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Judging by the downvotes you're getting, I'm not alone in getting a "my job it totally harder than their job!" vibe from your post. (If you spend more of your p

by wtracy 10y ago

Judging by the downvotes you're getting, I'm not alone in getting a "my job it totally harder than their job!" vibe from your post. (If you spend more of your professional time doing marketing than coding, saying so might have helped.) Why do you say that there are no inherently hard problems in marketing? Winning market share against a competitor with a bigger ad spend than you sounds like a hard problem. Achieving minimum customer acquisition cost and optimum market segmentation sound like hard problems. Getting customers to self-select early in the sales funnel so that your salespeople don't waste their time on looky-loos without cutting into actual sales sounds like a hard problem. (I don't know, because I'm not in marketing. Educate me!) Also, saying that there are no hard problems in marketing other than "people are complex" sounds a bit like saying that there are no hard problems in computer science other than "math is complex".

kriro 10y ago
FWIW I have worked in marketing (B2B) at a technology company. I left that out of the post because I thought it was irrelevant (because it's basically an appeal to authority). I'm also a programmer and have a dual CS/MBA-ish degree (more focused on the CS side) so I'm comfortable in both worlds and think I have a decent but by no means great understanding of both worlds. Once you've ramped up to a certain skill level in marketing you're pretty much set. I never get that feeling on programming related work. Maybe I'm just not that great a programmer it's somewhat likely (but I'm also not great at marketing, I've seen some true sales-beasts in action and it's pretty beautiful to watch). I merely meant to say that getting to a level where your marketing/sales are at the 80% level that will get you really far is easier than getting to that 80% in programming (imo). I'm fairly confident that if you'd take someone with 0 experience in either field you could teach the 80% marketing a lot faster. The initial post I replied to contained the line "coding is easy, marketing is hard". I basically wanted to provide the counter perspective. I very much disagree with the "coding is easy" part of that statement but I guess I focused too much on the "marketing is hard" part. I fully admit to being somewhat snarky with the "no hard problems in marketing" comment but I thought the "other than people are complex" made that clear. Guess not, should have stuck with "marketing is easy, coding is hard" ;)

by wtracy 10y ago

kriro 10y ago

FWIW I have worked in marketing (B2B) at a technology company. I left that out of the post because I thought it was irrelevant (because it's basically an appeal to authority). I'm also a programmer and have a dual CS/MBA-ish degree (more focused on the CS side) so I'm comfortable in both worlds and think I have a decent but by no means great understanding of both worlds. Once you've ramped up to a certain skill level in marketing you're pretty much set. I never get that feeling on programming related work. Maybe I'm just not that great a programmer it's somewhat likely (but I'm also not great at marketing, I've seen some true sales-beasts in action and it's pretty beautiful to watch). I merely meant to say that getting to a level where your marketing/sales are at the 80% level that will get you really far is easier than getting to that 80% in programming (imo). I'm fairly confident that if you'd take someone with 0 experience in either field you could teach the 80% marketing a lot faster. The initial post I replied to contained the line "coding is easy, marketing is hard". I basically wanted to provide the counter perspective. I very much disagree with the "coding is easy" part of that statement but I guess I focused too much on the "marketing is hard" part. I fully admit to being somewhat snarky with the "no hard problems in marketing" comment but I thought the "other than people are complex" made that clear. Guess not, should have stuck with "marketing is easy, coding is hard" ;)