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In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather th

by NhanH 4y ago

In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information). The reason we can’t realistically do it right now is due to marketing effort manifested into spam, which turns it into a very difficult technological problem. I would still feel derisive about marketing as a field due to that reason. Marketing nowadays seems to focus on overwhelming the audience and hope they makes bad decisions.

austinpena 4y ago
Oftentimes marketing is focused on those who aren't "problem aware" which can bring genuine value. These types of marketing messages focus on bringing a previously unknown problem/inefficiency to someone's mind and show the solution.
- NhanH 4y ago
  I had part of my comment responding to this point, but I wasn’t sure how to best phrase it so I cut it off. I don’t believe for this to happen enough at any frequency to be a valid reason. People usually knows their pain point, and go to great length trying to address that (normally spending a lot of time due to, well, spam-ish marketing). And to be frank, most products are not game-changing things that magically solve a problem no thing previously could have solved. People are already using tools and solutions for their problems, and if they are looking for a better thing, they already know which tweak it needs. They just can’t differentiate the solutions between a sea of junk marketing.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    >People usually knows their pain point Exactly. I know my buggy is slow, I just need a faster horse.
  - austinpena 4y ago
    I look at duckduckgo, they do tons of Top of Funnel advertising like billboards. Do you think that they should cease this type of advertising and just try and show up when people search "privacy conscious search engine"?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Another way to phrase that: marketing convinces you you have a problem so they can sell you the solution.
  - eropple 4y ago
    Another way to phrase it: marketing identifies with words and examples a problem that you haven't been able to isolate for one of a dozen reasons from inattention to time crunch to insufficient expertise in the problem domain--so they can sell you the solution. Sometimes, anyway, on the last part. There is marketing (as anyone who's ever studied advertising) that doesn't even try to sell you anything because there's value in the knock-on growth of awareness and an expanding or top-of-mind market (the canonical example being Campbell Soup's "Soup Is Good Food" advertising campaign).
- defterGoose 4y ago
  I dunno, this just makes me think of all the "where did the soda go?" infomercial memes.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
This is my primary complaint as well. It's nearly impossible to find a product even after specifying the exact name and type in many search tools. Even something as simple as a bolt with a specific diameter gets flooded with irrelevant products. It's like the original Search terms are completely ignored and replaced with fuzzy results and promoted products
- Arrath 4y ago
  > flooded with irrelevant products Or your top results are a bevy of "Best threaded bolts of 2022" articles that, suspiciously, list the same handful of products maybe in differing order and all through affiliate links.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Once you get into branding that's all whole another can of worms. I was thinking about concrete product descriptions Eg “1/4 inch diameter hex bolt 10 inch long“ Won't show any products that actually fit the description. If that's what I need, no amount of marketing is going to convince me to buy a half inch diameter bolt that is 5 in Long. Is it utter failure of marketing oriented search functions
    - Arrath 4y ago
      I've run into this, while searching for a replacement machine screw in fact, and it drove me batty. I ended up just running to a few local hardware stores and then more specialized supply storefronts to solve my problem. I don't want or need a 'related product' I need exactly this product!
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Yeah, infuriating when you know it exists and you know what it is called
    - plutonic 4y ago
      McMaster-Carr is your friend here. I used it use it a lot for robotics club in high school. It has a clear interface that makes it easy to find the exact parts you need
jeromegv 4y ago
How do you imagine people pull that information? You still need to be “findable” when someone is pulling that info. You still need to convince them that what you are offering matches their need. They need to be convinced you are better than the other 4 other things they found that might also match their need. All of this is still marketing.
- elefanten 4y ago
