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> When a bunch of reviews can undo the effects of a massive, weeks or months long marketing push, I'd say it's time to rethink your product strategy. Whenever

> When a bunch of reviews can undo the effects of a massive, weeks or months long marketing push, I'd say it's time to rethink your product strategy. Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion. When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one. But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person. I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.

thenomad 11y ago
That'd be nice, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm not going to make a grand sweeping statement here, but certainly, I've found out about multiple useful products via adverts. I actively don't want them to go away completely. I am very interested in hearing about new products in a number of spaces. If people can pay to let me know, briefly, about their thing that they think I might find useful, I'm cool with that.
- Majestic121 11y ago
  Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them? I find myself very often in the situation were I hear/learn about a new cool thing, and I want it absolutely right now (The last example was a colleague bringing an Oculus to work, I almost ordered one the spot) However, I try to wait a bit before actually buying anything big (like one/two weeks), and I find that most of the time I don't actually need/care about the product I was so hyped about. This is one of the part that annoy me the most about advertising, especially if it is well targeted : It creates a new need and offers (sells) its solution, more than it helps me to fulfill a real need.
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need." "We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra." – Tyler Durden, Fight Club (Swap out a few of the products in the second quote for gadgets, cars and porn to make it better fit the HN demographic.)
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    The century-old foundation for modern consumerism is that people are irrational actors who are primarily motivated by base instincts like fear, lust, hunger, and so on. If you haven't seen the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," I highly recommend it.
  - thenomad 11y ago
    Depends what you mean by "need". If you mean "your business or life had a critical problem that could only be fixed by this tool", then no. If you mean "your business or life could be significantly impacted and improved by this tool", then yes. I almost never impulse-buy, FYI.
  - xixi77 11y ago
    I don't think "real" and "new" are opposites -- if someone only realizes that she wants X after hearing about X, why does it make her need any less real?
  - fluidcruft 11y ago
    > Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them? Yes. As a mater of fact, a prime example from earlier this week--I live in an area with very active clays and we've had a serious drought this year which has shifted foundations around like crazy--whatever, that's what active clays do and you learn to live with it. But the annoying part is doors that stick or won't close or closets that won't open. So, I fixed a few last weekend by putting spacers behind hinges and moved some strike plates around and was getting ready to learn how to plane the doors that couldn't be fixed that way and for the first time and I saw an advertisement for an "adjustable door hinge". Whoa. best. idea. ever. Test batch is in the mail and I have high hopes. Why on earth these things aren't stocked in the local Lowe's or Home Depot is beyond my comprehension.
- Retra 11y ago
  Advertisements aren't completely devoid of value... You just don't need to be subjected to them continuously and without reservation. Personally, I find a far greater percentage of useful products through word-of-mouth. If I hear about something new, it has to be good enough to survive the 'telephone game' of getting the information to me, which means I'll have a preference for very good or very local products.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I think the best way to learn about what is good or not is through the opinions of people you respect or agree with enough to take their word for it. Centralized example: Yahtzee Croshaw of the Zero Punctuation video game reviews eschews any semblance of a ratings system because it's a little absurd to boil down a complex opinion into a number. Watch a review and get a sense of whether you'd like the game or not. Decentralized example: plug.dj (before it went down. Dubtract.fm kinda sucks) let users get in line to play one song for a room. Some rooms can have you waiting 3 hours to play one song so if you're gonna wait that long you're gonna play a banger. Yeah it's more effort than a numeric ratings system but you get what you pay for with your time.
hagbardgroup 11y ago
So, the reviews never happen without the marketing push. The interplay between the marketing and the reviews are to help consumers decide if the vendor fulfilled their promises to the public. Critics with prestige will only review films that they anticipate will have an audience. The audience will go to the critics to see if they verify the sizzly promise from the trailer. There is no demand for critical evaluation of a product without trying to generate that demand first through marketing and advertising. Try launching a product without doing any marketing at all and see what happens (absolutely nobody will buy your thing). Different consumers care differing degrees on how much they want to research before they make a purchase. Ask an indie film director how unimportant promotion and hustling are to actually getting people to see a movie. Yelp and all crowdsourced reviews that don't even try to verify purchasing are easily scammed and gamed at scale. Similarly, reviewing on Youtube -- especially for things like games and children's toys -- is rife with concealed bribery for influence -- illegal in the US. This stuff is harder to 'disrupt' than it seems. >But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person. What happens is that people in cities tend to pick a small number of vendors that they trust based on repeated positive trading interactions. They might decide to test out different vendors if they receive a sufficiently enticing offer. Yelp is not terribly good and doesn't even make money. This is also kind of a non-problem in search of a solution: people will evaluate restaurants based on peer evaluations, their own experience, professional critics, and crowd reviews. The kind of people who make judgments based on crowd reviews might just want to be with the popular crowd rather than quality. What crowd reviews tell you is what's popular -- since you don't have a sense of the personality and knowledge level of each amateur critic, each individual review carries little weight. So for example, most Yelpers would freak out at the 'slow service' of a super-high-end restaurant because they're tasteless scenesters. If you want to know what the herd of mindless scenesters think is hot right now, Yelp'll tell you. Or in your Thai example.
taejo 11y ago
> to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair Many people here on HN are paid by ads.
snowwrestler 11y ago
As you note, the idea of good/bad is often highly subjective. If one baker is actually bad across the board, they will eventually go out of business. But often what happens is segmentation: one restaurant meets the demand for authentic Thai, and one satisfies the demand for Americanized Thai. Which is "better"? It's in the eye of the beholder. Broad rating tools like Yelp end up illustrating the mix of opinions in the population, rather than an objective "good/bad" scale. If half of customers like authentic Thai, and half like Americanized, then both restaurants will have middling ratings given a random mix of customers. This highlights the real purpose of advertising: to enable market segmentation. An action movie with a terrible plot and characters will emphasize the action in their marketing, to attract people who like action. Critics, who tend to prefer original stories and complex characters, might pan it--who cares? The people who read movie reviews are themselves only a segment of the market.
dec0dedab0de 11y ago
I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless. How can you recommend something you've never heard of?
- eevilspock 11y ago
  A grapevine starts with one. Recommendation systems, as well as the plain old web, are just scalable grapevines. If a new product is good, people will quickly hear about how good it is from actual users. As opposed to from you the biased (and often motivated to mislead) seller. So how do you bootstrap your good product into the grapevine? A variety of ways, depending on what it is. Sending samples to reviewers. Announcements on relevant websites (such as HN). Making it available in catalogs and product search engines (Amazon, an app store, Etsy, Orbitz, etc) where people will encounter it in search results.
  - dec0dedab0de 11y ago
    Sending samples to reviewers. Announcements on relevant websites (such as HN). Making it available in catalogs and product search engines (Amazon, an app store, Etsy, Orbitz, etc) where people will encounter it in search results. Aren't those all forms of advertising?
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
      People read reviewers and get catalogues and search for things on purpose. I don't think people have a problem with getting information about products when they deliberately look for that.
    - eevilspock 11y ago
      Only in the barest and most technical of senses. They are not being shoved in anyone's face; They are being placed where people want to find them. They are not subsidizing anything, and thereby mucking with normal healthy free-market dynamics (where the customer is the customer, not the product). It's one thing to put a sign outside your new bakery, or to request the newspaper's food critic to review your product, and its another thing entirely to "donate" your cupcakes to a charity bake sale on condition that there be a sign about your shop or flyers handed out with the cupcakes.

