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Nerds are people who are incredibly easy to market products to - it just needs to appeal to the rational mindset more than the emotional mindset. Putting out a

Nerds are people who are incredibly easy to market products to - it just needs to appeal to the rational mindset more than the emotional mindset. Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door. We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads. Promoting technical documentation as marketing is a bit odd though. Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.

roenxi 5y ago
I suspect the average nerd would cave at any sort of targeted advertising rational or emotional. Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging ^^ and uncomfortable that I don't believe most nerds do that. The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. The best defence is having unusual preferences ... which is no defence at all if someone takes the time to figure out what they are. Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate. ^^ EDIT Consider the should-be-famous story of Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Mathematical genius, Master of the Mint, totally in his element. Successfully identified the bubble forming. Caved to what was essentially social pressure anyway and bought back into the bubble after a few months. Being right in defiance of social pressure is excruciating.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Big budget marketing drives most of the mainstream preferences though, so I'd argue that resistance to marketing is the main thing separating nerds from mainstream.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  low and high status markers?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. I think that there is some form of automatic anti-persuasion feeling going on too. You feel more negative about something when you feel that it is being pushed 'too hard'.
- Ieghaehia9 5y ago
  > Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate. Isn't there also some component of effective demand to this? If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. If you don't care about being seen as uncool and don't like smartphones, you're not going to get one. Etc. In the extreme, a hermit monk would just reply to a sales pitch with "still tethered to your possessions, I see".
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. I'd argue that the way it works is that they create desire on the one hand and sell their products as solutions to things that they aren't on the other. To explain the latter, for example, selling beer or handbags to fill a need for self-esteem or something. If you think about it, a lot of people have most of what they need and are persuaded by these created desires anyway. Then you also have to consider that people are trying to get you to buy their butter rather than the other butter. That's the third part. In summary, being satisfied is not a defense since they can make you unsatisfied.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers Really? "Status markers"? I suppose I respond to "status markers" subliminally, like anyone else does. I recognise brands that have been advertised, and I rate them higher than unknown brands. But I despise advertising, especially the shotgun advertising that encroaches/takes-over on public space; and UBE. Turning buses and taxis into advertising billboards has degraded public space. And a lot of shotgun advertising involves externalising costs - UBE in particular costs an awful lot in terms of the inbox-owner's time. I'm conflicted about this. I'm OK with brand promotion, which began in times when many products were adulterated (e.g. flour mixed with brick-dust), and a brand tied product quality to brand reputation. But brand marketing seems to have gone hand-in-hand with price competition, so that "top" brands nowadays are often correlated with cheap components, built-in obsolescence, and crap service. If we're considering a tech product (think SaaS), then a website that has obviously been manicured by someone from Marketing is a serious turn-off. Especially if the marketing dude has removed all useful information.
- hobofan 5y ago
  > Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging You only have to evoke the illusion of making a decision based on statistics. Many "nerds" go crazy for benchmarks in marketing (and e.g. presenting them as a graph rather than a simple statement like "20% faster"), even though they are usually only meaningful if you really dig deeply into them.
goto11 5y ago
Marketing associate emotions to products. For perfume ads it is a feeling of being attractive. For products marketed to geeks it is a feeling of being smarter and mentally superior to others. Notice how successful geek marketing talks about the type of person who use the product rather than just about the merits of the products itself. "The BingWiz languages are used by true 10x geeks who are are tired of group-think and corporate bullshit and don't want to be tied down by mediocrity. Mediocre corporate drones uses FlopFlup because their feeble minds are unable to comprehend the true power of BingWiz."
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  I've spent gobs of money to buy products, very nerdy products. It was always to reduce headaches and friction. Better workflows for dev teams. Fewer production outages. Reduce/mitigate security incidents, etc. I think the only ads I get is either product placement or sponsored search results, I don't read any spam or unsolicited ads/emails/messages. However, I do not recall any purchasing decision that was not driven by some need/headache to solve and involved some peer-review/references by others to make sure I don't have blindspots. Is this unusual in commercial/B2B context? I don't think there was all that much emotion, unless you call pain-relief an emotion. Couldn't care less what it looked like, branding, or anything like that, all I wanted is to solve my immediate challenge and forget about it.
  - goto11 5y ago
    Obviously geeks always think their product choices are driven by rational thinking. This is why marketing to geeks are like "you are more smart and rational if you buy this product". Marketing is used because it works. Of course your decisions might be purely rational, if such a thing is possible, but in general marketing have an effect. I fact the article seem to be itself a clever piece of marketing, and the minds of HN is eating it up because it confirms what they want to believe about themselves ("we are too smart to fall for marketing.").
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
nine_k 5y ago
Look at all these retro-gaming consoles, nerdy-joke t-shirts, weird dev boards and SBCs, DIY 3D printers, and similar stuff. I don't think nerds buy then out of pure rationality. It's a mistake to think that nerds have a suppressed or lacking emotional sphere. It's just wired differently that the neurotypical one, but it's very much there.
- libertine 5y ago
  Mechanical keyboards - people are spending thousands on keyboards. Nerds are just like any other human, and the worst thing one can do is to fool himself thinking they're imune to advertising or any sort of influence - it makes you a sitting duck. You'll be eating advertising completely unaware of it, from a weird sense of "superiority" and because of an adblocker. The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be. So then you are aware and not affected, doesn't that mean you are aware you are no longer affected since you are aware of the effects of marketing? My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on. Like, I am aware that I am not significantly affected by marketing. I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product. Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money. But like sure, I feel an emotional tingle from ads, but I recognize it for what it is and just shuts it down. It isn't hard to do for me, rather it is hard to actually feel like the products would be meaningful. I think that many who recognize that ads doesn't affects them significantly works similarly.
frant-hartm 5y ago
Nerds are not geeks, true nerds are still on IRC, not HN. Compulsory geek vs nerd video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tvy_Pbe5NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tvy_Pbe5NA
pydry 5y ago
I don't think that's at all true. Moreover the assumption that they are more rational by default actually leads them to be more susceptible. Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. It might not be a sports shoe but the same emotional dynamics are in play.
- nottorp 5y ago
  > Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. "Used to". These days i'd think "how long till they cancel it?" instead.
dgb23 5y ago
> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs. For me it goes like this: * see an article or link description that promises something interesting. If it has a sound rationale and not too many buzzwords I continue. * quickly skip the homepage/brochure to look for hints of real use-cases or some hard, tangible problem they solved, ignore the rest. * check the pricing tabs to get a rough idea of the features, figure out if I'm in the target audience and to find out whether the pricing model scales with my needs or with theirs. * check the documentation, look for quick starts, specific guides, integration with other tooling.
enaaem 5y ago
Nerds can also be influenced by by one upping your competitor’s specs sheet with gimmicks. Features that look good on paper, but are badly implemented and have limited usefulness in practice.
herbst 5y ago
> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs. I often compare products by their docs after filtering the pricing pages. So if you show up on Google for the thing I need I likely end up in your docs. Good docs are a selling point for me :)