  “In an ideal world” that info would be collected, organized and accessible to all, alongside usage/performance/satisfaction data. Gp is right, marketing is horribly inefficient and everything about it’s current configuration is toxic because it seeks to influence by stealing attention, stealing time, stealing memory, spreading selective (dis)info and manipulating you into buying things. We’re just unfortunately pretty far from that ideal world.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  Can’t resist quoting David’s Sling[1] (not a masterpiece of philosophy by any means, but makes some good points): > We don't want to destroy advertising. We want to destroy manipulative advertising. We want to eliminate the kind of advertising that persuades the listener to buy in spite of the best information, rather than because of it. We want people to filter the informational content from commercial advertising—and all too often, when an advertisement is run through an informational filter, nothing is left. The adversarial approach is the problem. This is akin to the difference between a jury trial or televised debate and an academic argument: neither permits outright lies, ideally, but in the latter intentional cherry-picking is (or should be) disqualifying whereas the former just dumps two opposing cherry-pickers in a bag and lets them fight it out. (Not coincidentally, an academic argument doesn’t require an audience.) I’m not entirely sure that advertising, like law, can be different, because it may simply be impossible to do better when the participants don’t trust each other to act in good faith. But it’s also no wonder that the result seems revolting when a large portion of your identity is centred around seeing things as they are and not as you wish they were. In any case, defending manipulation and cherry-picking requires an argument (such as this one) stronger than “you still need to inform buyers about your product”. (If you’re talking about convincing rather than informing, you’re already assuming the conclusion.) [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7661157M/ https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7661157M/
WalterBright 4y ago
> and hope they makes bad decisions Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.
- conception 4y ago
  Very few companies, in the US at least, are interested in long term business vs quarterly profits.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I hear that a lot, and it's just baloney. Recurring revenue is the holy grail for businesses, not one-shot revenue. Stock investors do not reward companies that eat their seed corn. They short those companies. If you know which companies are sacrificing the long term, you'd be shorting their stock.
    - _tom_ 4y ago
      And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
        NotOscarWilde 4y ago
        > > And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing. > I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me? The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas. Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?
codegeek 4y ago
"For when they need it" I agree in general but there is also a lot of value in reaching out to someone and helping them decide if/when they need it. THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future. Sometimes, people are lazy and unless they have hair on fire problem, they don't actively look to solve their problem. However, if you reach out to them (considering you did your homework on them), there is plenty of value in that. We have won customers for our company doing that and there is no need for coercion of any sort. You just need to start a conversation and truly go with a consultative approach.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future. That's maybe true in theory. The point of practical marketing is to make people think they have a problem that you have an extraordinary solution for. Sometimes that is true, but the vast majority of the time the problem doesn't even exist, and even if it did, the product wouldn't do anything to solve it. Basically, penis enlargement pills are the quintessence of marketing.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    Indeed. I'm not sure talking about some idealistic form of marketing is any more useful than talking about an idealistic form of government where we get rid of all laws and just have people do what they're supposed to do. Sure, such a thing would be nice. It also doesn't happen. The goal of marketing is to get people to buy something. It doesn't matter if they need it or not, it doesn't matter if there's a better option out there. The goal is to get people to buy. Considering most people don't need most products, and even when someone does need a product they're usually choosing just one of several available options, we can surmise that the vast majority of marketing is trying to get people to buy something they shouldn't be buying.
  - whiskey14 4y ago
    I would say that you've misunderstood the sprectral nature of marketing. Yes some marketing is immoral, but not all of it is. It's not black and white. Charity advertertising or B-corp marketing would be on the other end of your spectrum. I still think they could also be put down as the "quintessence of marketing".
dylan604 4y ago
How can it be a bad decision if it is the decision you wanted them to make? ;P
wpietri 4y ago
For sure. I'm good with the part of marketing that is really figuring about how to market a product. Understanding audiences. Understanding their lives and their needs. Explaining how the current products can help, and providing internal input so that future products are better. That's all productive stuff! But as we look towards advertising and sales, it looks to me like both an arms race and the tragedy of the commons. Between companies' own websites, professional reviewers (Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc), and community discussions (Reddit, etc), these days consumer information needs are for the most part easily satisfied. But because competitors try to manipulate purchasers via ads and sales techniques, other companies are obliged to follow suit to some extent. That's the arms race part. And the tragedy of the commons is that so much of the information space is filled with stuff whose information value runs between low and negative. Another commons that its harmed is the ethical one. With so many people whose jobs depend on manipulation to one extent or another, it makes manipulative behavior more generally ok. I think you're also right about push vs pull. Push systems so often have pernicious negative side effects, and this is no exception.
