7 ms·

The tech world is wrong about marketing

75 points by samsolomon 11y ago

fny 11y ago
Uh... Aren't the spread of buzzwords like "inbound marketing" and "content marketing" the result of insanely brilliant marketing? Isn't touting that the Modern Internet makes old school marketing irrelevant a genius marketing strategy to take over the market of marketing? Sure, the new product might be worse, but these "tech world" companies have managed to take over, and I'd bet they'll keep repacking old wisdom in shiny new phrases and blog posts until they push the ivory towers of marketing into obselence. Hell, Brian Halligan, Hubspot's CEO, is even a senior lecturer at MIT...
acconrad 11y ago
The last few sentences of the article: > Whenever marketers claim that “everything has changed” or that something is “dead” or that some new buzzword “is the future of marketing,” ask for evidence. Make them cite their sources and explain their reasoning. Most of the time, they are just full of it. Somehow I don't think the author fully grasped the irony of his statement given the title.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Or seen the decline of old school yellow pages companies - something changed there
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I'm feeling a little bit dense today, I just can't see the irony :( Not being flippant, but can you help point this out to me?
  - wmeredith 11y ago
    The title of the author's article is in the same vein of the ones being lambasted in his closing paragraph.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      You do realise that article authors normally don't chose the title for their articles? That's the job of the subeditor, and they don't always listen to the author of the article.
      - acconrad 11y ago
        I don't think that's actually obvious to the HN crowd, most of whom are not in publishing or journalism.
jpadkins 11y ago
Overall sentiment of this article is generally correct. Lots of minor errors throughout. One major one that caught my eye: > to increase brand awareness and thought leadership (and those cannot be measured). Brand awareness and thought leadership absolutely can be measured through polling, search volume changes, etc. Be wary of any marketing that is being sold to you where the claim is the benefit can't be measured.
- takno 11y ago
  There are certainly things you can do to measure these things. The difficulty is that these measures aren't as neat as the ones you use for direct marketing, and are less likely to capture the whole value of the brand and thought leadership spend. This means they can be used against each other, but at a high level it's risky to use them to assign resources to the different strategies
petewailes 11y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head for a lot of "tech" businesses at the moment: > “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”
- Zigurd 11y ago
  In cases where network effect is important and the cost of being a follower is high, yeah, just get big. How soon do you think Amazon should do otherwise?
kordless 11y ago
Marketing is about raising interest. Interest is one of the 8 basic emotions, with the other being joy, trust, fear, suprise, sadness, boredom and anger. If you can bootstrap interest into joy, you get optimism. Interest and anger bring aggression, on the other hand. When someone say "everything some other people says about marketing is wrong", what they are really saying is "what they are saying isn't interesting to me and therefore everything they are saying is wrong", which is the well known ad hominem bias. Biases are good in this context because they bring efficiency to systems. For example, when a marketing person uses buzzwords without context to describe their business, you get the expected "bored" responses from people. Does the Intercloud interest you? What if I told you the Intercloud was a cloud of clouds and it needed a high trust federated network backed by the blockchain to operate? Does it interest you now? To be successful at marketing X, one must ignore everything anyone is saying about X and try to understand two basic things: 1. What people (Ys) are interested in X? and 2. What makes X equally interesting to more Ys? Keep in mind sometimes those answers fall outside what you may already know about X. This implies you must learn more about X and get to know the Ys to raise interest in them with the stuff you know they don't. If you pour a lot of resources into #2, don't expect all the Ys to respond well. Part of what can make something interesting is others aren't interested in it as much as you are. And, if you understand that, you will begin to understand marketing.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >Marketing is about raising interest. That's one component, but marketing is bigger than that. In fact, this is seems to be a major point of confusion, that "marketing" is advertising. Marketing encompasses bringing a product to market, perhaps even creating that market. According to Wikipedia's definition: "This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships."
  - kylej762 11y ago
    Agreed, too often people correlate Marketing with Promotion. While marketing is much larger than just promotions. As is evidenced by the 4 Ps of Marketing. The goal of marketing is to "invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defensible market segments" - William Davidow (of Intel) in his book Marketing High Technology (1). The book may be dated, but it provides amazing insight into the other Ps of marketing. (1) http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Davidow/dp/1451697589 http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Davi...
golergka 11y ago
Good article. Also, great content marketing for that book I'm already sick of noticing at HN homepage.
- exception_e 11y ago
  I agree. It seems so forced!
vonnik 11y ago
TYPO: Missing an "e" in "the".
- dang 11y ago
  We eliminated that by de-baiting the title.
gk1 11y ago
