[HN Gopher] I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a you...
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I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie
Author : tosh
Score : 192 points
Date : 2022-07-25 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| sjtgraham wrote:
| How engineers feel about non-engineering counterparts in their
| business is a only reflection of their own maturity.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Trade magazines were essentially opt-in advertising that I think
| solve most of the problems that marketing ostensibly tries to
| solve.
|
| The problem is that when your competitor is everywhere, you need
| to be everywhere too. It's an arms race.
|
| Maybe there's a way to cap the arms race without overly favoring
| incumbents?
| permo-w wrote:
| 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?
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I feel like there'd be consequences for up-and-comers against
| incumbents, who would have a huge brand lead.
| kmacdough wrote:
| Both sentiments seem true.
|
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| Sturgeon's Law applies in every endeavor.
|
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| I wonder what the comments about software developers look like
| on Marketer News :)
| [deleted]
| mindtricks wrote:
| 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| In that case I would suggest not having such apparently
| strongly held (wrong) opinions about a whole discipline their
| paycheck relies on every month.
| anonu wrote:
| 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"...
| rapind wrote:
| > 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| permo-w wrote:
| in my opinion, unless the marketing prophecy fulfils itself,
| it's absolutely a deliberate manipulative lie
| hinkley wrote:
| Hell, often we don't even achieve that.
|
| Many, many products are 1.2x for one demographic and .8x for
| another.
| mason55 wrote:
| 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."
| hinkley wrote:
| Well, except it's Good Marketing is Good and Bad Marketing
| is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
|
| Mongo and Neo4j come to mind as examples of this.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What percent of products you buy you are sorry you bought?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| 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.
| codegeek wrote:
| Yea but John Carmack's identity is not just about Consulting
| CTO for Oculus. He is much bigger than that.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| dale_glass wrote:
| 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.
| aabhay wrote:
| 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.
| NhanH wrote:
| 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.
| thrashh wrote:
| 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
| cirgue wrote:
| > 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.
| thrashh wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
|
| All of this is still marketing.
| elefanten wrote:
| "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.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7661157M/
| leobg wrote:
| 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.)
| whiskey14 wrote:
| > (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.
| leobg wrote:
| 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.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| 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.
| codegeek wrote:
| "For when they need it"
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
| bnralt wrote:
| 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.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| 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".
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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.
| permo-w wrote:
| they're referring to the pre-marketing _internet_ economy.
| it seems as if you read it as the pre-internet marketing
| economy?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > Marketing just took different forms back then
|
| Right, crucially, it didn't really take form on the
| internet that much at all ;)
| allenu wrote:
| > 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.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...very difficult technological problem."
|
| 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.
| whiskey14 wrote:
| 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.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How can it be a bad decision if it is the decision you wanted
| them to make? ;P
| [deleted]
| ricw wrote:
| 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.
| cbtacy wrote:
| You are conflating the larger marketing world with the specific
| sub area that is advertising.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > and hope they makes bad decisions
|
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's a very funny take. Have you looked for example at the
| mobile gaming industry?
|
| Diablo Immortal recently made hundreds of millions of dollars
| by using every psychological trick in the book in terms of
| marketing in-game.
|
| Do you think Activision-Blizzard considers this a loss just
| because some games journalists and annoyed gamers are
| complaining?
|
| Or do you think people really _needed_ to literally spend
| thousands of dollars on in-game items?
| eropple wrote:
| _> Or do you think people really needed to literally spend
| thousands of dollars on in-game items?_
|
| No. But they wanted to, because the games create an
| endorphin rush.
|
| Marketing didn't cause that. Downright evil game design
| did, _but those are different things_.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Downright evil game design did
|
| "Endorphin rush" is just a fancy word for "fun". You
| claim it is evil for people to play a game because it's
| fun?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If they weren't having fun, they'd go home.
| eropple wrote:
| This is a genuinely inhumane sentiment that elides both
| habituating and addictive factors in--well--everything.
|
| I am disappointed.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
|
| How about you?
| EddieDante wrote:
| This is like raping a guy and saying that if he didn't
| want it he wouldn't have gotten an erection.
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You don't find achievement to be fun? I do.
|
| The attempt to draw a distinction as rather tortured, and
| doomed to failure.
| conception wrote:
| Very few companies, in the US at least, are interested in
| long term business vs quarterly profits.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I hear that a lot, and it's just baloney.
|
| Recurring revenue is the holy grail for businesses, not
| one-shot revenue.
|
| Stock investors do not reward companies that eat their seed
| corn. They short those companies.
|
| If you know which companies are sacrificing the long term,
| you'd be shorting their stock.
| _tom_ wrote:
| And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when
| that is objectively terrible for the consumer is
| marketing.
