I've worked in Marketing for the better part of a decade. It's a constant pain point that even in this thread people are conflating marketing with advertising. The reality is that advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department.
If you are a young/solo techie, here is some marketing advice to save you a ton of time:
- The number one source of new customers will be existing, stable customers. You make customers stable by offering tons of resources and post-sale updates.
- You would not believe how many deals I have seen lost because a founder didn't respond to a inquiry or forgot to schedule a follow up meeting. Have some sort of process in place to make your marketing-sales pipeline smooth and consistent.
- Have a specific plan for the kind of people you want to look at your company, and how you are going to get them to look at your company. Search ads are obvious but getting crazy expensive. Billboards are surprisingly effective. So is direct mail - you will never beat the ROI of sending a CTO a bottle of something fancy with a nice handwritten note.
- In person events are great. So are tradeshows. People are literally walking around looking for interesting products. If you don't get leads from these, it's probably because your product isn't interesting.
- Social media is a huge time and resource suck with limited opportunity for creating customers.
- If your product is going to make people happier/better off than the alternatives, they will be happy you found them. If you don't believe this about your own product, quit right now - this is how you end up exploiting people.
I hate advertising but I agree with almost all your points.
When I actively look for products, I don't consider it advertising, I consider it information. When I go to a market or open the store app, it's because I want to look at products. I only object when companies start trying to shove that information in front of my face without my consent.
Cultivating reputation, word of mouth, real world events... It takes time and money. It's much easier to just spam people with ads. I don't think that should be allowed.
My word of warning though - unless you are well connected, you cannot jumpstart a company by word of mouth alone. Too many great ideas have sputtered out because the founder was too proud to look for customers.
If you are bootstrapping, you need a plan from Day 1 on how to get your idea in front of new people. A Show HN post ain't going to cut it.
- Good marketers are troubleshooters. Is the problem you are not getting enough new prospects? Fix/invest in something there. Not enough trials? Tinker the problem there. Too much churn/dropoff? What are the fixes the product needs? If your marketing people can't separate out distinct problems and provide data points to troubleshoot them, get rid of them.
- Marketing strongly favors the upstart. Big companies have to saturate the channels for increasingly diminishing returns. You are forced into lower ROI activities just to feed the business. Small hacky companies can get by with a lot less. But this is also why you have such large departments at big companies seemingly just spinning their wheels.
It's incredibly common. If you are a CTO at a software company, you are getting multiple boxes of swag or gifts a week. If you check your employee handbook, it may even specify what kinds of gifts you can accept.
Generally can't do it with government employees. But marketing to government is a whole other thing.
It's much worse on the PR side of the house. Journalists and bloggers are absolute grifters.
2 is unfortunately still pretty common. Together with let's make friend with the CTO and invite him to a restaurant and pay the large wine and cocktail bill. Note that this is actually forbidden in many places like State universities and some companies (usually as they grow larger).
And is illegal in many countries, including Sweden. If you want to send for example a Christmas present to one of the customers, it can’t cost more than something like $30, and there are similarly limitations on what is considered a reasonable business lunch.
My wife freaking loves getting catalogues in the mail. We enjoy looking at specials when we shop. There are brands I have signed up for product alerts from.
It's one of those things where you ignore the kinds of marketing you like and get mad at the ones you don't.
It's a constant pain point that even in this thread people are conflating marketing with advertising. The reality is that advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department.
To expand on the "advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department" bit, marketing advertising is for brand building. That's those very expensive branded videos, banner ads etc. It's a very specific type of advertising which is generally pretty untargeted and doesn't aim at specific actions.
This is NOT search engineering advertising, which is highly targeted and typically part of the sales, not marketing department.
Literally everyone has a PR problem - Government! Tech bros! Even that little old lady down the street can be spun negatively if a journalist wants to (she's probably conservative and racist).
But if you have a problem, those things magically disappear when you are trying to solve it. No one remembers that sexual harassment lawsuit against the fire department when their house catches on fire - they just call 911.
I honestly don't care what tech bros overall think about marketing. People are still picking up the phone and asking for help.
Just mute "techbro" on Twitter if the term bothers you.
Sometimes I get annoyed that I get painted with the same brush as my most toxic coworkers, but I have the resources to cope. It's rarely an issue in my daily life.
As OP said clearly: a lot of the issues people have with "marketing" are actually issues with "advertising". I wholly agree (as someone who actively avoids ads).
There are marketers who believe their only tool is advertising. There are also technologists who believe that ads are all marketing is. Both of these groups are leaving opportunities on the table. That isn't anyone's fault, it just means these people are missing their chances.
The marketers, the people creating the advertisements, are extra responsible if they are perceived negatively since they're the people who should be most able to market themselves better. It's kinda funny, really.
My company pays me to market its products and services. They don't pay me to do image repair for my discipline. I suspect this is the case for most companies and most disciplines.
I come across a lot of crappy software. I come across a lot of crappy ads. I paint neither the software engineering nor marketing disciplines wholly negatively.
My experience with marketing comes from games. In games, if you show marketing a new game they'll tell you it won't sell. They only want clones of the last hit. Where-as, IMO, their job is to get people to want your new game, not to ride off the coattails of the popularity of a previous game.
This one thing I've always admired about Nintendo. AFAIK (totally my imagination), the game dev team makes whatever they want and then they tell marketing "YOU WILL MARKET THIS AND MAKE IT A HIT!"
Examples might be Splatoon, Animal Crossing, maybe Smash Brothers, Pikman,
Where as I've been at plenty of companies where marketing effectively says "This is not a Call of Duty/GTA clone therefore it won't sell, therefore we will not waste time marketing it".
In some ways, this is like asking lawyers what you should do for a situation to be successful and avoid court.
Some of the best can, but it’s not the way they’re generally wired - similar to Engineers and art. For lawyers, you’ll usually have more success giving them a concrete contract or scenario and asking them for all the things that could go wrong.
That, any competent lawyer will do well at. You can then go down the list, ask questions re: risks, etc. then.
For marketers, you’ll often get better results (as noted by a peer comment!) giving them something already and asking them to market it.
It’s less unbounded that way, less analysis paralysis and you kick things into the gear they are used to using all the time.
Knowing what is marketable is a different skill than marketing, in the same way engineering design and systems architecture is different than writing code.
In my experience, most lawyers don't want to go to trial. Billable hours are billable hours and going to trial is an incredibly exhausting process, no matter how mediocre of a lawyer you are or how "evil" you are. It's incredibly physically demanding and one slip-up can cost you the whole thing. You're often living out of a hotel (away from family and friends) and just living and breathing the trial for sometimes as long as 3 or 4 weeks. Much better to drag it out (assuming you're a lawyer who doesn't care about the client as long as you get paid) and reach a settlement.
Successfully avoiding a trial while undertaking a new not-yet-well-defined endeavor, like defining a new marketable product, is a LOT harder than taking an existing concrete contract and making it less contentious or settling/driving an existing case to a conclusion. That's all I'm saying.
> In games, if you show marketing a new game they'll tell you it won't sell.
And they would statistically be right, as most games don't sell.
On a serious note, though — there's plenty of marketing specialists in game industry that have a lot of experience with new and indie titles; some companies like indie publishing houses are built upon this. I've worked in one and seen this first-hand. Generalising negative statements like this about a whole profession seem like a product of arrogance.
Arrogance and lack of professionalism are what half my industry (security) works on.
Arrogance in the sales process (yes we can break your shit), and a certain level of in unprofessionalism in the delivery side (we with actually break your shit) tends to convert to repeat business with competent clients.
You can't sustainably market a product users don't find valuable.
Based on the above two, people would rather focus on pattern copy / incremental improvements vs big risks.
Sometimes, something IS extremely valuable that breaks existing patterns.
It's important that marketing is bought into why it's breaking the existing patterns. If they are, they will market it.
To your Nintendo example, I don't know anything about how they work. But you may be surprised that seemingly-disparate games may actually fit a known success pattern internally. They know their audience and what they value, and new XYZ game fits that pattern.
Does Oracle really need marketing? I thought their cash cow is exploitive contracts and markets they've captured through onerous certification requirements, such as for government work.
Nintendo is kind of the exception to the rule though. By the very nature of a game being a Nintendo game they can put out new IP and get a lot of attention organically. They can also pin it to the top of their storefront or, in the old days, force retailers to carry it and promote it.
If you are average publisher you have none of those options, so you have to either sell your game on merit or on following trends. Unfortunately most publishers choose the later as it is more perdictable.
It would seem to be the opposite in practice, though. All the major publishers who should be able to push a weird and experimental game by the cachet of their brand alone just end up making safe and derivative games. And then because indie devs don't have the funding to compete with AAA studios in the space of safe and derivative games, no-name companies end up making all the weird and experimental games.
If you're the CEO of a AAA game studio, you really just need to have a handful of tiny two-person in-house teams where you just give them 1/10,000th the budget of the most recent Far Cry 516 and tell them to make something weird.
Kind of a side tangent, but yes. I am baffled by the AAA game publishers. It is not just that they are making safe bets, it is that they cannot execute upon them to save their life. The games are objectively bad.