thenomad 11y ago

That'd be nice, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm not going to make a grand sweeping statement here, but certainly, I've found out about multiple useful products via adverts. I actively don't want them to go away completely. I am very interested in hearing about new products in a number of spaces. If people can pay to let me know, briefly, about their thing that they think I might find useful, I'm cool with that.

Majestic121 11y ago
Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them? I find myself very often in the situation were I hear/learn about a new cool thing, and I want it absolutely right now (The last example was a colleague bringing an Oculus to work, I almost ordered one the spot) However, I try to wait a bit before actually buying anything big (like one/two weeks), and I find that most of the time I don't actually need/care about the product I was so hyped about. This is one of the part that annoy me the most about advertising, especially if it is well targeted : It creates a new need and offers (sells) its solution, more than it helps me to fulfill a real need.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need." "We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra." – Tyler Durden, Fight Club (Swap out a few of the products in the second quote for gadgets, cars and porn to make it better fit the HN demographic.)
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  The century-old foundation for modern consumerism is that people are irrational actors who are primarily motivated by base instincts like fear, lust, hunger, and so on. If you haven't seen the BBC documentary "Century of the Self," I highly recommend it.
- thenomad 11y ago
  Depends what you mean by "need". If you mean "your business or life had a critical problem that could only be fixed by this tool", then no. If you mean "your business or life could be significantly impacted and improved by this tool", then yes. I almost never impulse-buy, FYI.
- xixi77 11y ago
  I don't think "real" and "new" are opposites -- if someone only realizes that she wants X after hearing about X, why does it make her need any less real?
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  > Did you actually have a need for those products before hearing about them? Yes. As a mater of fact, a prime example from earlier this week--I live in an area with very active clays and we've had a serious drought this year which has shifted foundations around like crazy--whatever, that's what active clays do and you learn to live with it. But the annoying part is doors that stick or won't close or closets that won't open. So, I fixed a few last weekend by putting spacers behind hinges and moved some strike plates around and was getting ready to learn how to plane the doors that couldn't be fixed that way and for the first time and I saw an advertisement for an "adjustable door hinge". Whoa. best. idea. ever. Test batch is in the mail and I have high hopes. Why on earth these things aren't stocked in the local Lowe's or Home Depot is beyond my comprehension.
Retra 11y ago
Advertisements aren't completely devoid of value... You just don't need to be subjected to them continuously and without reservation. Personally, I find a far greater percentage of useful products through word-of-mouth. If I hear about something new, it has to be good enough to survive the 'telephone game' of getting the information to me, which means I'll have a preference for very good or very local products.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

