Marketing, legal lies?

Ok, the title may be a little harsh. Marketing is not, per say, lying. It is simply a way to present the truth in a better light.

Me, for one, I am a very picky buyer. I study products and competing products for a long time before shelling out the money, so that when I get something, I have ass few surprises as possible. Yes, that takes a bit of fun out of the purchasing process, mainly discovering your new toy and what it can do. But since I try to hang on to products as long as possible, I am in that owner-product relationship for the long haul. That means I want to know if what I buy is going to serve the task I need it to.

To make a long story short, when I buy something, I try to find out as many details about it as possible. That means first going through the brochures, the manufacturer`s site and afterwards I head over to reviews and forums. Overkill? Maybe.

Now why do I need so many sourcesof information? Because the manufacturer is not always very straight forward about what they can do. For example: Nokia says on it`s site that some of it`s mobile phones have "integrated handsfree". After some searhing and reading a User`s Manual, I realised that "integrated handsfree" is in fact, the simple loudspeaker. Now woldn`t that be straight forward? Isn`t that easier to understand?

Just like that one, I have come across many more examples. Now why is it that some guy in the marketing office decided that "loudspeaker" sounds bad and that "integrated handsfree" sounds a lot better? Not only doesn`t it sound better, in my oppinion, but it sounds confusing. Some of my friends actually asked me if the phone has a bluetooth handsfree inside it that you can take out and use. I just can`t believe that marketing is about selling products while taking advantage of the uninformed client or the one that doesn`t have the time to look up a lot of information about a certain product.

Has misleading the client become the standard now? Why not make clear staements about a product and rely on people not paying attention to details to get products out the door? The bad part is companies are not really the ones to blaim, in my oppinion. We are, because we are letting them get away with it.