- sooheon 4y ago
  Great thoughts. But I think the distinction between push and pull is not so clear. When I want to pull information, at some point I have to query the world (because I don't have direct indexing into the world's knowledge). The response to that query is bound to be a powerful push of some sort, purely evolutionarily speaking.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    I think that might have been true once, but I don't think it is now. If I make a thing, I can put up a web page about it. I can ask Google to index it. I can put my product on Amazon with useful keywords. I can get myself in directories. I can go to trade shows. I can put a press release on PR Newswire. None of those are push actions in the sense that I am intruding on recipients and trying to badger them into doing what I want. They're just all making offerings in a pull-compatible way such that when people with needs go looking, they will find things. The last bit makes me think you might be using "pull" in a metaphorical sense, but here I'm using it in the Lean supply chain sense, which is about producer and consumer behavior.
leobg 4y ago
I think it’s a technological challenge. Getting the information you need, when you need it. It’s semantic search, squared. A whole sequence of challenges: 1) Understanding what the user wants and needs without him needing to type out the full context. 2) Having a database of all the world’s information extracted from sources. 3) A search algorithm that brings query and data together in the way the user expects, including ranking the results. We have marketing because such a system does not exist. (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.)
- whiskey14 4y ago
  > (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.) This +1. Essentially, what we would need is mind reading abilities to be able to put the information in front of people exactly when they needed it. Said system would also need to perfectly analyse the economics so they can be sure that they can afford the information. The spread of marketing and sales through the digital world isn't going anywhere while new products and services are being created. It can't be automated perfectly, and while it can't be automated then there will always be ways to rig and game the systems that we engineer.
  - leobg 4y ago
    You can rig the game on vague claims. You cannot rig it on facts. A 600 Watt solar panel is 600 Watts. Only most buying criteria do not have measurables attached to them. And even if they have, tech is terrible at filtering for them. Search Amazon for linen pants and most results you get will be made of cotton.
    - whiskey14 4y ago
      Searched Amazon for linen pants, 2/20 were cotton, most others were made of "cotton linen". Then googled cotton linen. Turns out its a blended fabric that avoids the disadvantages of both: https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advantages-of-cotton-linen-blended-fibre https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advant... Most "linen" material is blended. So actually turns out Amazon is inferring what you really want. The "facts" that people need in their products are actually really difficult to determine. People don't want linen pants, they really want cotton linen. And for the 600w solar panel, what other criteria does it boil down to? I think is the reason there is no decent standard for product categorisation, there is literally too much to quantify and the consumer won't/can't be bothered to navigate such categorisation.
sam0x17 4y ago
Agreed. The very existence of the IDEA of marketing has depressing implications -- you are always going to see what the top bidder or the person with the best SEO wants you to see, rather than what you want to see, at least as long as players like google are king. I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd. What's worse is the pages with the best ROI tend to be scams, so you're basically guaranteed to see scams because they can always afford to out-bid on their relevant keywords.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd. You mean when everyone became obsessed with beanie babies, Furbies, and got suckered into Enron / Worldcom scams? Marketing just took different forms back then. It was physical, store-bound. It wasn't online because people were at the malls, reading newspapers and watching TV Ads. In some cases, people would listen to "boiler room" calls over their landline telephone to get pumped/dumped. All that has changed, is that today we have centralized all forms of marketing to the internet. Instead of stores pushing us marketing at the front of the store as we walk in, we get hit with ads on the top of Google / Amazon's pages. Instead of boiler-room scams being pushed out by telephone, we get Facebook groups pushing cryptocoin rug pulls.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    they're referring to the pre-marketing internet economy. it seems as if you read it as the pre-internet marketing economy?
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    > Marketing just took different forms back then Right, crucially, it didn't really take form on the internet that much at all ;)
