Wouldn’t a lot of either standard best practices or cutting edge research fall under what is considered “dark arts” here? So this really becomes “you can use Dark Arts for good purposes”. Whether you should do so seems at least questionable, although I can see some arguments for it (such as when you need to use it to get rid of the effect of biases or to oppose someone else’s dark arts).
True, but if marketing is your aim you are probably better off familiarizing yourself with standard best practices than with cutting-edge research.
Wouldn’t a lot of either standard best practices or cutting edge research fall under what is considered “dark arts” here? So this really becomes “you can use Dark Arts for good purposes”. Whether you should do so seems at least questionable, although I can see some arguments for it (such as when you need to use it to get rid of the effect of biases or to oppose someone else’s dark arts).
This doesn’t seem like ‘dark arts’ as knowing who to talk to, which seems more to fall under general effectiveness.
There’s a happy medium… a lot of the standard best practices become white noise because people see them all the time.