Every once in awhile they buy a studio and it remains uncorupted for awhile, but slowly but surely they lose their ability to make games that are fun.
AAA games before launch can be seen as high-risk speculative assets. The game gets a few rounds of investment and then when it's still not done, they go begging. Sometimes one publisher pawns the game off onto another, but internal politics equally acts to create horse-trading situations. There are attempts at cost control but they get overridden by the desire to hit every possible marketing bullet point. As the budget creeps up the desire to make back sunk costs rises, so further escalation acts as a way to stop cancellation. There's a lot of executive hot potato causing design changes, but the team's getting funding. So, in theory, at least, the game is shaping up to be "bigger and better".
Finally, the game launches, after passing through so many hands and getting a drop-dead deadline. Crunch is mandated in hopes of getting it somewhat release-worthy, but really, it's just a pile of assets that have been given little time in the oven. Reviewers marvel at the graphics and animation. Individual pieces of the game are polished to hell. The engineers get to give talks about their cool rendering optimization strategy, and the art directors and design leads likewise can talk about how they made art style or design decisions. But it's not representative of a holistic vision - it's enterprise software.
When a studio is bought, it often starts from a point of some coherence. And then the horse trading starts, and the original studio heads leave. So it just becomes another team. And it's hard to avoid that because the whole idea of AAA is to build up the assets and IP, not the teams and their ability to execute. You sacrifice the teams to get an IP, and then find a new team.
When the first PlayStation came out, I worked at a feature film VFX studio attempting a game industry gamble: all, and I do mean ALL, early PlayStation games were aimed above the age range a typical Nintendo title targets. Their/our strategy was to make a game targeting younger gamers who were being left out of the PlayStation more mature push. Well, once we had the game created (which looked amazing at the time) the PlayStation and game industry marketing firms we met were simply useless. They were the target market, they only cared to work with games they'd play themselves. In fact, I found the game industry overall to lack the ability to work on projects they'd not personally purchase. There is a huge amount of immaturity in the game industry.
In general it is a bad idea to let sales/marketing types control the direction of a company with complex internal operations. They are only outwardly focused and act like they're running a magic widget factory that makes whatever they want regardless of how the business is managed.
I am genuinely interested in this, please excuse my naivety.
My expectation would be that new Product work would, at some high-ish level, be sanctioned by company leadership. Or you wouldn't be spending weeks/months/years on it. Ideally Marketing would be involved in that leadership decision, and this is where they could raise that kind of concern. But even if they are not, Marketing's "boss" (CEO) could/should tell them they need to market it or go pound sand.
I gotta tell you though, there have been a few co-op games where my friends and I simply wanted more levels. Don't change the engine. Don't add more character items/guns.
Give us more story and levels to play in. The novelty coming from applying well known stuff to new scenario.
In non-co-op land, Half Life 3? Just finish the damn story Valve!
As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too. But most products don't reach 10x, maybe theyre only 1.1x or 1.2x - meaning small incremental improvements over whatever else is out there. I think if you can use a new tool and get "10% more of whatever" out of it - then thats still good, but the user friction you will encounter will be too great, switching costs are too high. I think this is where marketing comes in. Most successful marketing wont tell you about all the nice features, they will instead give you a feeling that using the product you belong to some higher strata of society or humanity. That is what makes great marketing. You can say its BS - but think about how the coolest products you use in your daily life make you "feel"...
Maybe we shouldn't try and impose great switching costs on society for things that are, at-best, 1.2x improvement. Marketing also tends to downplay the externalities, costs, and downsides to a new technology, because their job is to get you to buy things. In practice, I don't even think most 1.2x products even reach that in the long run once all the negatives are accounted for.
I think bullshit is technically the correct term for that "make people feel superior" nonsense. Bullshit being "statements produced without particular concern for truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth".
What if we just trusted people to decide for themselves when the 10% improvement is good enough for them to switch? Rather than, say, manipulating them via cognitive flaws so that we can fill our own pockets.
Do you remember the early apple iPod TV commercials? https://youtu.be/NlHUz99l-eo The ones with the silhouettes of people dancing and the white cord on prominent display?
There's not a single mention of what an ipod is or how much space it has or how you connect it to songs. These ads were about feelings... Not tech specs. That's what sells in the end.
As the parent you're replying to notes, this ad was bullshit, not a lie. A lie cares about the truth. It has to, in fact, follow the truth up till a specific and very carefully chosen point, and a good liar learns to maintain and update an elaborate concurrent model of the world in their head, one thread for the actual world, and one thread per each independent lie they told. Bullshit doesn't give a shit, a bullshitter literally couldn't care less there is something out there beyond them that they have to match at least roughly in broad outlines. A lie is a well-aimed sniper rifle, bullshit is a spraying gatling gun.
It's like the difference between being evil and being a psychopath, most evil people either believe that they are good and doing good (and devise elaborate reality filters to maintain that belief), or that they are good but are forced or tempted by things outside of their control into doing bad. Some might even believe they are fundamentally bad and those are either pursuing redemption (however half-heartedly) or believe that they are beyond redemption but hate themselves every second. No such inner live for the psychopaths, they just can't get their head around the idea of moral obligations, the notion of doing things even if they are not useful or favorable to you, because you would like others to do them for you if the situations are reversed. The Golden Rule is Quantum Mechanics to them. Evil people and liars are trying to win the game of being good and\or truthful despite breaking the rules, bullshitters and psychopaths can't even get themselves to understand\care about the game or its rules, let alone caring about winning or losing.
This is one of the reasons I refuse to buy Apple on principle. Aside from the practical reason of a hilariously inflated pricing and an exploitative business model, the supreme disrespect to your intellect and moral worth is their marketing, to them your're not an adult to be told factual things about the product or even amusing lighthearted jokes about the product or shown sexy women holding the product or any advertising strategy that treat you as someone of an independent desire who must be convinced or tempted into buying the product. No, you're a child who should be coddled with stories whose point is that you're better and happier than others when you buy the product. Like a cult, "join the chosen people".
And good marketing will help the 1.2x demographic discover that there's an improved solution while not worrying about the .8x demographic (or actively disqualifying them).
This thread is doomed to failure because half of the people are imagining the perfect altruistic, benevolent, competent marketer, and the other half is imagining the scummy, scam artist, and the actual answer is the tautological "good marketing is good and bad marketing is bad."
I've more than once seen a new database company grow from nothing to a serious business by being 2-5x for one narrow set of users and 0.1x-0.5x for the rest, but being sold as 2-10x for everyone. Most of their market doesn't end up coming from the people for whom they're actually a decent choice, because capturing even a small amount of the larger market is more valuable than 100% of that tiny market segment. Trying to deprogram people who've fallen for the marketing can be really frustrating, if you're trying not to be saddled with subpar crap that's going to make your life harder.
Odd comparison considering graph databases are incredibly niche wheres you could argue document is basically just relational with embedding and with a different query syntax
> As engineers, we all want to build the 10x product - the one that is so great that it cooks for you and does your dishes too
What? No we don’t. Maybe some of us I’m sure, but I’d wager only a small minority want to build a 10x product as a priority. I suspect the category is far too wide to generalize about this, but for myself (programmer and entrepreneur) I enjoy the “craft” as cheesy as that sounds. The satisfaction from pouring effort into something you can be proud of. Awesome if it pays the bills (even better if I no longer need to care about bills), but 10x w/e isn’t even something I’m thinking of.
My pet theory is that marketing and publicity as a craft is subject to an unfortunate combination of two factors: 1) successful results are hard to measure quantitatively and 2) the skill itself is focused on selling stuff.
As a result, once the market of successfully marketing products and services has reached equilibrium, marketing specialists are no longer competing and being selected for being better at selling marketable items—they are competing and being selected for being better at selling their own services to executives up to C-level.
It's easier to optimise the ability to sell one particular service to a known and relatively homogeneous audience than to optimise the ability to sell any arbitrary product or service to a broad and infinitely diverse population. Hence for instance the truism of "no publicity is bad publicity". What better way for the marketing crowd to evade the negative consequences of unsuccessful, controversial or even broadly hated campaigns?
Now I'm not saying that all successful marketing specialists follow this pattern. What I'm saying is that they are no longer at an advantage with regards to the bullshit sellers.
In the agency world, this is absolutely true. The goal is to get more work, not to do good work. Those who are good in the pitch meetings get promoted.
In an internal marketing department? Much less true. You still need people who are good at presenting and working with internal clients, but that is more based on communication skills then selling.
Yes, that does make sense. I'm sure the motivations and incentives of internal marketing teams are much better aligned, particularly if they have been established for a while.
It is true. As someone who has spent over a decade in marketing, only a small percentage really have any idea what they are doing. Most just parrot what people who know what they are talking about—it will sound good at first, but then you realize they don’t understand what they are saying beyond the surface-level detail.
This is especially problematic when you are not a marketer and hope to hire a marketer or marketing agency. The good ones, bad ones, and nefarious ones will all sound pretty much the same.