- Terr_ 4y ago
  > I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s That reminds me of Web-rings [1] and later LinkExchange [2]. It was still marketing or at least advertising, but in retrospect is seems quaint and innocent. Conversely, many portal pages [3] were still attempts to create a walled-garden. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal
whiskey14 4y ago
I think that we, as engineers, need to remember that this is what engineers created. Marketers told them what they wanted in terms of technology and built it, for cash. Not pointing the blame, but the state of dystopic state of marketing is due to symbiotic relationship between makers and creators. I don't have a solution, but I'm not sure laying the entire blame at sellers and marketers is correct.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I'd disagree with that. Engineers were told what to do or they would lose their jobs by the business people who had their ethical center removed as part of their MBA program.
ricw 4y ago
Spam is a problem, but that's not the reason why we can't "retrieve" good information. That's just not how humans work. We are lazy. We grab either the thing we know or the thing that seems easiest / lowest risk. Hardly ever do we change our minds, even if a great product is available. We're very emotional and easily influenced by many distracting factors. Research is hard, and information is not easily available (and never will be). Marketing is in effect good communication. It's much more valuable than a good product, because we as humans are en-large lazy and good marketing bridges that. However, a good product plus good marketing are unbeatable. The Microsoft's and Oracle's of the world won not because they had the best product (they didn't), but because of great marketing.
clairity 4y ago
> "...very difficult technological problem." it's not a technological problem at all. it's a sociopolitical "problem", of wanting to influence others for personal gain. it's more practical to consider this an axiom of the human condition to be channeled rather than suppressed (much like greed in relation to capitalism). we'll never be rid of the desire to influence, and more extremely, to coerce, others. you can invert the perspective and think about ways to obviate the core need for marketing, which is to match idiosyncratic needs with pre-determined solutions. then you could apply technology to that aim, for example creating a search engine than anticipates all your desires (google's ultimate goal). there are dystopian traps all around though, so it's not clear that technology is a net-good approach.
nonethewiser 4y ago
In an ideal world, people would also be introduced to things they are interested in. I don't think people ONLY want to pull info. Do you figure what you want to watch and then open Netflix? Sometimes. People also open Netflix and see what is available before deciding. In fact, even determining what to watch then opening the streaming service relies on having a concept of what streaming services have been marketed to you.
cbtacy 4y ago
You are conflating the larger marketing world with the specific sub area that is advertising.
bdcravens 4y ago
Many of our favorite products received significant funds under the status quo. (and many of those developers are present on HN) Once we change the equation for investors, we will see a different funding situation.
thrashh 4y ago
I think people look at marketing and see all the bad examples. But nearly every product you use has a marketing budget and the only reason they are around is because they spent that budget. To me, marketing is a sign that you are serious about your product and you are willing to spend a lot of money to promote it. It’s not a sure sign of a good product still but there’s no such thing anyway. In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin. see: all the unmarketed direct-from-China clones of more or less the same product on Amazon with weird brand names
- cirgue 4y ago
  > In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin This is still very much the case. Marketing is a signal of exactly one thing: marketing budget. At least with the anonymous clones, I can be somewhat certain that when my friend says “yah I got a pair of running shorts from [insert random company here] and they’ve been pretty good so far”, their decision was made on the basis of their direct experience because that’s all they can go on.
  - thrashh 4y ago
    Sure, it’s still the case but my point that it’s not anywhere nearly as bad as it is on Amazon. I can at least navigate a world of differing advertising budgets. I can’t even begin to navigate an Amazon listing of copy-cat products or even worse, an AliExpress search result.
allenu 4y ago
> In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information). I think we as engineers are biased to think that people can/should pull information out of the ether and then reason about what's best for them by rationally going through the pros and cons of a product. The thing is, not everybody acts and thinks in that way. Many people (even engineers) are more likely to be swayed by emotion and stories, hence marketing. However, I do think marketing has gone overboard nowadays. Every possible place you look or listen is filled with advertising. I've started reading books again in the past few months and one thing I love is knowing that when I turn the page, there isn't going to be a distracting ad trying to vie for my attention.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by NhanH 4y ago

