[HN Gopher] I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a you... ___________________________________________________________________ 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) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-25 23:00 UTC)