The best advice I can give if you are looking for marketing help is to find a trusted advisor. The second best is to trust the one who tells you hard truths. You will hate it when they say your product won’t sell at the volume you want in the current form, but most marketers develop a sixth sense for what will and won’t sell and often have some ways to estimate demand for a particular niche or industry.
Most agencies won’t tell you that your product won’t sell because no one likes to hear that. It actually shows a lot of honesty and directness to tell a client that it won’t work.
I've been recruiting a marketer for some time and eventually gave up and assumed the role myself and I can concur this.
The vast majority of marketers just know how to show activity but have no idea how to track, optimize and actually convert clients. Let alone find creative ways that are not just "test more ads" and "create more content".
Even simply tracking ROI across the marketing/sales funnel is too much to ask
>Most agencies won’t tell you that your product won’t sell because no one likes to hear that.
Also, I think there is incentive for agencies to say a product will sell (other than people don't like hearing it). It's a lot easier to spend $100K if I'm gonna get back $500K in sales than if I'm just gonna get back $50K.
Assume they are full of shit unless they prove otherwise. Being actually good at marketing is pretty rare. Most marketers are those with poor skills and little talent who find marketing's ambiguity a perfect place to hide and do work in a startup without having to prove results. Even worse are so-called growth hackers.
Ultimately, marketers market themselves. They may be good at it or bad at it, but at the end of the day, if they're dishonest about it, they can be successful also.
Agreed, and many of them don’t know when they are lying. It’s easier to sound really confident when you don’t have the domain knowledge to know if you are telling the truth.
My breakdown would be ~50% marketing, 49% first mover advantage, 1% actual tech. Many coins are far superior to BTC and Ether, on basically every front.* BTC and Ether are whale oil and crude, next to green energy.*
The vast majority don't have the patience to listen to what's going on under the hood. They don't have the background in math, in coding, in economics to make sound decisions amid the oceans of bullshit. And it's not reasonable to expect them to be competent in all required fields before dipping their toe in.
The tech is what interests me* - I have no significant stake in any of them.* When I try to tell people [very rarely] about block lattice such as Nano, people don't believe me.*
They say I sound like a marketer when I claim that it processes transactions in under a second with no fees.*
If I try to talk about how important decentralization is, people claim that BTC is the most decentralized (!!). Bag holders will bullshit til the day things break completely.
... I'd love to fix all this, but when I talk about it - *.
There is nothing wrong with directed acyclic graph crypto schemes but shilling nano is not a good example of 'having the patience to listen to what's going on under the hood'. Nano is able to process transactions quickly and cheaply because it makes the tradeoff that it is exceptionally susceptible to no cost or low cost spam attacks / sybil attacks - I can trivially make multiple copies of my agent 'self' and flood the network with invalid or zero value transactions, ensuring that nobody else can use the network. This in fact happened in 2021, which brought the service down globally. The only reason that doesn't happen constantly is that nano is not very widely used.
Nano now uses a 'bucket' system which works well to mitigate spam, and they are developing it further.
I don't claim that it's perfect, but it is better than most every alternative with a higher market cap - and I find that very interesting in the context of marketing.
Think about how absurd it is to claim that high fees are a feature and not a bug.
Really think about it. It's so obviously upside down.
Now think of the eco impact from mining - also often claimed as a feature rather than a bug. Real damage is being done with this nonsense.
People only take these claims seriously out of ignorance, deluged by the loud repeated claims of BTC maxis and bag holders. That was kinda the whole point of my post.
Btw - shilling? Really? No lies were told, or false claims made. You are really helping prove my earlier points though.
I don't think anyone is saying high fees are a feature. What I am saying is that the tradeoff that nano makes to avoid those fees makes it a poorly designed protocol. Low or no fees is a fantastic feature - as long as it doesn't degrade the main use of the system - which in the case of nano it certainly does.
Consensus matters, we can't just keep switching this tech. Going from BTC to ETH made sense, because BTC is too primitive & its community doesn't want to change that.
People in here are really doing their best to prove my point.
Block lattice > block chain; the numbers don't lie. Ether was and is interesting, but it is outdated.
There are other DAGs that allow for coding, so please don't make a comparison to Nano which doesn't try to be an Ethereum competitor.
Yes, consensus matters. that's why I gave "first mover" such importance in my comment. However, the tech limitations are growing every day. People can't keep burning crude all the time; and solar gets cheaper and more prevalent by the day - wait, I made this analogy already. Well, it still holds.
Why? Why not keep switching until you find something that doesn't suck? Because a bunch of speculators who were buying in with hopes of owning the entire financial system of the future are going to be ruined?
> They don't have the background in math, in coding, in economics
And for those of us that do have backgrounds in every one of these fields, we notice the abuse of formal industry terms with crypto-exclusive definitions that weaken the economic structure or flat out fabricate fantasy.
Cryptocurrencies are a great idea for a more mature civilization. We are not that civilization.
Eh, there's marketing and there's marketing. Making stuff discoverable to people who do or would want it is great. Abusing psychological tricks to try and get people to buy your product regardless of value is less great. Spamming people because surely they need to know about your super special amazing product is worthy of derision.
In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information). The reason we can’t realistically do it right now is due to marketing effort manifested into spam, which turns it into a very difficult technological problem.
I would still feel derisive about marketing as a field due to that reason. Marketing nowadays seems to focus on overwhelming the audience and hope they makes bad decisions.
This is my primary complaint as well. It's nearly impossible to find a product even after specifying the exact name and type in many search tools. Even something as simple as a bolt with a specific diameter gets flooded with irrelevant products. It's like the original Search terms are completely ignored and replaced with fuzzy results and promoted products
Or your top results are a bevy of "Best threaded bolts of 2022" articles that, suspiciously, list the same handful of products maybe in differing order and all through affiliate links.
I've run into this, while searching for a replacement machine screw in fact, and it drove me batty. I ended up just running to a few local hardware stores and then more specialized supply storefronts to solve my problem.
I don't want or need a 'related product' I need exactly this product!
McMaster-Carr is your friend here. I used it use it a lot for robotics club in high school. It has a clear interface that makes it easy to find the exact parts you need
At this point its back to the brick and mortar for me for many goods. Being able to hold an item in hand before you put money down is such an advantage. It's not as convenient, but the ways its better are worth it compared to electronic shopping these days. Some items are also just absurd to order online with the shipping, e.g. if its heavy or fragile.
Agreed. The very existence of the IDEA of marketing has depressing implications -- you are always going to see what the top bidder or the person with the best SEO wants you to see, rather than what you want to see, at least as long as players like google are king. I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd.
What's worse is the pages with the best ROI tend to be scams, so you're basically guaranteed to see scams because they can always afford to out-bid on their relevant keywords.
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd.
You mean when everyone became obsessed with beanie babies, Furbies, and got suckered into Enron / Worldcom scams?
Marketing just took different forms back then. It was physical, store-bound. It wasn't online because people were at the malls, reading newspapers and watching TV Ads. In some cases, people would listen to "boiler room" calls over their landline telephone to get pumped/dumped.
All that has changed, is that today we have centralized all forms of marketing to the internet. Instead of stores pushing us marketing at the front of the store as we walk in, we get hit with ads on the top of Google / Amazon's pages. Instead of boiler-room scams being pushed out by telephone, we get Facebook groups pushing cryptocoin rug pulls.
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s
That reminds me of Web-rings [1] and later LinkExchange [2]. It was still marketing or at least advertising, but in retrospect is seems quaint and innocent.
Conversely, many portal pages [3] were still attempts to create a walled-garden.
Yes, my personal website had 20 or so affiliate badges / buttons from a lot of the skinning and UX customization sites I frequented. The early days of wincustomize/stardock were a beautiful time
For sure. I'm good with the part of marketing that is really figuring about how to market a product. Understanding audiences. Understanding their lives and their needs. Explaining how the current products can help, and providing internal input so that future products are better. That's all productive stuff!
But as we look towards advertising and sales, it looks to me like both an arms race and the tragedy of the commons. Between companies' own websites, professional reviewers (Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc), and community discussions (Reddit, etc), these days consumer information needs are for the most part easily satisfied.
But because competitors try to manipulate purchasers via ads and sales techniques, other companies are obliged to follow suit to some extent. That's the arms race part. And the tragedy of the commons is that so much of the information space is filled with stuff whose information value runs between low and negative. Another commons that its harmed is the ethical one. With so many people whose jobs depend on manipulation to one extent or another, it makes manipulative behavior more generally ok.
I think you're also right about push vs pull. Push systems so often have pernicious negative side effects, and this is no exception.
I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer could achieve their goals, even if that meant sending money to a competitor.
A pretty typical example would be Cognito, which is just mismatched with a lot of use cases. Referring someone to Auth0 just made sense a lot of the time.
The view of marketing internally was also not great.
Sure, not all sales is the manipulative kind. What you're describing sounds like the nice part of the "consultative selling" end of sales. And I'm sure it works well for a market leader with a huge brand. But it has that name to distinguish it from the more common sort. The used car salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross side of things.