austinpena 4y ago

Oftentimes marketing is focused on those who aren't "problem aware" which can bring genuine value. These types of marketing messages focus on bringing a previously unknown problem/inefficiency to someone's mind and show the solution.

NhanH 4y ago
I had part of my comment responding to this point, but I wasn’t sure how to best phrase it so I cut it off. I don’t believe for this to happen enough at any frequency to be a valid reason. People usually knows their pain point, and go to great length trying to address that (normally spending a lot of time due to, well, spam-ish marketing). And to be frank, most products are not game-changing things that magically solve a problem no thing previously could have solved. People are already using tools and solutions for their problems, and if they are looking for a better thing, they already know which tweak it needs. They just can’t differentiate the solutions between a sea of junk marketing.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >People usually knows their pain point Exactly. I know my buggy is slow, I just need a faster horse.
- austinpena 4y ago
  I look at duckduckgo, they do tons of Top of Funnel advertising like billboards. Do you think that they should cease this type of advertising and just try and show up when people search "privacy conscious search engine"?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Another way to phrase that: marketing convinces you you have a problem so they can sell you the solution.
- eropple 4y ago
  Another way to phrase it: marketing identifies with words and examples a problem that you haven't been able to isolate for one of a dozen reasons from inattention to time crunch to insufficient expertise in the problem domain--so they can sell you the solution. Sometimes, anyway, on the last part. There is marketing (as anyone who's ever studied advertising) that doesn't even try to sell you anything because there's value in the knock-on growth of awareness and an expanding or top-of-mind market (the canonical example being Campbell Soup's "Soup Is Good Food" advertising campaign).
defterGoose 4y ago
I dunno, this just makes me think of all the "where did the soda go?" infomercial memes.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

This is my primary complaint as well. It's nearly impossible to find a product even after specifying the exact name and type in many search tools. Even something as simple as a bolt with a specific diameter gets flooded with irrelevant products. It's like the original Search terms are completely ignored and replaced with fuzzy results and promoted products

Arrath 4y ago
> flooded with irrelevant products Or your top results are a bevy of "Best threaded bolts of 2022" articles that, suspiciously, list the same handful of products maybe in differing order and all through affiliate links.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Once you get into branding that's all whole another can of worms. I was thinking about concrete product descriptions Eg “1/4 inch diameter hex bolt 10 inch long“ Won't show any products that actually fit the description. If that's what I need, no amount of marketing is going to convince me to buy a half inch diameter bolt that is 5 in Long. Is it utter failure of marketing oriented search functions
  - Arrath 4y ago
    I've run into this, while searching for a replacement machine screw in fact, and it drove me batty. I ended up just running to a few local hardware stores and then more specialized supply storefronts to solve my problem. I don't want or need a 'related product' I need exactly this product!
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Yeah, infuriating when you know it exists and you know what it is called
  - plutonic 4y ago
    McMaster-Carr is your friend here. I used it use it a lot for robotics club in high school. It has a clear interface that makes it easy to find the exact parts you need

jeromegv 4y ago

How do you imagine people pull that information? You still need to be “findable” when someone is pulling that info. You still need to convince them that what you are offering matches their need. They need to be convinced you are better than the other 4 other things they found that might also match their need. All of this is still marketing.