roenxi 5y ago

I suspect the average nerd would cave at any sort of targeted advertising rational or emotional. Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging ^^ and uncomfortable that I don't believe most nerds do that. The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. The best defence is having unusual preferences ... which is no defence at all if someone takes the time to figure out what they are. Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate. ^^ EDIT Consider the should-be-famous story of Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Mathematical genius, Master of the Mint, totally in his element. Successfully identified the bubble forming. Caved to what was essentially social pressure anyway and bought back into the bubble after a few months. Being right in defiance of social pressure is excruciating.

Jensson 5y ago
Big budget marketing drives most of the mainstream preferences though, so I'd argue that resistance to marketing is the main thing separating nerds from mainstream.
inter_netuser 5y ago
low and high status markers?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Aerroon 5y ago
>The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. I think that there is some form of automatic anti-persuasion feeling going on too. You feel more negative about something when you feel that it is being pushed 'too hard'.
Ieghaehia9 5y ago
> Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate. Isn't there also some component of effective demand to this? If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. If you don't care about being seen as uncool and don't like smartphones, you're not going to get one. Etc. In the extreme, a hermit monk would just reply to a sales pitch with "still tethered to your possessions, I see".
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. I'd argue that the way it works is that they create desire on the one hand and sell their products as solutions to things that they aren't on the other. To explain the latter, for example, selling beer or handbags to fill a need for self-esteem or something. If you think about it, a lot of people have most of what they need and are persuaded by these created desires anyway. Then you also have to consider that people are trying to get you to buy their butter rather than the other butter. That's the third part. In summary, being satisfied is not a defense since they can make you unsatisfied.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
denton-scratch 5y ago
> Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers Really? "Status markers"? I suppose I respond to "status markers" subliminally, like anyone else does. I recognise brands that have been advertised, and I rate them higher than unknown brands. But I despise advertising, especially the shotgun advertising that encroaches/takes-over on public space; and UBE. Turning buses and taxis into advertising billboards has degraded public space. And a lot of shotgun advertising involves externalising costs - UBE in particular costs an awful lot in terms of the inbox-owner's time. I'm conflicted about this. I'm OK with brand promotion, which began in times when many products were adulterated (e.g. flour mixed with brick-dust), and a brand tied product quality to brand reputation. But brand marketing seems to have gone hand-in-hand with price competition, so that "top" brands nowadays are often correlated with cheap components, built-in obsolescence, and crap service. If we're considering a tech product (think SaaS), then a website that has obviously been manicured by someone from Marketing is a serious turn-off. Especially if the marketing dude has removed all useful information.
hobofan 5y ago
> Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging You only have to evoke the illusion of making a decision based on statistics. Many "nerds" go crazy for benchmarks in marketing (and e.g. presenting them as a graph rather than a simple statement like "20% faster"), even though they are usually only meaningful if you really dig deeply into them.