Long ago a friend told me about a meeting with a very successful serial CEO where the topic was hiring ad sales reps. The famous guy said that they needed to find people with a lot of personal debt, because salespeople needed to be absolutely desperate for the commission checks to really go out and sell. I suspect that sort of thinking underlies a lot of the problematic sales behaviors: desperate people do desperate things.
But I think the distinction between push and pull is not so clear. When I want to pull information, at some point I have to query the world (because I don't have direct indexing into the world's knowledge). The response to that query is bound to be a powerful push of some sort, purely evolutionarily speaking.
I think that might have been true once, but I don't think it is now.
If I make a thing, I can put up a web page about it. I can ask Google to index it. I can put my product on Amazon with useful keywords. I can get myself in directories. I can go to trade shows. I can put a press release on PR Newswire.
None of those are push actions in the sense that I am intruding on recipients and trying to badger them into doing what I want. They're just all making offerings in a pull-compatible way such that when people with needs go looking, they will find things.
The last bit makes me think you might be using "pull" in a metaphorical sense, but here I'm using it in the Lean supply chain sense, which is about producer and consumer behavior.
Lean supply chain is maybe not the best analogy, because suppliers are limited, their properties are known, and deals and optimizations are made in advance. Knowledge foraging is very different in that knowledge supply is constantly shifting and basically infinite, and by definition you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
You can request your page to be indexed and your product to be listed, but so can a million other suppliers, so we return to the problem of how to prioritize and distill information when someone asks for something.
I'm not saying the supply chain is the best analogy. I'm saying that in that context, "push" and "pull" have very specific meanings, and that's the one I'm using here.
I agree that distilling information is challenging. Challenging enough that places from Google to Wirecutter to Consumer Reports make good livings from doing that. But advertising makes that problem worse, not better.
I agree in general but there is also a lot of value in reaching out to someone and helping them decide if/when they need it. THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future.
Sometimes, people are lazy and unless they have hair on fire problem, they don't actively look to solve their problem. However, if you reach out to them (considering you did your homework on them), there is plenty of value in that. We have won customers for our company doing that and there is no need for coercion of any sort. You just need to start a conversation and truly go with a consultative approach.
> THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future.
That's maybe true in theory. The point of practical marketing is to make people think they have a problem that you have an extraordinary solution for. Sometimes that is true, but the vast majority of the time the problem doesn't even exist, and even if it did, the product wouldn't do anything to solve it.
Basically, penis enlargement pills are the quintessence of marketing.
Indeed. I'm not sure talking about some idealistic form of marketing is any more useful than talking about an idealistic form of government where we get rid of all laws and just have people do what they're supposed to do. Sure, such a thing would be nice. It also doesn't happen.
The goal of marketing is to get people to buy something. It doesn't matter if they need it or not, it doesn't matter if there's a better option out there. The goal is to get people to buy. Considering most people don't need most products, and even when someone does need a product they're usually choosing just one of several available options, we can surmise that the vast majority of marketing is trying to get people to buy something they shouldn't be buying.
I would say that you've misunderstood the sprectral nature of marketing. Yes some marketing is immoral, but not all of it is. It's not black and white.
Charity advertertising or B-corp marketing would be on the other end of your spectrum. I still think they could also be put down as the "quintessence of marketing".
How do you imagine people pull that information? You still need to be “findable” when someone is pulling that info. You still need to convince them that what you are offering matches their need. They need to be convinced you are better than the other 4 other things they found that might also match their need.
Can’t resist quoting David’s Sling[1] (not a masterpiece of philosophy by any means, but makes some good points):
> We don't want to destroy advertising. We want to destroy manipulative advertising. We want to eliminate the kind of advertising that persuades the listener to buy in spite of the best information, rather than because of it. We want people to filter the informational content from commercial advertising—and all too often, when an advertisement is run through an informational filter, nothing is left.
The adversarial approach is the problem. This is akin to the difference between a jury trial or televised debate and an academic argument: neither permits outright lies, ideally, but in the latter intentional cherry-picking is (or should be) disqualifying whereas the former just dumps two opposing cherry-pickers in a bag and lets them fight it out. (Not coincidentally, an academic argument doesn’t require an audience.)
I’m not entirely sure that advertising, like law, can be different, because it may simply be impossible to do better when the participants don’t trust each other to act in good faith. But it’s also no wonder that the result seems revolting when a large portion of your identity is centred around seeing things as they are and not as you wish they were. In any case, defending manipulation and cherry-picking requires an argument (such as this one) stronger than “you still need to inform buyers about your product”.
(If you’re talking about convincing rather than informing, you’re already assuming the conclusion.)
“In an ideal world” that info would be collected, organized and accessible to all, alongside usage/performance/satisfaction data.
Gp is right, marketing is horribly inefficient and everything about it’s current configuration is toxic because it seeks to influence by stealing attention, stealing time, stealing memory, spreading selective (dis)info and manipulating you into buying things.
We’re just unfortunately pretty far from that ideal world.
I think people look at marketing and see all the bad examples.
But nearly every product you use has a marketing budget and the only reason they are around is because they spent that budget.
To me, marketing is a sign that you are serious about your product and you are willing to spend a lot of money to promote it. It’s not a sure sign of a good product still but there’s no such thing anyway.
In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin. see: all the unmarketed direct-from-China clones of more or less the same product on Amazon with weird brand names
> In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin
This is still very much the case. Marketing is a signal of exactly one thing: marketing budget. At least with the anonymous clones, I can be somewhat certain that when my friend says “yah I got a pair of running shorts from [insert random company here] and they’ve been pretty good so far”, their decision was made on the basis of their direct experience because that’s all they can go on.
Sure, it’s still the case but my point that it’s not anywhere nearly as bad as it is on Amazon.
I can at least navigate a world of differing advertising budgets. I can’t even begin to navigate an Amazon listing of copy-cat products or even worse, an AliExpress search result.
I had part of my comment responding to this point, but I wasn’t sure how to best phrase it so I cut it off.
I don’t believe for this to happen enough at any frequency to be a valid reason. People usually knows their pain point, and go to great length trying to address that (normally spending a lot of time due to, well, spam-ish marketing). And to be frank, most products are not game-changing things that magically solve a problem no thing previously could have solved. People are already using tools and solutions for their problems, and if they are looking for a better thing, they already know which tweak it needs. They just can’t differentiate the solutions between a sea of junk marketing.
Another way to phrase it: marketing identifies with words and examples a problem that you haven't been able to isolate for one of a dozen reasons from inattention to time crunch to insufficient expertise in the problem domain--so they can sell you the solution.
Sometimes, anyway, on the last part. There is marketing (as anyone who's ever studied advertising) that doesn't even try to sell you anything because there's value in the knock-on growth of awareness and an expanding or top-of-mind market (the canonical example being Campbell Soup's "Soup Is Good Food" advertising campaign).
Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.
They are not - much of the time, they use similar technique, they are just enhanced by the game environment.
It's not all pure endorphin though. For example, the game shows you that you can add up to three gems to get better rewards from some activity. When you go and buy those three gems and add them, the UI changes, showing you can actually add up to 10!
Or, all of the prices in the store are very carefully calculated so you have to buy more of the in-game currency than you actually need - an item you are likely to want may cost 20 gems, but you can only buy bundles of 17 or 39 gems, for example.
Sure, the endorphin rush is what makes you want the items to begin with, and there are aspects unique to the game design that encourage that. But there are a lot of other aspects of the game that are designed to confuse and convince players to spend more than they'd like.
You're totally right in your analysis. I'm not disagreeing with you at all about what these genuinely abominable games do, just the attribution of it. "Marketing" is a term of art; it means something.
With respect, you are hiding the ball. Those two terms are not synonymous. Some users can experience an endorphin flood from achievement, not merely excitement through play, which is probably more analogous to "fun". What these designers have learned to do, however, is establish through the game's ephemera (art, sound, animation, number-go-up etc.) a direct connection between endorphins as achievement and spending money. You spend money, you get the hit. It's a straight line.
And that, yes, I will call "downright evil", because it is exploitative abuse of the human firmware for mere profit. Developers of slot machines are excoriated for the same thing; there's no reason that virtual ones are any better.
Do you think gambling addicts are having fun? Because when I stepped into the casino at 2pm, nobody looked like they were having fun, and the slots certainly weren't fun, despite all the flashy lights and sounds and manipulation around payouts.
I know sugar is bad for me, but I ingest it anyway. Why? Because I like the taste. The same for coffee and alcohol. The same goes for every other self-destructive behavior I indulge in.
I like the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked because I knew I'd like it a lot, and would not want to quit. Smokers I know like smoking.
If we look at something like a Netflix sales pipeline we have:
Marketing that arranges interviews with stars of their new shows on new channels and on youtube and gives TikTokker preview screenings and merchandise and proposes pieces to the New Yorker and the NYTimes on how deep the script is etc..
Advertising makes sure that when you search "that new show staring XX from the NYTimes" they find the right thing
Sales takes the visitor to the website and tries to turn them into a customer.