elefanten 4y ago
“In an ideal world” that info would be collected, organized and accessible to all, alongside usage/performance/satisfaction data. Gp is right, marketing is horribly inefficient and everything about it’s current configuration is toxic because it seeks to influence by stealing attention, stealing time, stealing memory, spreading selective (dis)info and manipulating you into buying things. We’re just unfortunately pretty far from that ideal world.
mananaysiempre 4y ago
Can’t resist quoting David’s Sling[1] (not a masterpiece of philosophy by any means, but makes some good points): > We don't want to destroy advertising. We want to destroy manipulative advertising. We want to eliminate the kind of advertising that persuades the listener to buy in spite of the best information, rather than because of it. We want people to filter the informational content from commercial advertising—and all too often, when an advertisement is run through an informational filter, nothing is left. The adversarial approach is the problem. This is akin to the difference between a jury trial or televised debate and an academic argument: neither permits outright lies, ideally, but in the latter intentional cherry-picking is (or should be) disqualifying whereas the former just dumps two opposing cherry-pickers in a bag and lets them fight it out. (Not coincidentally, an academic argument doesn’t require an audience.) I’m not entirely sure that advertising, like law, can be different, because it may simply be impossible to do better when the participants don’t trust each other to act in good faith. But it’s also no wonder that the result seems revolting when a large portion of your identity is centred around seeing things as they are and not as you wish they were. In any case, defending manipulation and cherry-picking requires an argument (such as this one) stronger than “you still need to inform buyers about your product”. (If you’re talking about convincing rather than informing, you’re already assuming the conclusion.) [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7661157M/ https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7661157M/

WalterBright 4y ago

> and hope they makes bad decisions Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.

conception 4y ago
Very few companies, in the US at least, are interested in long term business vs quarterly profits.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I hear that a lot, and it's just baloney. Recurring revenue is the holy grail for businesses, not one-shot revenue. Stock investors do not reward companies that eat their seed corn. They short those companies. If you know which companies are sacrificing the long term, you'd be shorting their stock.
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
      - NotOscarWilde 4y ago
        > > And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing. > I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me? The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas. Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?

codegeek 4y ago

"For when they need it" I agree in general but there is also a lot of value in reaching out to someone and helping them decide if/when they need it. THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future. Sometimes, people are lazy and unless they have hair on fire problem, they don't actively look to solve their problem. However, if you reach out to them (considering you did your homework on them), there is plenty of value in that. We have won customers for our company doing that and there is no need for coercion of any sort. You just need to start a conversation and truly go with a consultative approach.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future. That's maybe true in theory. The point of practical marketing is to make people think they have a problem that you have an extraordinary solution for. Sometimes that is true, but the vast majority of the time the problem doesn't even exist, and even if it did, the product wouldn't do anything to solve it. Basically, penis enlargement pills are the quintessence of marketing.
- bnralt 4y ago
  Indeed. I'm not sure talking about some idealistic form of marketing is any more useful than talking about an idealistic form of government where we get rid of all laws and just have people do what they're supposed to do. Sure, such a thing would be nice. It also doesn't happen. The goal of marketing is to get people to buy something. It doesn't matter if they need it or not, it doesn't matter if there's a better option out there. The goal is to get people to buy. Considering most people don't need most products, and even when someone does need a product they're usually choosing just one of several available options, we can surmise that the vast majority of marketing is trying to get people to buy something they shouldn't be buying.
- whiskey14 4y ago
  I would say that you've misunderstood the sprectral nature of marketing. Yes some marketing is immoral, but not all of it is. It's not black and white. Charity advertertising or B-corp marketing would be on the other end of your spectrum. I still think they could also be put down as the "quintessence of marketing".

dylan604 4y ago

How can it be a bad decision if it is the decision you wanted them to make? ;P

wpietri 4y ago

For sure. I'm good with the part of marketing that is really figuring about how to market a product. Understanding audiences. Understanding their lives and their needs. Explaining how the current products can help, and providing internal input so that future products are better. That's all productive stuff! But as we look towards advertising and sales, it looks to me like both an arms race and the tragedy of the commons. Between companies' own websites, professional reviewers (Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc), and community discussions (Reddit, etc), these days consumer information needs are for the most part easily satisfied. But because competitors try to manipulate purchasers via ads and sales techniques, other companies are obliged to follow suit to some extent. That's the arms race part. And the tragedy of the commons is that so much of the information space is filled with stuff whose information value runs between low and negative. Another commons that its harmed is the ethical one. With so many people whose jobs depend on manipulation to one extent or another, it makes manipulative behavior more generally ok. I think you're also right about push vs pull. Push systems so often have pernicious negative side effects, and this is no exception.

