> Engineers look down on advertising and advertising people, for the most part.
Worse, we know how to filter it out and actively do so. We know all the tricks. Most successful advertising platforms are built by skilled engineers.
> Engineers want to know the features and specifications, not just the benefits.
Replace engineer with people here. If you are selling something and you can't articulate what it is that you are selling, you are wasting your time. If what you are selling is very complicated (and many products aimed at engineers are), people are going to have questions that need answering. A lot of those questions start with the word 'How'. Avoiding to talk about the complex parts of your offering comes across as evasive and untrustworthy. Or worse, as clueless and incompetent.
A lot of successful marketing actually starts with these how questions. People will find their way to your website or your sales people if you have good answers to such questions. Maybe they'll checkout your product and give it a try. Maybe they'll sign up even. That starts with you providing something they need that they were looking for anyway.
I really wonder how valid this "truism" is. It sounds more like a word trap, wherein anything other than "I'm susceptible" is the wrong answer.
It's a lot like those silly word games in the early 2000s where saying anything other than "I'm secretly gay" was simply taken as further proof of latent homosexuality.
"The most obvious application of the mere-exposure effect is in advertising, but research on its effectiveness at enhancing consumer attitudes toward particular companies and products has been mixed."
"A subsequent review of the research concluded that exposure leads to ambivalence because it brings about a large number of associations, which tend to be both favorable and unfavorable."
This would make sense, since it's the unfamiliarity itself that elicits a negative response. Once that unfamiliarity is gone, you'd react normally (positive or negative). We're all familiar with Facebook, Google, Ford, Tide, dogs, hamsters, veal, brussels sprouts... But that doesn't mean that we necessarily have a positive view of them.
So the "Mere Exposure Effect" remains unproven for positive response in an advertising context.
A nit: don't confuse the terms advertising and marketing. The goal of marketing is that the product's website clearly explains how it will benefit you. The goal of advertising is that you visit the website in the first place.
Except that many engineering types don't work that way. Cars are freedom? In what way? What - specifically - can they do for my freedom? And what - specifically - makes this car better? How can I know that it will do all the car things I want it to?
I've bought many cars in my life, and only once have I bought one without spending months beforehand digging through specs to find the best set of possible cars for my use case: a 1970 Opel GT came up on Craigslist, and I had fun fixing it up and then drove it across America. Actually, I already knew all about them, so I'm not sure if this qualifies as no-research...
I still remember one car purchasing occasion where I demurred because they were asking too much and I was trying to decide if another cheaper option would serve my needs. Then the sales guy said "Well, maybe it's just too much car for you." I said "You know what? You're probably right. Thanks for your advice!" and never went there again.
> Worse, we know how to filter it out and actively do so. We know all the tricks. Most successful advertising platforms are built by skilled engineers.
I don’t think there’s any evidence to this whatsoever. Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop, being a software engineer does not give you magical brain powers and frankly it’s just textbook Dunning-Kruger.
I think you're both correct. Engineers are still susceptible to ads, but are more often than not able to remove them.
Also, you have engineers/developpers like me who actively boycott products when the ad was too intrusive/take me for an idiot (sexualized ads do that for me). I've never bought a Ubisoft game since 2013 or a for the first reason (and avoid Razer), and the second one makes my toiletry shopping interesting.
In the same way we're still "affected" by rain because we have to use an umbrella or a raincoat, sure. Compensating for a known effect can come near or exactly the desired outcome.
I will. In the same way a raincoat will hopefully prevent most of the water from reaching me, so too I hope blocking ads with software will prevent them from reaching my eyes
> I don’t think there’s any evidence to this whatsoever. Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop, being a software engineer does not give you magical brain powers and frankly it’s just textbook Dunning-Kruger.
I am not OP, but my interpretation was, that he knows how to remove injected ads. Not that he is invulnerable to ads. I might be wrong tho.
For myself I can definitely say that I am susceptible to advertisement, but I fulfill mostly the engineer cliché - for better or for worse.
Some examples are:
- technical details from manufacturers themselves (which are by definition advertisement)
- someone presenting a use case and solving it with a specific tool. If that use case sounds interesting to me I might actually try that tool. I cannot know if it is "real" advertisement or a genuine user in this case.
- looking for reputation on Reddit; again I cannot know if it is genuine users or advertisement - at least most of the time I can't
Worse, we know how to filter it out and actively do so. We know all the tricks. Most successful advertising platforms are built by skilled engineers.
> Engineers want to know the features and specifications, not just the benefits.
Replace engineer with people here. If you are selling something and you can't articulate what it is that you are selling, you are wasting your time. If what you are selling is very complicated (and many products aimed at engineers are), people are going to have questions that need answering. A lot of those questions start with the word 'How'. Avoiding to talk about the complex parts of your offering comes across as evasive and untrustworthy. Or worse, as clueless and incompetent.
A lot of successful marketing actually starts with these how questions. People will find their way to your website or your sales people if you have good answers to such questions. Maybe they'll checkout your product and give it a try. Maybe they'll sign up even. That starts with you providing something they need that they were looking for anyway.