display that information and you can even justify it, but you're not spending money to tell that.
Why? Because you can only say much to grab people's attention and to deliver the right message to them. Attention is precious, you have micro seconds to snatch it and seconds to sustain it and deliver a message.
Plus you can only factor in so many variables into a decision making process, you'll always make compromises as a customer. For a lot of people MPG isn't a problem. For some, it is. That's why there's so much variety in the market.