On the one hand: Yes, there is too much BS in marketing. There always has been, but today the barrier to calling yourself a "marketer" is close to nothing. These self-proclaimed marketers use a veil of buzzwords (eg, "growth hacking") to deceive and cover up. On the other hand: "The four P's" is a man-made concept, too. So is the entire framework the author shows off. So why is "inbound marketing" a sham while "the four P's" is gospel? That whole part is a rant about terminology more than anything else. There needs to be more skepticism and calling-out-BS within marketing, but that doesn't mean rejecting every new idea because it doesn't fit a decades-old mold. Rejecting everything is just as intellectually lazy as accepting everything. To give an example: I'm an engineer-turned-marketer and now consult tech companies. I never received a "traditional" marketing education so I'd get schooled on theory by a first-year marketing student, but I can automate marketing operations, increase conversion rates, deploy code, turn more trial users into customers, and so on. Between those things and "The Four P's," which do you think matters more to a startup? Theory is useful but dismissing an entire industry (tech) because they don't subscribe to an old theory or choose to use new terminology is ignorant.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  And inbound marketing is now used to refer to what used to be called SEO if you have seen as may mistakes as I have a competent inbound marketing person can improve your site. I wont mention any names but I saw a mistake with canonical tags cost a major UK company 1/2 a mill in less than a week.
  - magic_beans 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, how would a mistake in canonical tags be so catastrophic?
    - seattlekiwi 11y ago
      Mucking up rel canonical can cause massive indexation problems in search engines... No indexation, no rankings, no traffic, no sales.
    - 11y ago
siliconc0w 11y ago
Marketing and Technology are two ways to solve the same thing - information problems. Technology is better at it.
- omarchowdhury 11y ago
  Marketing is the exploitation of information asymmetry. Firms are selective with their message to maximize perceived value. Truth is hidden.
houselouse 11y ago
the raison d'être for a bus stop is not to sell cellphones, purfume or clothing. It is exists to establish and protect a pickup/dropoff point. The bus stop would exist even if the no ads were ever sold for it. On the other hand, the rambling, first-hand, poorly-worded 4 page review the latest sous vide exists solely to sell you that device. This is "content marketing". The text and graphics are inseparable from the intent to sell. Somewhere in the middle is the Slate webpage that links to the sous vide review. It wasn't written to sell that particular appliance, yet ad revenue is very much top of mind.
- omarchowdhury 11y ago
  Let this comment be a manifestation of my intent to subscribe to your newsletter.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
arafa 11y ago
"Creativity cannot be scaled." Actually, in the book The Song Machine, they pretty clearly show otherwise, with teams of topliners, beat makers, etc. churning out hits in a machine-like format: http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/0393241920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460998698&sr=8-1&keywords=the+song+machine http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/039...
- jraines 11y ago
  I thought that was more about maximizing your hits, given that you have found some creative geniuses at specific parts of the process, like Ester Dean, Max Martin, etc.
  - arafa 11y ago
    They are, but in the process have created a serious song and hit generating machine. You have these hit factories that churn this stuff out at scales that were previously unseen through the division of labor described, among other things.
ucaetano 11y ago
As usual, this article makes the very critical mistake of thinking marketing = advertising. Given that, I can expect the entire article to be bullshit.
- dang 11y ago
  If you are so much more knowledgeable than the author and most of us here, it would be better to post a comment that teaches us some of what you know. This one just makes a grand claim with no explanation, surrounded by name-calling. That's not a good fit for HN. We're going for thoughtful discussion here. This is a good description which you might (re-)read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Many of your comments here have breached civility in similar ways. That's a problem. On HN, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
  - ucaetano 11y ago
    My sincere apologies.
danpalmer 11y ago
This might be a bit naive, or just wrong, but I feel like there's a difference between "content marketing" and non-content marketing. Content marketing, to me, means marketing where the 'content' of the marketing is actually valuable in itself. It could be an educational blog post, or a discussion started on Twitter, but it's something that I might reasonably choose to consume in its own right. Non-content marketing I would see as banner ads, TV ads, etc, where I would never choose to see the content if I had a choice. I only see the adverts because they tag on to another piece of content in order to get any exposure.
- ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
  I think the author of the blog post would argue that traditional ads should also endeavor to be valuable in itself. Like how people search out ads like "Office Linebacker" or other high production value ads. Where I disagree with the author is that he makes it sound like absolutely everyone has forgotten traditional marketing 101. I personally haven't seen that, but then again I'm not in Silicon Valley...
phodo 11y ago
Seems ironic that, as a marketer, it took this much verbiage to make his point. Must have gotten paid by the word. On a serious note, the tech industry in general suffers from non standard language when it comes to describing roles. Consider pm for product manager, project manager, program manager. In some cases these labels refer to overlapping roles and responsibilities, in other cases they don't. Same with marketing, where u have different labels meaning the same thing or partially expressing the same thing. Or take bd, where in some startups it means sales and in others it means, well, bd.

