Few things are as satisfying as running a business where you get to help people.
For instance, fixing plumbing issues, optimizing a company’s costs, creating apps that connect people or improve lives, creating a product that makes users feel good about themselves, or simply providing entertainment through content people love.
In these businesses, you can almost see the gratitude on your customers’ faces. Sometimes you do see it when you provide relief, joy, or satisfaction with your product or service.
But what happens when the solution you create fails to connect with your target market? There is nothing more frustrating than seeing so many people miss out on the benefits of what you created, or worse, continue to suffer from the very problems you solve.
It’s like being a doctor who prescribes an effective remedy that no one takes because they won’t listen to you.
Often, markets fail to connect with your solution simply because you didn’t engage in marketing.
But what if you did? What if you followed marketing best practices to the letter?
You did your market research, developed your buyer persona, identified their pains and needs, built a robust content campaign, a website with all the bells and whistles, put enough money behind paid ads…
And still, the response was weak.
Why? If the marketing is excellent and the product or service actually works, why do people ignore it?
The answer is simple.
Humans dodge marketing. And rightly so.
Too much of everything
We’ve never been exposed to this much content before. A big chunk of it is made up of marketing. Wix says 7.5 million blog posts get published every day. According to a 2025 article by Teleprompter, more than 720,000 hours of new videos are added to YouTube daily.
That’s a lot of content.
Regarding ads, there’s no way to know for certain how many digital ads get published per day, but a quick search suggests billions of personalized auction requests are processed daily by major ad networks like Google and Meta.
And how many of those do we consciously register? In 2016, research firm Lumen ran a study involving 15,000 ads and 300 viewers and found 35% of digital display ads received any views at all; of those, only 9% received more than a second’s worth of attention, and only 4% received more than 2 seconds of engagement. And the more content-with-ads we see, the more our mind simply stops noticing them — even when the ad content itself is more creative.
Put another way: if your marketing sounds like marketing, you’re very likely to be ignored.
You’ll be invisible.
The negative connotation
Ask anyone what marketing is and what it’s for, and they’ll probably tell you: “annoying ads, flashy campaigns trying to get my attention, and sales pitches of every kind.”
In other words, they won’t describe it as something positive. With obvious exceptions, of course, most people feel marketing is intrusive, manipulative, and untrustworthy.
This last point is crucial. The moment we think “this is marketing,” we start consuming it with a certain skepticism. Why? Maybe because we sense the manipulation.
But there’s another, simpler reason: knowing marketing exists to increase sales is enough to stop trusting its claims.
In other words, people think: “Why would I trust a campaign whose main goal is to get me to spend my money?” Marketing, as it’s understood today, is a practice associated with getting people to buy more.
No matter how much you say it helps you better serve your customers, if you do marketing and people sense it, they will distrust you by default.
If you do marketing as it’s usually done, you inevitably create an immense wall between your solution and your target audience.
It doesn’t matter how well you communicate your product’s benefits, how well-designed your ads are, or how well-produced and edited your videos are. If you do marketing, you’re already working against a negative connotation.
The inherited habit
That connotation is real. To a large extent, marketing really has focused on getting people to buy more. We’ve spent decades exposed to campaigns designed to make us spend more.
And we have spent a lot. Because of that, we’ve learned that marketing simply is that: making people buy. We don’t see marketing any other way. No matter how annoying marketing is, no matter how manipulative it comes across, or how insistent it gets, we keep doing it the same way: loud, flashy, attention-grabbing, repetitive, and insistent.
If sales drop, we pour more budget into campaigns. If people don’t respond, we make flashier videos. We post more content. We push out more stories, reels, or TikToks. If our reach is low, we jump on social media trends. We run two-for-one deals. We offer limited-edition products, for a limited time. We keep sending promotional emails, over and over. We lean on every season — Valentine’s Day, summer, Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s. We do what’s always been done to sell.
Again and again. Every year. Every single day. Ad nauseam.
That’s why people stop paying attention. Because we don’t know how to do marketing any other way than annoying and repetitive. People get sick of it. Maybe they still buy. But make no mistake — they’re sick of it.
The internal pressure
Those of us doing this kind of marketing — the kind focused on getting people to buy more — usually do it because we have to hit the year’s goals. Otherwise, we’re in trouble. Whether we’re managers at a multinational company or running a small business, the pressure is real.
To hit those goals, people will do almost anything. More events, more paid campaigns, more influencers, more “valuable” content built purely to generate leads. More inflatable tube men outside car dealerships, more product promoters.
Since we’re also consumers ourselves (someone’s target audience) we know exactly how annoying we can be when we cling to hitting business goals through marketing that does more, and more, and more. But it doesn’t matter. That’s just how things are.
Of course, there’s plenty of marketing that delights, that hits the mark, that connects. But there’s also a lot of marketing that doesn’t, and that instead contributes to an endless noise fueled by this pressure to hit the year’s targets.
The stress of having to hit them is overwhelming.
In short, a lot of people don’t respond for the same reason you don’t respond: because you can’t stand stubborn, excessive marketing that only exists to make you spend money.
But there’s another way to do marketing. One people don’t dodge. Some businesses are already doing it, but not enough. We need more.
We’ll get to it in our next article. To read it, subscribe to Feral Thoughts.
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