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
| NotOscarWilde wrote:
| > > 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?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| austinpena wrote:
| Oftentimes marketing is focused on those who aren't "problem
| aware" which can bring genuine value.
|
| These types of marketing messages focus on bringing a
| previously unknown problem/inefficiency to someone's mind and
| show the solution.
| defterGoose wrote:
| I dunno, this just makes me think of all the "where did the
| soda go?" infomercial memes.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Another way to phrase that: marketing convinces you you have
| a problem so they can sell you the solution.
| eropple wrote:
| 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).
| NhanH wrote:
| 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.
| drstewart wrote:
| >People usually knows their pain point
|
| Exactly. I know my buggy is slow, I just need a faster
| horse.
| austinpena wrote:
| I look at duckduckgo, they do tons of Top of Funnel
| advertising like billboards.
|
| Do you think that they should cease this type of
| advertising and just try and show up when people search
| "privacy conscious search engine"?
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| sooheon wrote:
| Great thoughts.
|
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| nostrebored wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| >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.
|
| There is a saying in economics: "bad money drives out good
| money." The same is true of news, and in this case marketing
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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
| Arrath wrote:
| > flooded with irrelevant 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Once you get into branding that's all whole another can of
| worms. I was thinking about concrete product descriptions
|
| Eg "1/4 inch diameter hex bolt 10 inch long"
|
| Won't show any products that actually fit the description.
|
| If that's what I need, no amount of marketing is going to
| convince me to buy a half inch diameter bolt that is 5 in
| Long.
|
| Is it utter failure of marketing oriented search functions
| plutonic wrote:
| 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
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I use McMaster for work a lot, grainger as well. I love
| the interface but hate the prices when I am footing the
| bill.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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!
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, infuriating when you know it exists and you know
| what it is called
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| The are an inordinate number of people in this thread who
| conflate marketing with advertising.
|
| Marketing is about creating a market for your product. You can't
| _not_ do it.
| [deleted]
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| To quote Scott Adams in the Dilbert principal.
|
| "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.'"
| disintegore wrote:
| There has to be a way to inform me about amazing value without
| employing any manipulation tactics, espionage tools, and
| psychological terrorism.
| RGamma wrote:
| A concise, curated web directory would be nice. Sometimes I use
| Wikipedia lists of software; just something more general and
| _standard_.
| yifanl wrote:
| 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.
| jnwatson wrote:
| This.
|
| I spent several years in sales and then dabbled in marketing.
|
| It is entirely possibly, even superior, to have a completely
| ethical sales process (at least in a technical market).
|
| In marketing, psychological manipulation is part and parcel of
| the task. You can't get to step 2 before you want to take a
| shower to wash the ick off.
| mancerayder wrote:
| And repetition.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| disintegore wrote:
| Understandable but I imagine you're not trying to sell your
| coworkers penis enlargement pills.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The problem there is that it's a fake product, not a
| moderate amount of repetition.
| [deleted]
| maverickJ wrote:
| Marketing is very important.
|
| 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"
|
| If you want to read more, the link is below
| https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you...
| lbriner wrote:
| 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.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| This requires working markets.
|
| 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?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215551
| a_c wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_curve
| greggman3 wrote:
| 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".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| > 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| After decades in the industry, I'd say the arrogance and lack
| of professionalism is in the marketing side of the industry.
| golergka wrote:
| Arrogance and lack of professionalism is 80% of every
| profession on the face on the Earth.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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.
| etempleton wrote:
| 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.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Everyone wants to be associated with success.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| idontpost wrote:
| > You can't sustainably market a product users don't find
| valuable.
|
| Tell that to Oracle.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Does Oracle really need marketing? I thought they're cash
| cow is exploitive contracts and markets they've captured
| through onerous certification requirements, such as for
| government work.
| nl wrote:
| The quoted part above needs a slight modification:
|
| > You can't sustainably market a product _customers_ don 't
| find valuable
|
| Oracle doesn't care about users. It cares very much about
| its C-suite customers who pay the bills.
| rexreed wrote:
| 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.
| sg47 wrote:
| 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.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| 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).
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| fezfight wrote:
| Marketing has a PR problem. No offense, but whose fault is
| that?
| liquidise wrote:
| What does "fault" have to do with it?
|
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| To add to this:
|
| - 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.
| sizzle wrote:
| This is super insightful, especially the last point which makes
| a lot of sense yet feels counterintuitive in practice.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| 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.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Yep, Tesla has a marketing budget of basically zero. It feels
| like Musk just does things that make headlines, and that's the
| marketing.
| soared wrote:
| Tesla may have a low advertising budget, but they do not have
| a low marketing budget.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| "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
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| We have no choice but to be skeptical of marketing, because if we
| weren't they'd take every penny from us.
| [deleted]
| sachdevs wrote:
| 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.