75 points by samsolomon 11y ago

fny 11y ago

Uh... Aren't the spread of buzzwords like "inbound marketing" and "content marketing" the result of insanely brilliant marketing? Isn't touting that the Modern Internet makes old school marketing irrelevant a genius marketing strategy to take over the market of marketing? Sure, the new product might be worse, but these "tech world" companies have managed to take over, and I'd bet they'll keep repacking old wisdom in shiny new phrases and blog posts until they push the ivory towers of marketing into obselence. Hell, Brian Halligan, Hubspot's CEO, is even a senior lecturer at MIT...

acconrad 11y ago

The last few sentences of the article: > Whenever marketers claim that “everything has changed” or that something is “dead” or that some new buzzword “is the future of marketing,” ask for evidence. Make them cite their sources and explain their reasoning. Most of the time, they are just full of it. Somehow I don't think the author fully grasped the irony of his statement given the title.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
Or seen the decline of old school yellow pages companies - something changed there
chris_wot 11y ago
I'm feeling a little bit dense today, I just can't see the irony :( Not being flippant, but can you help point this out to me?
- wmeredith 11y ago
  The title of the author's article is in the same vein of the ones being lambasted in his closing paragraph.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    You do realise that article authors normally don't chose the title for their articles? That's the job of the subeditor, and they don't always listen to the author of the article.
    - acconrad 11y ago
      I don't think that's actually obvious to the HN crowd, most of whom are not in publishing or journalism.

jpadkins 11y ago

Overall sentiment of this article is generally correct. Lots of minor errors throughout. One major one that caught my eye: > to increase brand awareness and thought leadership (and those cannot be measured). Brand awareness and thought leadership absolutely can be measured through polling, search volume changes, etc. Be wary of any marketing that is being sold to you where the claim is the benefit can't be measured.

takno 11y ago
There are certainly things you can do to measure these things. The difficulty is that these measures aren't as neat as the ones you use for direct marketing, and are less likely to capture the whole value of the brand and thought leadership spend. This means they can be used against each other, but at a high level it's risky to use them to assign resources to the different strategies

petewailes 11y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head for a lot of "tech" businesses at the moment: > “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

Zigurd 11y ago
In cases where network effect is important and the cost of being a follower is high, yeah, just get big. How soon do you think Amazon should do otherwise?

kordless 11y ago

Marketing is about raising interest. Interest is one of the 8 basic emotions, with the other being joy, trust, fear, suprise, sadness, boredom and anger. If you can bootstrap interest into joy, you get optimism. Interest and anger bring aggression, on the other hand. When someone say "everything some other people says about marketing is wrong", what they are really saying is "what they are saying isn't interesting to me and therefore everything they are saying is wrong", which is the well known ad hominem bias. Biases are good in this context because they bring efficiency to systems. For example, when a marketing person uses buzzwords without context to describe their business, you get the expected "bored" responses from people. Does the Intercloud interest you? What if I told you the Intercloud was a cloud of clouds and it needed a high trust federated network backed by the blockchain to operate? Does it interest you now? To be successful at marketing X, one must ignore everything anyone is saying about X and try to understand two basic things: 1. What people (Ys) are interested in X? and 2. What makes X equally interesting to more Ys? Keep in mind sometimes those answers fall outside what you may already know about X. This implies you must learn more about X and get to know the Ys to raise interest in them with the stuff you know they don't. If you pour a lot of resources into #2, don't expect all the Ys to respond well. Part of what can make something interesting is others aren't interested in it as much as you are. And, if you understand that, you will begin to understand marketing.

forgetsusername 11y ago
>Marketing is about raising interest. That's one component, but marketing is bigger than that. In fact, this is seems to be a major point of confusion, that "marketing" is advertising. Marketing encompasses bringing a product to market, perhaps even creating that market. According to Wikipedia's definition: "This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships."
- kylej762 11y ago
  Agreed, too often people correlate Marketing with Promotion. While marketing is much larger than just promotions. As is evidenced by the 4 Ps of Marketing. The goal of marketing is to "invent complete products and drive them to commanding positions in defensible market segments" - William Davidow (of Intel) in his book Marketing High Technology (1). The book may be dated, but it provides amazing insight into the other Ps of marketing. (1) http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Davidow/dp/1451697589 http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-High-Technology-William-Davi...

golergka 11y ago

Good article. Also, great content marketing for that book I'm already sick of noticing at HN homepage.

exception_e 11y ago
I agree. It seems so forced!

vonnik 11y ago

TYPO: Missing an "e" in "the".

dang 11y ago
We eliminated that by de-baiting the title.