sooheon 4y ago
Great thoughts. But I think the distinction between push and pull is not so clear. When I want to pull information, at some point I have to query the world (because I don't have direct indexing into the world's knowledge). The response to that query is bound to be a powerful push of some sort, purely evolutionarily speaking.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I think that might have been true once, but I don't think it is now. If I make a thing, I can put up a web page about it. I can ask Google to index it. I can put my product on Amazon with useful keywords. I can get myself in directories. I can go to trade shows. I can put a press release on PR Newswire. None of those are push actions in the sense that I am intruding on recipients and trying to badger them into doing what I want. They're just all making offerings in a pull-compatible way such that when people with needs go looking, they will find things. The last bit makes me think you might be using "pull" in a metaphorical sense, but here I'm using it in the Lean supply chain sense, which is about producer and consumer behavior.

leobg 4y ago

I think it’s a technological challenge. Getting the information you need, when you need it. It’s semantic search, squared. A whole sequence of challenges: 1) Understanding what the user wants and needs without him needing to type out the full context. 2) Having a database of all the world’s information extracted from sources. 3) A search algorithm that brings query and data together in the way the user expects, including ranking the results. We have marketing because such a system does not exist. (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.)

whiskey14 4y ago
> (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.) This +1. Essentially, what we would need is mind reading abilities to be able to put the information in front of people exactly when they needed it. Said system would also need to perfectly analyse the economics so they can be sure that they can afford the information. The spread of marketing and sales through the digital world isn't going anywhere while new products and services are being created. It can't be automated perfectly, and while it can't be automated then there will always be ways to rig and game the systems that we engineer.
- leobg 4y ago
  You can rig the game on vague claims. You cannot rig it on facts. A 600 Watt solar panel is 600 Watts. Only most buying criteria do not have measurables attached to them. And even if they have, tech is terrible at filtering for them. Search Amazon for linen pants and most results you get will be made of cotton.
  - whiskey14 4y ago
    Searched Amazon for linen pants, 2/20 were cotton, most others were made of "cotton linen". Then googled cotton linen. Turns out its a blended fabric that avoids the disadvantages of both: https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advantages-of-cotton-linen-blended-fibre https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advant... Most "linen" material is blended. So actually turns out Amazon is inferring what you really want. The "facts" that people need in their products are actually really difficult to determine. People don't want linen pants, they really want cotton linen. And for the 600w solar panel, what other criteria does it boil down to? I think is the reason there is no decent standard for product categorisation, there is literally too much to quantify and the consumer won't/can't be bothered to navigate such categorisation.

sam0x17 4y ago

Agreed. The very existence of the IDEA of marketing has depressing implications -- you are always going to see what the top bidder or the person with the best SEO wants you to see, rather than what you want to see, at least as long as players like google are king. I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd. What's worse is the pages with the best ROI tend to be scams, so you're basically guaranteed to see scams because they can always afford to out-bid on their relevant keywords.

dragontamer 4y ago
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd. You mean when everyone became obsessed with beanie babies, Furbies, and got suckered into Enron / Worldcom scams? Marketing just took different forms back then. It was physical, store-bound. It wasn't online because people were at the malls, reading newspapers and watching TV Ads. In some cases, people would listen to "boiler room" calls over their landline telephone to get pumped/dumped. All that has changed, is that today we have centralized all forms of marketing to the internet. Instead of stores pushing us marketing at the front of the store as we walk in, we get hit with ads on the top of Google / Amazon's pages. Instead of boiler-room scams being pushed out by telephone, we get Facebook groups pushing cryptocoin rug pulls.
- permo-w 4y ago
  they're referring to the pre-marketing internet economy. it seems as if you read it as the pre-internet marketing economy?
- sam0x17 4y ago
  > Marketing just took different forms back then Right, crucially, it didn't really take form on the internet that much at all ;)
Terr_ 4y ago
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s That reminds me of Web-rings [1] and later LinkExchange [2]. It was still marketing or at least advertising, but in retrospect is seems quaint and innocent. Conversely, many portal pages [3] were still attempts to create a walled-garden. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal