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > not matching with already existing demand.
|
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| > creating demand ex nihilo
|
| 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.
| EddieDante wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
|
| [1]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kissing_Hank%27s_Ass
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _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.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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?
| drewcoo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The tweet is just a deepity.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I wonder if all those years getting a paycheck from Facebook is
| helping him develop this framework.
| moffkalast wrote:
| You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself
| become a capitalist shill.
| ericholscher wrote:
| 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.
| mola wrote:
| 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.
| ketzo wrote:
| Wait -- you don't see any problem not knowing about valuable
| stuff?
|
| If your product offered a 5x better way to do something, but
| nobody knew about it, wouldn't you be a little frustrated for
| both yourself and them?
| EddieDante wrote:
| 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.
| powerhour wrote:
| Are there any good examples of 5x products you've learned
| about through marketing efforts (and not, say, trusted
| colleagues)? I can't think of one.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| ghoward wrote:
| I have a relative that works for FreeTaxUSA. Thank you
| for using it!
|
| I'll let her know the ads work, thank you.
|
| I'll be happy to give her your comments.
| powerhour wrote:
| > 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).
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Tesla famously has a $0 marketing budget, but their real
| marketing is basically Musk keeps doing things that get
| him in the news.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| powerhour wrote:
| You've certainly marketed your thoughts my way, so I'm
| now familiar with them. The meaning of marketing is
| diminishing rapidly here.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| permo-w wrote:
| >How do you think your trusted colleagues originally
| found out about the stuff they recommend you?
|
| probably youtube or a course of some variety. the only
| times I ever gain anything from advertising is adverts
| for new series of tv shows
| golergka wrote:
| > probably youtube or a course of some variety
|
| Which is marketing.
| permo-w wrote:
| not really
| themacguffinman wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ketzo wrote:
| Easiest example is my iPhone.
|
| 5x is an understatement. Frankly, 500x probably is too.
|
| And there is exactly zero chance that I and everyone I know
| would have bought them (back in the day) without Apple's
| marketing.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| game-of-throws wrote:
| If only the well wasn't poisoned.
| [deleted]
| beebeepka wrote:
| 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
| manv1 wrote:
| Yes. The problem with marketing people is it's hard to tell which
| ones are full of shit and which ones aren't...becuase they both
| sound the same.
| rapind wrote:
| > becuase they both sound the same.
|
| Found your answer.
| awat wrote:
| 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.
| etempleton wrote:
| 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| >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.
| cynusx wrote:
| 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
| secondcoming wrote:
| Not just marketing people, look at the crypto space.
| vkou wrote:
| Crypto is 90% marketing.
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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 - *.
|
| * - I sound like a marketer.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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.
| sinity wrote:
| Ether is sufficient. Or will be, anyway.
|
| 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.
|
| Ether will have low fees too, when it scales. See "The
| Limits to Blockchain Scalability"
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
| mandmandam wrote:
| 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| > 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.
| davidatbu wrote:
| Does this count as poetry? Because I really like it.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Umm, yeah.. Sure. Yes. Definitely.
|
| ... That's really nice to hear, thank you :)
| cynusx wrote:
| Marketers have been flocking to crypto companies like crazy
| the past years, only now you see some washed up ones coming
| back.
|
| One I know likened crypto to selling art... 99% bullshit
| and the 1% is arguable
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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.
| etempleton wrote:
| 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.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| Because no full-of-shit engineer ever fools anyone...
| SilasX wrote:
| It's definitely a problem for engineers too, spurred on by
| "fake it till you make it"/"all self doubt is just Impostor
| Syndrome"-ism.
| hammock wrote:
| That's the other side (the consumer-facing side) of the coin,
| "half my marketing budget is wasted. I just don't know which"
| rexreed wrote:
| 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.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
|
| And it all started with an instagram ad.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| > 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| > 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.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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.
| oehpr wrote:
| 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.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I read that as sarcasm.
| kmacdough wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| > while absolutely loathing marketing in general
|
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I hated advertisers when I was younger. I'm older now. Still
| hate them."_
|
| Unsolicited advertising is a cancer on this planet. It should
| be completely banned.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. Yellow pages worked fine.
|
| 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.
|
| Why aren't ads banned already?
| EddieDante wrote:
| Its practitioners should be used for medical experiments.
| kingTug wrote:
| 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.
| jjulius wrote:
| This entire comment should be attributed to Banksy, as well
| as Sean Tejaratchi from Crap Hound.
| [deleted]
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tasuki wrote:
| > Unsolicited advertising
|
| Is there any other kind? Have you ever solicited advertising?
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Yellow pages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
| chadash wrote:
| 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.
| =========================================
|
| 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.
| oehpr wrote:
| 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.
| chadash wrote:
| 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.
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| > "getting the word out"
|
| 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."
| moffkalast wrote:
| "I used to hate advertisers. I still do, but I used to too."
| smolder wrote:
| RIP, Mitch Hedberg.
| phtrivier wrote:
| 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 !
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| 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.
| vba616 wrote:
| You can't feel derisive, he said derisively.
| sbf501 wrote:
| 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.
| togs wrote:
| > Then you need to grow
|
| Genuinely curious as to why this is
| Frost1x wrote:
| 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.
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| >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.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| > 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?
|
| But it's OK, because there is no rule against it.
| scubbo wrote:
| 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.
| openfuture wrote:
| Frustrating thing is that "if you want to go far go together"
| so everyone needs to finish converging before we can move on.
|
| Here is my lie: https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/
| DoctorNick wrote:
| "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
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
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