goto11 5y ago

Marketing associate emotions to products. For perfume ads it is a feeling of being attractive. For products marketed to geeks it is a feeling of being smarter and mentally superior to others. Notice how successful geek marketing talks about the type of person who use the product rather than just about the merits of the products itself. "The BingWiz languages are used by true 10x geeks who are are tired of group-think and corporate bullshit and don't want to be tied down by mediocrity. Mediocre corporate drones uses FlopFlup because their feeble minds are unable to comprehend the true power of BingWiz."

inter_netuser 5y ago
I've spent gobs of money to buy products, very nerdy products. It was always to reduce headaches and friction. Better workflows for dev teams. Fewer production outages. Reduce/mitigate security incidents, etc. I think the only ads I get is either product placement or sponsored search results, I don't read any spam or unsolicited ads/emails/messages. However, I do not recall any purchasing decision that was not driven by some need/headache to solve and involved some peer-review/references by others to make sure I don't have blindspots. Is this unusual in commercial/B2B context? I don't think there was all that much emotion, unless you call pain-relief an emotion. Couldn't care less what it looked like, branding, or anything like that, all I wanted is to solve my immediate challenge and forget about it.
- goto11 5y ago
  Obviously geeks always think their product choices are driven by rational thinking. This is why marketing to geeks are like "you are more smart and rational if you buy this product". Marketing is used because it works. Of course your decisions might be purely rational, if such a thing is possible, but in general marketing have an effect. I fact the article seem to be itself a clever piece of marketing, and the minds of HN is eating it up because it confirms what they want to believe about themselves ("we are too smart to fall for marketing.").
  - inter_netuser 5y ago

nine_k 5y ago

Look at all these retro-gaming consoles, nerdy-joke t-shirts, weird dev boards and SBCs, DIY 3D printers, and similar stuff. I don't think nerds buy then out of pure rationality. It's a mistake to think that nerds have a suppressed or lacking emotional sphere. It's just wired differently that the neurotypical one, but it's very much there.

libertine 5y ago
Mechanical keyboards - people are spending thousands on keyboards. Nerds are just like any other human, and the worst thing one can do is to fool himself thinking they're imune to advertising or any sort of influence - it makes you a sitting duck. You'll be eating advertising completely unaware of it, from a weird sense of "superiority" and because of an adblocker. The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be. So then you are aware and not affected, doesn't that mean you are aware you are no longer affected since you are aware of the effects of marketing? My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on. Like, I am aware that I am not significantly affected by marketing. I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product. Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money. But like sure, I feel an emotional tingle from ads, but I recognize it for what it is and just shuts it down. It isn't hard to do for me, rather it is hard to actually feel like the products would be meaningful. I think that many who recognize that ads doesn't affects them significantly works similarly.

frant-hartm 5y ago

Nerds are not geeks, true nerds are still on IRC, not HN. Compulsory geek vs nerd video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tvy_Pbe5NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tvy_Pbe5NA

pydry 5y ago

I don't think that's at all true. Moreover the assumption that they are more rational by default actually leads them to be more susceptible. Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. It might not be a sports shoe but the same emotional dynamics are in play.

nottorp 5y ago
> Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. "Used to". These days i'd think "how long till they cancel it?" instead.

dgb23 5y ago

> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs. For me it goes like this: * see an article or link description that promises something interesting. If it has a sound rationale and not too many buzzwords I continue. * quickly skip the homepage/brochure to look for hints of real use-cases or some hard, tangible problem they solved, ignore the rest. * check the pricing tabs to get a rough idea of the features, figure out if I'm in the target audience and to find out whether the pricing model scales with my needs or with theirs. * check the documentation, look for quick starts, specific guides, integration with other tooling.

enaaem 5y ago

Nerds can also be influenced by by one upping your competitor’s specs sheet with gimmicks. Features that look good on paper, but are badly implemented and have limited usefulness in practice.

herbst 5y ago

> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs. I often compare products by their docs after filtering the pricing pages. So if you show up on Google for the thing I need I likely end up in your docs. Good docs are a selling point for me :)