I think the best way to learn about what is good or not is through the opinions of people you respect or agree with enough to take their word for it. Centralized example: Yahtzee Croshaw of the Zero Punctuation video game reviews eschews any semblance of a ratings system because it's a little absurd to boil down a complex opinion into a number. Watch a review and get a sense of whether you'd like the game or not. Decentralized example: plug.dj (before it went down. Dubtract.fm kinda sucks) let users get in line to play one song for a room. Some rooms can have you waiting 3 hours to play one song so if you're gonna wait that long you're gonna play a banger. Yeah it's more effort than a numeric ratings system but you get what you pay for with your time.

hagbardgroup 11y ago

So, the reviews never happen without the marketing push. The interplay between the marketing and the reviews are to help consumers decide if the vendor fulfilled their promises to the public. Critics with prestige will only review films that they anticipate will have an audience. The audience will go to the critics to see if they verify the sizzly promise from the trailer. There is no demand for critical evaluation of a product without trying to generate that demand first through marketing and advertising. Try launching a product without doing any marketing at all and see what happens (absolutely nobody will buy your thing). Different consumers care differing degrees on how much they want to research before they make a purchase. Ask an indie film director how unimportant promotion and hustling are to actually getting people to see a movie. Yelp and all crowdsourced reviews that don't even try to verify purchasing are easily scammed and gamed at scale. Similarly, reviewing on Youtube -- especially for things like games and children's toys -- is rife with concealed bribery for influence -- illegal in the US. This stuff is harder to 'disrupt' than it seems. >But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person. What happens is that people in cities tend to pick a small number of vendors that they trust based on repeated positive trading interactions. They might decide to test out different vendors if they receive a sufficiently enticing offer. Yelp is not terribly good and doesn't even make money. This is also kind of a non-problem in search of a solution: people will evaluate restaurants based on peer evaluations, their own experience, professional critics, and crowd reviews. The kind of people who make judgments based on crowd reviews might just want to be with the popular crowd rather than quality. What crowd reviews tell you is what's popular -- since you don't have a sense of the personality and knowledge level of each amateur critic, each individual review carries little weight. So for example, most Yelpers would freak out at the 'slow service' of a super-high-end restaurant because they're tasteless scenesters. If you want to know what the herd of mindless scenesters think is hot right now, Yelp'll tell you. Or in your Thai example.

taejo 11y ago

> to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair Many people here on HN are paid by ads.

snowwrestler 11y ago

As you note, the idea of good/bad is often highly subjective. If one baker is actually bad across the board, they will eventually go out of business. But often what happens is segmentation: one restaurant meets the demand for authentic Thai, and one satisfies the demand for Americanized Thai. Which is "better"? It's in the eye of the beholder. Broad rating tools like Yelp end up illustrating the mix of opinions in the population, rather than an objective "good/bad" scale. If half of customers like authentic Thai, and half like Americanized, then both restaurants will have middling ratings given a random mix of customers. This highlights the real purpose of advertising: to enable market segmentation. An action movie with a terrible plot and characters will emphasize the action in their marketing, to attract people who like action. Critics, who tend to prefer original stories and complex characters, might pan it--who cares? The people who read movie reviews are themselves only a segment of the market.

dec0dedab0de 11y ago

I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless. How can you recommend something you've never heard of?

eevilspock 11y ago
A grapevine starts with one. Recommendation systems, as well as the plain old web, are just scalable grapevines. If a new product is good, people will quickly hear about how good it is from actual users. As opposed to from you the biased (and often motivated to mislead) seller. So how do you bootstrap your good product into the grapevine? A variety of ways, depending on what it is. Sending samples to reviewers. Announcements on relevant websites (such as HN). Making it available in catalogs and product search engines (Amazon, an app store, Etsy, Orbitz, etc) where people will encounter it in search results.
- dec0dedab0de 11y ago
  Sending samples to reviewers. Announcements on relevant websites (such as HN). Making it available in catalogs and product search engines (Amazon, an app store, Etsy, Orbitz, etc) where people will encounter it in search results. Aren't those all forms of advertising?
  - saint_fiasco 11y ago
    People read reviewers and get catalogues and search for things on purpose. I don't think people have a problem with getting information about products when they deliberately look for that.
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    Only in the barest and most technical of senses. They are not being shoved in anyone's face; They are being placed where people want to find them. They are not subsidizing anything, and thereby mucking with normal healthy free-market dynamics (where the customer is the customer, not the product). It's one thing to put a sign outside your new bakery, or to request the newspaper's food critic to review your product, and its another thing entirely to "donate" your cupcakes to a charity bake sale on condition that there be a sign about your shop or flyers handed out with the cupcakes.