gk1 11y ago

On the one hand: Yes, there is too much BS in marketing. There always has been, but today the barrier to calling yourself a "marketer" is close to nothing. These self-proclaimed marketers use a veil of buzzwords (eg, "growth hacking") to deceive and cover up. On the other hand: "The four P's" is a man-made concept, too. So is the entire framework the author shows off. So why is "inbound marketing" a sham while "the four P's" is gospel? That whole part is a rant about terminology more than anything else. There needs to be more skepticism and calling-out-BS within marketing, but that doesn't mean rejecting every new idea because it doesn't fit a decades-old mold. Rejecting everything is just as intellectually lazy as accepting everything. To give an example: I'm an engineer-turned-marketer and now consult tech companies. I never received a "traditional" marketing education so I'd get schooled on theory by a first-year marketing student, but I can automate marketing operations, increase conversion rates, deploy code, turn more trial users into customers, and so on. Between those things and "The Four P's," which do you think matters more to a startup? Theory is useful but dismissing an entire industry (tech) because they don't subscribe to an old theory or choose to use new terminology is ignorant.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
And inbound marketing is now used to refer to what used to be called SEO if you have seen as may mistakes as I have a competent inbound marketing person can improve your site. I wont mention any names but I saw a mistake with canonical tags cost a major UK company 1/2 a mill in less than a week.
- magic_beans 11y ago
  Out of curiosity, how would a mistake in canonical tags be so catastrophic?
  - seattlekiwi 11y ago
    Mucking up rel canonical can cause massive indexation problems in search engines... No indexation, no rankings, no traffic, no sales.
  - 11y ago

siliconc0w 11y ago

Marketing and Technology are two ways to solve the same thing - information problems. Technology is better at it.

omarchowdhury 11y ago
Marketing is the exploitation of information asymmetry. Firms are selective with their message to maximize perceived value. Truth is hidden.

houselouse 11y ago

the raison d'être for a bus stop is not to sell cellphones, purfume or clothing. It is exists to establish and protect a pickup/dropoff point. The bus stop would exist even if the no ads were ever sold for it. On the other hand, the rambling, first-hand, poorly-worded 4 page review the latest sous vide exists solely to sell you that device. This is "content marketing". The text and graphics are inseparable from the intent to sell. Somewhere in the middle is the Slate webpage that links to the sous vide review. It wasn't written to sell that particular appliance, yet ad revenue is very much top of mind.

omarchowdhury 11y ago
Let this comment be a manifestation of my intent to subscribe to your newsletter.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

arafa 11y ago

"Creativity cannot be scaled." Actually, in the book The Song Machine, they pretty clearly show otherwise, with teams of topliners, beat makers, etc. churning out hits in a machine-like format: http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/0393241920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460998698&sr=8-1&keywords=the+song+machine http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/039...

jraines 11y ago
I thought that was more about maximizing your hits, given that you have found some creative geniuses at specific parts of the process, like Ester Dean, Max Martin, etc.
- arafa 11y ago
  They are, but in the process have created a serious song and hit generating machine. You have these hit factories that churn this stuff out at scales that were previously unseen through the division of labor described, among other things.

ucaetano 11y ago

As usual, this article makes the very critical mistake of thinking marketing = advertising. Given that, I can expect the entire article to be bullshit.

dang 11y ago
If you are so much more knowledgeable than the author and most of us here, it would be better to post a comment that teaches us some of what you know. This one just makes a grand claim with no explanation, surrounded by name-calling. That's not a good fit for HN. We're going for thoughtful discussion here. This is a good description which you might (re-)read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html Many of your comments here have breached civility in similar ways. That's a problem. On HN, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- ucaetano 11y ago
  My sincere apologies.

danpalmer 11y ago

This might be a bit naive, or just wrong, but I feel like there's a difference between "content marketing" and non-content marketing. Content marketing, to me, means marketing where the 'content' of the marketing is actually valuable in itself. It could be an educational blog post, or a discussion started on Twitter, but it's something that I might reasonably choose to consume in its own right. Non-content marketing I would see as banner ads, TV ads, etc, where I would never choose to see the content if I had a choice. I only see the adverts because they tag on to another piece of content in order to get any exposure.

ConfuciusSay02 11y ago
I think the author of the blog post would argue that traditional ads should also endeavor to be valuable in itself. Like how people search out ads like "Office Linebacker" or other high production value ads. Where I disagree with the author is that he makes it sound like absolutely everyone has forgotten traditional marketing 101. I personally haven't seen that, but then again I'm not in Silicon Valley...

phodo 11y ago

Seems ironic that, as a marketer, it took this much verbiage to make his point. Must have gotten paid by the word. On a serious note, the tech industry in general suffers from non standard language when it comes to describing roles. Consider pm for product manager, project manager, program manager. In some cases these labels refer to overlapping roles and responsibilities, in other cases they don't. Same with marketing, where u have different labels meaning the same thing or partially expressing the same thing. Or take bd, where in some startups it means sales and in others it means, well, bd.