whiskey14 4y ago

I think that we, as engineers, need to remember that this is what engineers created. Marketers told them what they wanted in terms of technology and built it, for cash. Not pointing the blame, but the state of dystopic state of marketing is due to symbiotic relationship between makers and creators. I don't have a solution, but I'm not sure laying the entire blame at sellers and marketers is correct.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
I'd disagree with that. Engineers were told what to do or they would lose their jobs by the business people who had their ethical center removed as part of their MBA program.

ricw 4y ago

Spam is a problem, but that's not the reason why we can't "retrieve" good information. That's just not how humans work. We are lazy. We grab either the thing we know or the thing that seems easiest / lowest risk. Hardly ever do we change our minds, even if a great product is available. We're very emotional and easily influenced by many distracting factors. Research is hard, and information is not easily available (and never will be). Marketing is in effect good communication. It's much more valuable than a good product, because we as humans are en-large lazy and good marketing bridges that. However, a good product plus good marketing are unbeatable. The Microsoft's and Oracle's of the world won not because they had the best product (they didn't), but because of great marketing.

clairity 4y ago

> "...very difficult technological problem." it's not a technological problem at all. it's a sociopolitical "problem", of wanting to influence others for personal gain. it's more practical to consider this an axiom of the human condition to be channeled rather than suppressed (much like greed in relation to capitalism). we'll never be rid of the desire to influence, and more extremely, to coerce, others. you can invert the perspective and think about ways to obviate the core need for marketing, which is to match idiosyncratic needs with pre-determined solutions. then you could apply technology to that aim, for example creating a search engine than anticipates all your desires (google's ultimate goal). there are dystopian traps all around though, so it's not clear that technology is a net-good approach.

nonethewiser 4y ago

In an ideal world, people would also be introduced to things they are interested in. I don't think people ONLY want to pull info. Do you figure what you want to watch and then open Netflix? Sometimes. People also open Netflix and see what is available before deciding. In fact, even determining what to watch then opening the streaming service relies on having a concept of what streaming services have been marketed to you.

cbtacy 4y ago

You are conflating the larger marketing world with the specific sub area that is advertising.

bdcravens 4y ago

Many of our favorite products received significant funds under the status quo. (and many of those developers are present on HN) Once we change the equation for investors, we will see a different funding situation.

thrashh 4y ago

I think people look at marketing and see all the bad examples. But nearly every product you use has a marketing budget and the only reason they are around is because they spent that budget. To me, marketing is a sign that you are serious about your product and you are willing to spend a lot of money to promote it. It’s not a sure sign of a good product still but there’s no such thing anyway. In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin. see: all the unmarketed direct-from-China clones of more or less the same product on Amazon with weird brand names

cirgue 4y ago
> In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin This is still very much the case. Marketing is a signal of exactly one thing: marketing budget. At least with the anonymous clones, I can be somewhat certain that when my friend says “yah I got a pair of running shorts from [insert random company here] and they’ve been pretty good so far”, their decision was made on the basis of their direct experience because that’s all they can go on.
- thrashh 4y ago
  Sure, it’s still the case but my point that it’s not anywhere nearly as bad as it is on Amazon. I can at least navigate a world of differing advertising budgets. I can’t even begin to navigate an Amazon listing of copy-cat products or even worse, an AliExpress search result.

allenu 4y ago

> In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information). I think we as engineers are biased to think that people can/should pull information out of the ether and then reason about what's best for them by rationally going through the pros and cons of a product. The thing is, not everybody acts and thinks in that way. Many people (even engineers) are more likely to be swayed by emotion and stories, hence marketing. However, I do think marketing has gone overboard nowadays. Every possible place you look or listen is filled with advertising. I've started reading books again in the past few months and one thing I love is knowing that when I turn the page, there isn't going to be a distracting ad trying to vie for my attention.

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