If you don't want to go hungry, you won't try to "sell your friends" on where to hunt. You'll tell them what you know, you'll listen to what they know, and if their idea of where to hunt is better than yours, you say so, and then you go hunt there instead of where you originally thought you should hunt. You get just as much meat regardless of who initially suggested the hunt location. This is a situation that calls for honest debate, not marketing.

Contrast this with marketing. If you're marketing Nike, you don't get just as much meat regardless of whether people buy Reeboks, Nikes, or Birkenstocks. Your incentive structure is totally different. If you're really good at winning in the incentive structure of a marketing director, Nike's sales will go up, regardless of whether they're better or worse for the customers.

It's probably futile trying to argue with you since you started the conversation by, essentially, saying that you don't believe in honest debate. Marketing is the opposite of honest debate.

One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning.

Your example of the word 'sell' is one of those.

It takes the word and stretches it to a plausible but wrong new meaning. You're putting it somewhere between 'convince' and 'argue' whereas to sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency.

When I did the same thing with "marketing," it was clear to me you were abusing the term. You tried to redefine all human communication as marketing, which strips the word of its intended meaning.

Because you need to eat. You don't need a new pair of sneakers.