It's the C-suite, mostly the CEO and maybe the CFO and the revenue team that decides "we will offer subscriptions".
So it's sales, not marketing the convinces people to part with their money, and it's the company management that decides on subscriptions.
(And I'd note that I prefer a subscription model for Netflix to one-off payments.)
No, it's not. It's sales, and a bad and (in the long run) self-defeating mode of sales at that. Sales and marketing are different disciplines, with different strategies and different success criteria.
> > And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing.
> I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas.
Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?
None of those interest me, and so I don't subscribe. None of the things I subscribe to I consider terrible. I can't imagine why you'd choose to subscribe to something that is objectively terrible for you, or, even worse, renew such a subscription.
I think that we, as engineers, need to remember that this is what engineers created. Marketers told them what they wanted in terms of technology and built it, for cash.
Not pointing the blame, but the state of dystopic state of marketing is due to symbiotic relationship between makers and creators.
I don't have a solution, but I'm not sure laying the entire blame at sellers and marketers is correct.
I'd disagree with that. Engineers were told what to do or they would lose their jobs by the business people who had their ethical center removed as part of their MBA program.
> In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information).
I think we as engineers are biased to think that people can/should pull information out of the ether and then reason about what's best for them by rationally going through the pros and cons of a product. The thing is, not everybody acts and thinks in that way. Many people (even engineers) are more likely to be swayed by emotion and stories, hence marketing.
However, I do think marketing has gone overboard nowadays. Every possible place you look or listen is filled with advertising. I've started reading books again in the past few months and one thing I love is knowing that when I turn the page, there isn't going to be a distracting ad trying to vie for my attention.
I think it’s a technological challenge. Getting the information you need, when you need it. It’s semantic search, squared. A whole sequence of challenges:
1) Understanding what the user wants and needs without him needing to type out the full context.
2) Having a database of all the world’s information extracted from sources.
3) A search algorithm that brings query and data together in the way the user expects, including ranking the results.
We have marketing because such a system does not exist. (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.)
> (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.)
This +1. Essentially, what we would need is mind reading abilities to be able to put the information in front of people exactly when they needed it. Said system would also need to perfectly analyse the economics so they can be sure that they can afford the information.
The spread of marketing and sales through the digital world isn't going anywhere while new products and services are being created. It can't be automated perfectly, and while it can't be automated then there will always be ways to rig and game the systems that we engineer.
You can rig the game on vague claims. You cannot rig it on facts. A 600 Watt solar panel is 600 Watts. Only most buying criteria do not have measurables attached to them. And even if they have, tech is terrible at filtering for them. Search Amazon for linen pants and most results you get will be made of cotton.
Searched Amazon for linen pants, 2/20 were cotton, most others were made of "cotton linen". Then googled cotton linen. Turns out its a blended fabric that avoids the disadvantages of both:
https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advant...
Most "linen" material is blended. So actually turns out Amazon is inferring what you really want.
The "facts" that people need in their products are actually really difficult to determine. People don't want linen pants, they really want cotton linen. And for the 600w solar panel, what other criteria does it boil down to? I think is the reason there is no decent standard for product categorisation, there is literally too much to quantify and the consumer won't/can't be bothered to navigate such categorisation.
In an ideal world, people would also be introduced to things they are interested in. I don't think people ONLY want to pull info.
Do you figure what you want to watch and then open Netflix? Sometimes. People also open Netflix and see what is available before deciding.
In fact, even determining what to watch then opening the streaming service relies on having a concept of what streaming services have been marketed to you.
Spam is a problem, but that's not the reason why we can't "retrieve" good information. That's just not how humans work. We are lazy. We grab either the thing we know or the thing that seems easiest / lowest risk. Hardly ever do we change our minds, even if a great product is available. We're very emotional and easily influenced by many distracting factors. Research is hard, and information is not easily available (and never will be).
Marketing is in effect good communication. It's much more valuable than a good product, because we as humans are en-large lazy and good marketing bridges that. However, a good product plus good marketing are unbeatable. The Microsoft's and Oracle's of the world won not because they had the best product (they didn't), but because of great marketing.
Many of our favorite products received significant funds under the status quo. (and many of those developers are present on HN) Once we change the equation for investors, we will see a different funding situation.
it's not a technological problem at all. it's a sociopolitical "problem", of wanting to influence others for personal gain. it's more practical to consider this an axiom of the human condition to be channeled rather than suppressed (much like greed in relation to capitalism). we'll never be rid of the desire to influence, and more extremely, to coerce, others.
you can invert the perspective and think about ways to obviate the core need for marketing, which is to match idiosyncratic needs with pre-determined solutions. then you could apply technology to that aim, for example creating a search engine than anticipates all your desires (google's ultimate goal). there are dystopian traps all around though, so it's not clear that technology is a net-good approach.
I'd like to see the results of a country banning advertising entirely, except for a few opt-in experiences like trade magazines. there would obviously be initial downsides, but I'd be really interested to see how (or whether) the artistic creative equilibrium reasserts itself. government investment? more paid services?
There's a name (that I forget) for the concept that there is no system of law that cannot be gamed. Successful players of the game always emerge, and eventually gain and abuse power.
I agree you're always gonna have the 5% that game the system, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. yes some murderers/rapists/thieves/corrupt politicians/etc get away with it, but it's still worth having the law against them
I'd be much more concerned about making advertising cool and retro and underground
very possibly, but I think possibly not too. if the government instituted huge grants for the arts and media - something they may have to do to sell this radical idea - the effect could be the opposite
obviously in a democracy those grants are always at the whim of the day's government
if we assume that doesn't happen, it would certainly screw over the little guy
The reason most young engineers think this way is 1) they think their work is self-evident and doesn't require demand creation, 2) their management does not engage with marketing and therefore can't convey the value down, and 3) confuses "growth hacking" and "advertising" with the broader work that marketing supports.
...and for the records, they're completely justified here. They have a lot on their plate as a new engineer and this is not an area that has immediate value to them.
"If you experience any ethical problems with [marketing] remember the [marketing] motto 'were not screwing the customers where holding them down while the Sales people screw them.'"
The main issue I have with capital M Marketing is that it is very much about creating demand ex nihilo, not matching with already existing demand.
I often think of [former French media CEO] Le Lay's 2004 take on the role of media w.r.t. advertisement: it's about selling "available human brain time."
Marketing is about filling that void and entice consumption. And it rings so much truer nowadays with social media.
For some religions, and a number of athiests, instead of a little devil on your shoulder, it's a tiny marketing person, telling you you're not good enough, you're not safe enough, you're not happy enough.
Opposite the marketing person in the black suit is a marketing person in a white suit telling you that all you've got to do to be good enough, safe enough, and happy enough is to drink the Koolaid[0] and kiss Hank's ass[1].
If you work in pure marketing (like an ad agency) you also don't generally get to pick what it is you're selling. You pitch to everyone and sell services to the highest bidder. Sometimes you get lucky but most of the time you don't.
> If you work in pure marketing (like an ad agency) you also don't generally get to pick what it is you're selling.
They're mercenaries, and mercenaries have a choice. "Oh no my boss said I have to advertise these cigarettes and I don't have a choice because... I work for this agency" Just walk out of the office and go find an honest job.
A conscripted soldier might be said to have no choice, but mercenaries do. Marketers do. They chose the money.
> They're mercenaries, and mercenaries have a choice
Really? Do you consider yourself a soldier of fortune on the basis of what you do for work?
If marketers are mercenaries, what does that make Google and Facebook, who wouldn't even exist without their money-spinning ad products? The Axis of Evil?
There is no way to meaningfully separate latent demand from induced demand. It's a distinction without a difference. Many customers don't even know what they want until marketing shows them what's available.
If capitalism stopped at "let's just meet existing demand and nothing more", we wouldn't have had the Industrial Revolution.
Also, how do you differentiate between "organic demand" vs inorganic (i.e. coerced from prior marketing efforts) when estimating what "already existing demand" is?
I have a lot of respect for carmack but this sentiment is very tone-deaf.
Maybe he doesn't experience the web and real life the same as me, I don't know. But honestly I don't see any problem of not knowing about new valuable stuff, I DO see a problem of knowing about every inane fake scammy deceitful manipulative useless thing without wanting to.
How do you think your trusted colleagues originally found out about the stuff they recommend you? Even if they searched for it, SEO is marketing too (no doubt the search engine listing would be a marketing optimized webpage).
I'm pretty sure I found out about FreeTaxUSA through ads. The HN submissions for Notion seemed promotional to me and it's how I found out about it, I'd also struggle to think of how Notion would have been discovered if a marketing or sales team did not make efforts to spread mentions of it. GitLab markets pretty aggressively on HN (or at least they used to) which is how I found out about it too.
> How do you think your trusted colleagues originally found out about the stuff they recommend you?
Probably other colleagues. I've been doing this a long time and the only 5x tools I can think of are things like git and Linux (if it counts as a tool), which probably didn't have much marketing behind them. Maybe IRC? It may have been 5x better than the BBSs I was using.
Tools like Notion seem to be more like 1x or maybe 1.1x compared to plain text files or Google Keep (which itself is also incremental).
