4 ms·

Selling What They Preach

28 points by cdvonstinkpot 10y ago

leggomylibro 10y ago
I'm normally a big fan of The Atlantic's longform pieces, but this one really missed the mark with me. It certainly doesn't justify its length, and it only gave passing mention to the simple fact that companies sell what people want to buy. People seem to want hope right now, and there is endless hand-wringing about how we can fight the rising nationalistic nastiness in the world. Rebuild stronger local community ties? Be more mindful of small acts of kindness? People have their own ideas, but that's what they want to buy, so that's what companies are using in their ads. I think the author got the causal relationship backwards. Marketers aren't arbiters of what people think is good or right. They just do their best to express those values as they see them in the current zeitgeist.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > companies sell what people want to buy That doesn't really sum it up. There are lots of things people would love to buy, but there are strong enough disincentives to marketing them that they don't get sold. A simple example is raw milk, but there are myriad reasons why a company would not sell a product, and often times those reasons line up across an entire industry. In marketing specifically, there are cultural practices that make certain products easier to market than others. It's not that those products are unmarketable, or that people don't want to buy them, the tools to do it just don't exist. For example, I could invent a marketing tool for marketing some of these products, adding 0.01% to the typical marketing professional's revenue... but learning that tool isn't really worth their time. They can manage maybe a half dozen tools max. so each of those needs to provide tens of thousands of revenue per year. If we start from a presumption that marketing will be done by people earning $50-200k per year, only tools that fit into that lifestyle can exist. Of course, there could be a market of part time freelance marketers capturing those smaller contracts, but there's no incentive for the existing marketing industry to build the tools they'd need. In fact there's disincentives: having a big step-up in the cost to get started makes it harder for newcomers, which decreases competition for professional marketers, which makes it easier for them to keep their contracts. And for the tool builders (software companies, etc) it is just more manageable to focus on one or two tools that capture the lions share of the market. Product teams get bogged down in trying to build too much, so management has an incentive to keep it simple. A startup could capture that value, but as startups grow there is pressure for them to go after the big fish clients, and again that causes them to turn away from the long tail. Open source will get to it, but the open source software development world is still in its infancy compared to the IP-based software development world. And OSS is currently in a crisis due to software shifting from downloadable executables to software-as-a-service. We'll pull out of that, but until then the end-user OSS market is languishing.

28 points by cdvonstinkpot 10y ago

I'm normally a big fan of The Atlantic's longform pieces, but this one really missed the mark with me. It certainly doesn't justify its length, and it only gave passing mention to the simple fact that companies sell what people want to buy. People seem to want hope right now, and there is endless hand-wringing about how we can fight the rising nationalistic nastiness in the world. Rebuild stronger local community ties? Be more mindful of small acts of kindness? People have their own ideas, but that's what they want to buy, so that's what companies are using in their ads. I think the author got the causal relationship backwards. Marketers aren't arbiters of what people think is good or right. They just do their best to express those values as they see them in the current zeitgeist.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
> companies sell what people want to buy That doesn't really sum it up. There are lots of things people would love to buy, but there are strong enough disincentives to marketing them that they don't get sold. A simple example is raw milk, but there are myriad reasons why a company would not sell a product, and often times those reasons line up across an entire industry. In marketing specifically, there are cultural practices that make certain products easier to market than others. It's not that those products are unmarketable, or that people don't want to buy them, the tools to do it just don't exist. For example, I could invent a marketing tool for marketing some of these products, adding 0.01% to the typical marketing professional's revenue... but learning that tool isn't really worth their time. They can manage maybe a half dozen tools max. so each of those needs to provide tens of thousands of revenue per year. If we start from a presumption that marketing will be done by people earning $50-200k per year, only tools that fit into that lifestyle can exist. Of course, there could be a market of part time freelance marketers capturing those smaller contracts, but there's no incentive for the existing marketing industry to build the tools they'd need. In fact there's disincentives: having a big step-up in the cost to get started makes it harder for newcomers, which decreases competition for professional marketers, which makes it easier for them to keep their contracts. And for the tool builders (software companies, etc) it is just more manageable to focus on one or two tools that capture the lions share of the market. Product teams get bogged down in trying to build too much, so management has an incentive to keep it simple. A startup could capture that value, but as startups grow there is pressure for them to go after the big fish clients, and again that causes them to turn away from the long tail. Open source will get to it, but the open source software development world is still in its infancy compared to the IP-based software development world. And OSS is currently in a crisis due to software shifting from downloadable executables to software-as-a-service. We'll pull out of that, but until then the end-user OSS market is languishing.