Ok then I'll have to ask how those other colleagues or those other IRC people originally heard about those products, ad infinitum.
Things like git and Linux were marketed, they just weren't marketed by professional specialists in return for money. Torvalds was out on mailing lists intentionally promoting his creations. For-profit startups will do this kind of informal marketing too, even technical founders will initially try to talk up their business amongst their circle of friends and associates.
Without someone making a deliberate effort to tell people about new stuff, it's unlikely people will just magically know about it.
That would be true if my thoughts & commentary were available as a product, but they're not. If I said "if you liked what I have to say, get my free or paid eBook that has my thoughts/commentary" then yes that would very clearly be marketing.
This might also be true if my profile or skills were being marketed through my commentary, but I'm anonymous. Others on HN submit commentary and blog posts on HN with the intent of promoting their profile as a consultant or leader. Profit-driven corporations also do this, there's basically no non-altruistic reason to share any of their proprietary knowledge except to market their pedigree to engineers they might hire or customers they might want to impress.
Then how did the YouTuber or course creator originally hear about the product? Unless a technology is already well known from other marketing channels, it's unlikely that unaffiliated people will just magically know about a new product.
Are you really so unimaginative that you’re going to follow the trail and at every point say “but surely THIS is where the marketing occurs!” without considering alternatives?
It doesn't matter how good the product is if I'm not getting paid enough to be able to afford it. It's easy for John Carmack to see "incredible value all around"; he's a multimillionaire.
There's a lot of awesome stuff I don't know about, but I also hate being actively marketed to. My web preferences are HN and a select set of Subreddits (and where those point me.)
I am glad because I tend to buy all of the shiny objects that catch my attention. On the other hand, there's a lot of cool things I am missing out on because of my lack of engagement on more things that just my very focused hobbies.
The problem is that the value of products and services is distorted and the highest margins that can buy the most marketing are not the products that offer the most value. What good is all the value if the knowledge about it is hidden by more powerful marketing.
It would be a game changer if Carmack could convince Facebook/Meta to create an advertising market that would allow people to become aware of that amazing value. Meta has the power to structure their prices in a way that advertising is actually helpful.
I am reminded of the OpenXanadu submission [1], where every referenced text receives a micropayment. Could value transactions become so frictionless that we change the way we interact?
Once you work with good marketing people, it becomes clear that most are terrible, or worse.
I once worked with a "marcom" (marketing communications) person who was absolutely gifted. Completely remade the company's image with branding, copy, and misc materials. They some how created tasteful, engaging stuff with a very small budget.
I once worked with a genius "bizdev" (business development) marketing person who worked magic. Surveys, determined market size, competitive analysis, turned some cranks to magically determine price points, budgeting, etc. All the stuff that feeds into sound (quantifiable) strategy and product planning.
Older me tries (struggles) to not denigrate other professions, just because most of the practitioners are bozos.
I'm a big fan of marketing as a consumer. Yes, it's mostly terrible and abusive, but also one of my all time favorite tech purchases came out of seeing an ad for it (my comma.ai running openpilot). That device has changed my life so drastically that any car purchase I make in the future (new or used) will begin by looking for cars that support openpilot.
That seems a big post hoc ergo propter hoc to me. I'm glad that you found something you're happy with. But in a world without advertising, you can still find things you need, even novel ones.
For example, I got a Garmin sports watch recently, and one of the reviews I found was from DC Rainmaker, who is exactly the sort of detail-oriented obsessive I love reading reviews from. That got me to read some of his other reviews and I discovered that there's now a whole category of bike radar units that let you know when somebody is overtaking you. That's amazing! When I return to cycling, I will absolutely buy one.
Does that mean I have to be in favor of all blogs? Or that my life will be worse if that blogger stops reviewing? Definitely not. I could have learned about this product in many other ways. Bike stores! Bike forums! The manufacturer's website! Other cyclists! Review sites! Bike magazines! Etc, etc.
> But in a world without advertising, you can still find things you need, even novel ones.
Sure, eventually. Maybe. But I'm glad this information was pushed to me when it was.
> I could have learned about this product in many other ways. Bike stores! Bike forums! The manufacturer's website! Other cyclists! Review sites! Bike magazines! Etc, etc.
It amuses me that at least two of the examples you listed are just other marketing channels by companies (magazines and their own website) and marketers definitely work in forums, review sites, sending information to stores, and other cyclists most likely learned about it from marketing too.
That's the age old Hacker News fairy tale of the "fair and balanced reviews" approach to marketing.
Businesses don't need to advertise! We'll find their products and generate word of mouth! Yeah, I'm sure people who put their livelihood at risk by starting a new business are going to entirely trust that to happen.
Look, there's a lot of marketing scams. We know.
But until someone here stops whining for a minute and explains to me how they would start a business with nothing they would call "marketing" I'll keep being very dismissive of clueless engineers who could not sell something to save their lives but who happily work at fucking Google (or something that feeds off of it) and criticize whole disciplines they've never practiced or studied.
I am also glad you have something you like. But unless it's the only way you could have found it, it doesn't tell you much about the necessity of advertising.
As to magazines, I was not referring to the ads (something not all magazines have) but to the content.
In a world with ads, do some people learn about things through those ads? Yes, I never said otherwise. But my point is that in a world without ads, everybody would still learn about new products. Indeed, they might learn about them much faster without incumbents trying to manipulate the markets.
> I was not referring to the ads (something not all magazines have) but to the content.
I too was referring to the content. Most magazine content is influenced by marketing teams.
> But my point is that in a world without ads, everybody would still learn about new products.
And my counterpoint is, I'm not so sure. When you launch a new product, how is anyone supposed to find out about it without marketing? Marketing isn't just ads -- it's also product placement, reaching out to buyers for stores, reaching out to vendors, magazine writers, and lots of other non-ad activities.
I'm mainly talking about ads here, which is what you were celebrating. I agree there are other kinds of marketing. Many of which are much less manipulative.
And I already listed some ways that one could find new products without ads. You have listed some too. It looks like you're well on your way to imagining how a world could work without ads.
That DC Rainmaker blog sure looks like advertising. There's affiliate links, coupon codes, and even a custom ad platform [1]. I'm not suggesting it's a bad thing, but DC Rainmaker is most certainly "marketing".
It does sell advertising, but it is not advertising itself. Note that he also offers subscriptions. So it's basically a one-man magazine of the specialist reviews variety.
It's like the reverse paradox of AI: when marketing is good, it's not seen as marketing. Think of people lining up to see Steve Jobs' keynotes.
We also underestimate the power of marketing, even the in-your-face annoying kind. I lived in Japan as a teen in the mid-80s. Even today, when I don't know the words to a song, I use the words from Calbee potato chips ads of that time that I barely understand, yet still remember nearly 40 years later.
This is why it's so important to defend our sanity using things like ad-blockers. Sure, our brains have compensated to some extent with phenomena like banner blindness, but it's not enough.
Some important context is that this tweet comes from John Carmack, "Consulting CTO" for Oculus/Meta VR.
Oculus fairly recently got a lot of criticism for laying out its plan to introduce an advertising API inside of VR experiences. Many of the early-adopting developers actually pulled out of the pilot because the backlash was so strong.
He chose to bolt himself onto the Facebook monster, so he loses all respect from me for that. You can be the smartest person in the world and still do stupid and harmful things.
The world would be better if he did nothing, rather than making the Oculus platform more competitive. I think I'd rather see VR struggle to survive than Facebook have a de-facto stranglehold on the ecosystem.
I'd have much preferred something other than Facebook, but it can't be denied that VR needed a lot of money to be anywhere near decent.
I've got all the Oculus hardware starting from the DK1.
* DK1 is 100% a proof of concept. It's not suitable for anything but really primitive gaming.
* DK2 is the bare minimum acceptable to play games with. You have to squint at critical information in Elite. That was using a Galaxy Note 4 screen, from a high end, expensive phone.
The modern tech is absolutely critical to giving it an enjoyable experience. Good controllers, excellent tracking without having to place cameras around carefully, high enough resolution that games can actually show text to the player.
I couldn't find any recent news about this -- the most recent article I found is Oculus' blog post from June 2021. So I don't believe this particular tweet is providing cover for any recent decision, but the implication you are making (that Carmack has to provide cover for the advertising efforts of Meta) is probably accurate.
"Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does."
― Steuart Henderson Britt
"Marketing is a zero sum game. You only compete against the marketing of your competition. If no one would market, the result would be pretty much the same. You kind of need it, but it doesn't realy CREATE value." (https://twitter.com/ViconDev/status/1551683678446690306)
Marketing creates "value" for the people doing the marketing. It doesn't create value for the intended consumers. At best they buy something they hadn't heard of and hadn't realized they wanted/needed. At worst, you're manipulating people into giving you cash in exchange for something they wouldn't have otherwise bought.
A lot of the takes I see here are from the perspective of the company, and I absolutely agree that if you run a company, you need marketing if you're going to compete. It's just a shame it has to be that way. If marketing (and especially advertising) didn't exist, we'd have the same situation we have now, except that people wouldn't pointlessly stretch their finances to buy things they don't need.
It's funny how Carmack realizes that there's so much value that we're just missing, and doesn't realize the WHY of us missing it.
We can't hear about it. There's a cacophony of self interested black hat actors blasting our communication channels with worthless noise. The moment any medium becomes an effective communication channel for valuable things for the wider public, it will be targeted by those self interested black hats for their own gain.
And to be clear, this framing is assuming the best possible motivation of marketers. That they want to inorganically promote their product. When in reality they will lie, manipulate, and insult the general public if it shows statistical gains. They'll play on your fears, or even give you new fears, if it shows statistical gains.
I hated advertisers when I was younger. I'm older now. Still hate them.
Yup, I'm perfectly aware of how valuable it is to a business while absolutely loathing marketing in general. The ROI is clear, but so is the fact that I value my own time and sanity and see marketing as a clear attack on my peace of mind.
There is an aspirational claim of marketing: it's trying to raise brand awareness and make sure customers know that your product is an option when a customer decides to purchase a product in the segment (i.e. When a consumer needs to replace their knives we want to make sure CutsAwesome is on their brand radar)... but marketing in the modern world is much more about creating demand when there was none ("Feeling depressed and lonely? Well drinking our beer will surround you with attractive people!").
I think consumer oriented marketing is an externalized cost on society - we are lowering everyone's productivity so you can sell three extra cans of coke and it's hurting us economically.
You're mostly describing bad or poorly targeted advertising. It's not only a cost on society but also a huge and largely avoidable waste of the businesses' resources. It's frustrating to see so many businesses squandering their limited promotional resources on poorly targeted advertising that is certainly under-performing, if not actively damaging their brand.
It keeps happening because too many rank-and-file marketers are incompetent at their jobs and too many business owners don't understand how to effectively measure and manage the performance of the marketing department.
I think you are conflating marketing with advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing, but wouldn't include things like:
- Writing clear and effective home pages (e.g. the Get Started button is the most prominent affordance on the https://reactjs.org/ homepage)
- The design of that homepage is marketing. Have you ever felt more comfortable using a product that has a nice website?
- Engineering blogs (e.g. the https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ seems to make it to the HN homepage every few months... they aren't just writing this stuff for fun)
- Making your product easy to get started with isn't strictly marketing, but letting people know that it's easy to get started with sure is (e.g. good documentation)
- Having a good pricing strategy is marketing. (e.g. make three tiers for different customers, but try to steer people to the middle one)
- Having a good pricing discount strategy is marketing. (e.g. AWS is basically free for students because they know who those students will want to use when they are making decisions in the work force in a few years)
A key thing is that not all marketing needs to be done by the marketing department. Marketing is about understanding the market and what will make them use your product. This is important even for software engineers.
Edit: fixed typo above and adding below.
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Also, there are ways of getting the word out that aren't advertising but are done by the same sorts of people. For example, GoPro didn't buy online ads or TV commercials when they were a young company. They gave away GoPros to people doing crazy stuff and had them upload their footage to youtube.
Trader Joes doesn't buy advertising, but mixes up their inventory regularly in order to generate buzz. They'll even take popular items out of production, which I've always suspected is a marketing ploy meant to get people talking about them.
Lamborghini is another example of a company that doesn't make ads, but they fiercely guard their reputation. In fact, their marketing department is hiring right now for someone to manage their "car configurator" (https://configurator.lamborghini.com/), a product that they see as part of marketing.
I think your response is valid. Pedantic, but valid. I read into Carmack's post and interpreted it as him meaning "advertising", and then used the same nomenclature he used. You are right to say that this is imprecise.
Honestly now I'm not sure what he meant by Marketing. I still think he meant "getting the word out" Which would fall on advertising in all it's lovely forms.
This is probably just a semantic difference. In the marketing/advertising industry, “advertising” tends to refer to a subset of channels (banner ads, social media ads, video ads, TV ads, billboards, etc.) while “marketing” refers to the general problem of getting the word out.
I think you’re using “advertising” the way a marketing person would use “marketing”.
I don't think this changes anyone's point, just clarifying what might feel pedantic where there is a term of art associated.
Sorry for being pedantic. Response wasn't directed at you specifically, but at the wider audience, some of whom might not understand the distinction. But my guess is that John Carmack does get the distinction and was intentional with his wording, although obviously I could be wrong :)
But even in advertising, there's a huge variance of ethics. I don't love targeted advertising based on my search history. I'm perfectly fine with my favorite history podcast being able to continue because of casper ads. In that case, casper isn't tracking me specifically... just assuming that history podcast listeners might be good mattress customers.
To be even more precise (or pedantic), "getting the word out" (aka generating awareness) in general is called "Promotion." Advertising is a form of promotion. So is "word-of-mouth" and public relations (aka press relations). All of them fall under the broad responsibility of "Marketing."
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
Copyright law already has fair use provisions that permit you to analyze or criticize advertising, or other works. Mockery is also covered under fair use.
Few ads provide worthwhile raw material for reworking and remixing.
Ads only stimulate overconsumption. They work against the free market (not the best product wins, but the one with the largest advertisement budget). They interrupt us in our work. They make girls feel insecure about themselves. They target children.
Sure, when I want to know more about a product someone recommends. 99.99% of it is unsolicited though. The only forced commercials I think I'm subjected to is during sports events. I have paid opt out of everything else. Let me tell you how annoying 5-7 minutes of commercials are when you've grown unaccustomed to it.
Didn't feel like sarcasm to me. I've seen a heck of a lot of people go through this transition, to the point that this tweet is indistinguishable from common opinions.
Sarcasm that's mostly indistinguishable from real opinions is just intentional miscommunication.
Marketing, in the hands of skilled, experienced marketers should not be noticeable since it optimizes audience, message, channel, and delivery.
Unfortunately most marketers are talentless hacks with poor skills who apply the same hammers to every problem, whether or not they are nails. Advertising? Email blasts? Social media? Influencers? Most so-called marketers these days just throw spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks. This is especially the case in tech marketing. The higher you go in the organization, the worse it gets. Some of the most incompetent marketers have titles such as Chief Marketing Officer and VP Marketing. That doesn't absolve lower-level titles who seem to just be skilled at "field marketing" or "event marketing" and hire PR firms who try to get "earned media" and pray to the SEO gods. Many of the reason why tech folks dislike marketing is not because of marketing, but because of the marketers.
Marketing is a hard skillset, and I think it's important for folks in engineering to respect it. I think it looks really easy when it's done well, but so many devs have OSS tools or products that they've worked on and can't get users for. This is a marketing problem!
I love book Obvious Awesome's tagline, which is "I know my product is awesome, but why doesn't anyone else?" This is the deep truth of marketing -- trying to explain your product to people in a way that shows it's value.
We've struggled a lot with this on the small product we've been working on EthicalAds. Trying to build good landing pages, running free ads ("house ads" on our own network) that point to the landing pages, and optimizing these two together. It's incredibly difficult to write good ad copy and then landing pages that explain what your product does in a clear way. It's a super power when you have the skills though.
As mentioned in my article on Nikola Tesla's breakthrough, "Doing brilliant work is not enough; Showing|demonstrating brilliant work is not enough. What is enough is showing your brilliant work to the right people. When your brilliant work is shown to the right audience at the right time, it triggers action for the next stage of the work. In Tesla’s case, it was the commercialisation of alternating current by George Westinghouse of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburg. When your work is shown to the wrong people, the merits of the work are typically dismissed"
Regarding value creation, in economy there is the smiling curve [1]. It states that throughout the product development, the R&D stage and marketing stage create the most value in the sense of profit margin whereas manufacturing itself create the least.
IMO there is a third kind of value which is management. Things like software maintenance, customer service and all sorts of people work that are considered chore by many software folks.
Anyway, I agree with carmack. I used to think marketing is worthless. Now I realise how difficult is it for others to buy in the vision you have. Essentially what marketing does.
Ask HN : is there something of _incredible_ value that we're really missing on because of a lack of marketing ?
I'm more pessimistic. I think the reason we're not drowning in great stuff is that there isn't that much great stuff, and it does not stay in the shadow for very long.
And that's okay ! The proverbial "99% of everything being crap" is a feature, not a bug ; producing lots of different stuff and being able to label it as "crap" is the only way to organically find good stuff, eventually.
Still, what do you think we're really missing ? What is John Carmack thinking about when writing this tweet ?
But if you know of an hidden gem, I'm interested !
I think my project https://datasette.io/ could be incredibly useful to a wide variety of people who haven't heard about it yet.
I found myself nodding when I saw Carmack's tweet precisely because I'm finding myself at a point where my time may well be better spent marketing what I've already built rather than continuing to improve the product.
Absolutely, there is plenty of high-value stuff out there that people are unaware of. And marketing is how you'd bring awareness. But real value is irrelevant to a capitalist market; perceived value is all that matters.
When customers have a diminished ability to assess value (i.e. consumers who cannot reasonably thoroughly evaluate every purchase decision), optimal marketing becomes a game of illusion and misperception. And modern marketing has evolved to the point where it's incredibly effective at hijacking known human biases and weaknesses to create perceived value where no practical value exists. In this way, the net-effect of many marketing campaigns is increased profits for companies, with no net value created for the community.
The clothing industry is a prime example: Marketing pushes that their products are cheap and stylish, with the underlying implication that consumers will be happier and save $. In reality, though, they'll spend a lot more in the long run, and reinforce social insecurities.
There can also be a problem at scale. A small team getting the word out to people who will be genuinely helped by your product and avoiding wasting time on people who won't be interested is great.
However, at a certain point, with a multi-million pound marketing team, you start getting diminishing returns, hard-selling the brand and inventing BS schemes to justify your cost (Tropicana, Pepsi etc.).
Corporates (or investors?) seem to struggle with the idea that a market can saturate and there is little extra value to find except at a much larger input cost.
I hated marketing. Marketing always felt like the one thing that was in my way to achieving massive success. Too expensive and too difficult to compete amongst so many offerings, seems like you just had to build things and hope for the best. Even if I was willing to spend a lot of money, marketing was never an exact science.
Marketing is a broad term. I hate ads but welcome good marketing that is not based on tracking or brainwashing me.
What I am saying is that PR works better for people like me. Unless a company has a groundbreaking product I never knew I needed, chances are I will read or watch a video about it.
Even respectful sponsored content is better than ads
I read a lot of books. None of them have been marketed to me. I hear it through word of mouth from people I trust. I wish I could find out about other things in life the same way. These days, if I need to buy something, I get recommendations from reddit which seems to be fairly effective.
What if the people you trust heard about the book through some form of marketing themselves, found that the book was a good one, and recommended it to you?
To me that says you're still influenced by the marketing - just by second remove (or more).
I didn't understand marketing until I started running a company. It's great when your first product launches and you're riding on the first few years of success. Then you need to grow. And you know what that requires? Marketing.
Well, if you don't sell a recurring subscription (or a consumable), once someone buys something, they don't buy it again. So how do you meet payroll? You have to constantly sell to make money and pay your employees. That's called growth. Kinda basic.
Running a small company and balancing time between marketing and building the core product is really hard - it's hard to see the immediate value in marketing when the opportunity cost is a worse product.
There is, it just requires that the field be clear of others employing any of those tactics, otherwise they'll naturally dominate with their much louder megaphone.
An important lesson I've learned in my career: don't resist repeating yourself. You can communicate something to someone extremely clearly and they'll have forgotten a week later, because they have a whole lot of other things going on in their lives.
When I worked at a large company I started out incredibly frustrated at feeling like I was having the same conversation over and over and over again. Eventually I realized that repeating myself was part of the job.
In the end, your product can't provide value for anyone if no one knows about it. Marketing is big and messy and illogical but overall it helps society more than it hurts, much like capitalism as a whole.
> how much amazing value is present that people just don’t know about. If only there was a way to bring it to their attention…
People pay for marketing to convince other people of things. If Carmack is serious, he can hire marketers to espouse the wonders not enough of us know about.
My experience with marketing comes most from being a consumer and being lied to by marketing more times than I can count. It's a profession of psychopaths who use deception and worse to move product, using any tactic no matter how immoral. Exploiting a teenager's confidence issues to sell product that will surely make them more popular with their peers? Nothing wrong with that, full speed ahead!
Marketers are mercenaries, and most of them are willing to inflict any atrocity on anybody if there's money in it. Edward Bernays told women around the world that smoking would liberate them, but encouraged his own wife to quit because he knew cigarettes were lethal.
"full_text":"I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie it wasnt creating the value. Nowadays, I often marvel at how much amazing value is present that people just dont know about. If only there was a way to bring it to their attention"
Tweets are so short it makes me wonder why HN does not pin the text at the top of the HN thread, like it does with archive.ph links for articles on "paywalled" sites, instead of forcing people to visit Twitter. (The term "forcing" is used here as a figure of speech. As with most "paywalled" sites, there are workarounds for Twitter.)
Marketing and advertising is largely a propoganda game anymore. I don't disagree that there's value in awareness, discovery, and solution/need matching--I don't think any engineer is going to be upset if you hand them the perfect solution to their problem at a reasonable cost: they're going to take it and use it and move on.
The issue is that those marketing and advertising are only partly about correct match making, they're also about deceit and the underlying goal is to drive revenue and ultimately profit in. Correctly matchmaking a need with your solution is just a side effect, ultimately they want to maximize how much they can extract from the population. Sometimes that's in providing a solid recurring solution, sometimes that deceiving someone to grab a few short term purchases, sometimes it's convincing someone they need something they don't and an array of other unscrupulous strategies.
The issue is that in a competitive market, lying and deceit is often a relatively low cost effective strategy. You ultimately end with someone in the market who will stretch the truth to make their solution appear better than it is. Competitive forces make better solutions lower the bar and follow suit to some degree, either inflating their solution or debunking dubious claims from others (not too common due to liable cases).
So we get the race to the bottom of advertising which is why now I can't believe anything that isn't highly regulated and even then have to pick through each word for ambiguities that may be hiding some truth. I'm perfectly fine if you provide me a nice list of solutions I need that make my life easier at a reasonable cost. I'm not so fine when your goal is to pretend to do this while just looking for ways to extract wealth from me.
"anymore"? It's ALWAYS been propaganda. The term "public relations" was coined by Edward Bernays because "propaganda" had taken on a negative term, and he readily admitted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dtg-qFPYDE
He created a very typical English language split. Two terms for the same thing, but one mean the "bad" or the "cheap" kind, and the other means "good" or "fancy."
It sometimes makes our arguments for something exactly follow (in substance) our arguments against something, except when we're for a thing we use a different set of words than we use when we're against the thing. It's also the reason why there are so many stupid arguments about the "real definition" of a term like "propaganda" or "oligarch" or "terrorist"; entire arguments hinge on just repeating the bad word.
More characters have been spilled on the definition of "propaganda" than have been written about physics. Propaganda is some idea that you want to propagate. That's it. If I want people to think Tide makes clothes whiter than any other detergent, that's propaganda.
>the underlying goal is to drive revenue and ultimately profit in. Correctly matchmaking a need with your solution is just a side effect
As someone who worked in public relations, I'd like to play the devil's advocate for a moment.
The ultimate goal for all business is to drive revenue, and it is imperative that this is achieved in a legal manner that abides with the local regulatory/compliance requirements.
Public relations provide a crucial role to a business by expanding its market reach through raising awareness and educating the public on the potential benefits of a product. Other times they shield a company from potential negative, and often unjustified public outrage by carefully shaping the social narrative.
At the end of the day, it is up to our governments to create legislations that provide guidance and restrictions on what's allowed in advertisements. It has been established that a legal imperative, and thus a financial incentive will always triumph over the perceived "moral" choice, which often provides suboptimal value to the shareholders.
> The ultimate goal for all business is to drive revenue, and it is imperative that this is achieved in a legal manner that abides with the local regulatory/compliance requirements.
This belief that "if nobody said it's wrong, it's okay" means driving "legal revenue" is always a race for loopholes.
I had a disturbing look at the everyday work of a PR disaster management company, and watched how they subtly directed the entire flow of a minor internet firestorm the way they wanted it to go. Few people saw what was happening, including some of those who knew that a PR firm was involved and were on the lookout for it.
If this is something that individual small-to-medium- sized companies can afford, what are the big players doing that we never see? And if we never see it, how does it get regulated?
This perfectly articulates a lot of frustration I've felt with marketing, and why "why don't you want to be told about things you would enjoy?" is not a good argument in its favour. Thank you.
> lying and deceit is often a relatively low cost effective strategy
Only in the short term. Eventually you end up where we are now, no one believes anything you say. Then the cost of chasing customers rises because you have to come up more ways to get your lies to come off as not advertising.
In the end, centralized sources of business information just don't work. Top down planned economies don't do as well for a variety of reasons. Allowing companies to market themselves with some regulations is messy but better for the world as a whole.
If you are a young/solo techie, here is some marketing advice to save you a ton of time:
- The number one source of new customers will be existing, stable customers. You make customers stable by offering tons of resources and post-sale updates.
- You would not believe how many deals I have seen lost because a founder didn't respond to a inquiry or forgot to schedule a follow up meeting. Have some sort of process in place to make your marketing-sales pipeline smooth and consistent.
- Have a specific plan for the kind of people you want to look at your company, and how you are going to get them to look at your company. Search ads are obvious but getting crazy expensive. Billboards are surprisingly effective. So is direct mail - you will never beat the ROI of sending a CTO a bottle of something fancy with a nice handwritten note.
- In person events are great. So are tradeshows. People are literally walking around looking for interesting products. If you don't get leads from these, it's probably because your product isn't interesting.
- Social media is a huge time and resource suck with limited opportunity for creating customers.
- If your product is going to make people happier/better off than the alternatives, they will be happy you found them. If you don't believe this about your own product, quit right now - this is how you end up exploiting people.