4 ms·

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 thei

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.
  - sooheon 4y ago
    Lean supply chain is maybe not the best analogy, because suppliers are limited, their properties are known, and deals and optimizations are made in advance. Knowledge foraging is very different in that knowledge supply is constantly shifting and basically infinite, and by definition you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. You can request your page to be indexed and your product to be listed, but so can a million other suppliers, so we return to the problem of how to prioritize and distill information when someone asks for something.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      I'm not saying the supply chain is the best analogy. I'm saying that in that context, "push" and "pull" have very specific meanings, and that's the one I'm using here. I agree that distilling information is challenging. Challenging enough that places from Google to Wirecutter to Consumer Reports make good livings from doing that. But advertising makes that problem worse, not better.
nostrebored 4y ago
I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer could achieve their goals, even if that meant sending money to a competitor. A pretty typical example would be Cognito, which is just mismatched with a lot of use cases. Referring someone to Auth0 just made sense a lot of the time. The view of marketing internally was also not great.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Sure, not all sales is the manipulative kind. What you're describing sounds like the nice part of the "consultative selling" end of sales. And I'm sure it works well for a market leader with a huge brand. But it has that name to distinguish it from the more common sort. The used car salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross side of things. Long ago a friend told me about a meeting with a very successful serial CEO where the topic was hiring ad sales reps. The famous guy said that they needed to find people with a lot of personal debt, because salespeople needed to be absolutely desperate for the commission checks to really go out and sell. I suspect that sort of thinking underlies a lot of the problematic sales behaviors: desperate people do desperate things.
hammock 4y ago
>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. There is a saying in economics: “bad money drives out good money.” The same is true of news, and in this case marketing

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.
- sooheon 4y ago
  Lean supply chain is maybe not the best analogy, because suppliers are limited, their properties are known, and deals and optimizations are made in advance. Knowledge foraging is very different in that knowledge supply is constantly shifting and basically infinite, and by definition you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. You can request your page to be indexed and your product to be listed, but so can a million other suppliers, so we return to the problem of how to prioritize and distill information when someone asks for something.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    I'm not saying the supply chain is the best analogy. I'm saying that in that context, "push" and "pull" have very specific meanings, and that's the one I'm using here. I agree that distilling information is challenging. Challenging enough that places from Google to Wirecutter to Consumer Reports make good livings from doing that. But advertising makes that problem worse, not better.

nostrebored 4y ago

I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer could achieve their goals, even if that meant sending money to a competitor. A pretty typical example would be Cognito, which is just mismatched with a lot of use cases. Referring someone to Auth0 just made sense a lot of the time. The view of marketing internally was also not great.

wpietri 4y ago
Sure, not all sales is the manipulative kind. What you're describing sounds like the nice part of the "consultative selling" end of sales. And I'm sure it works well for a market leader with a huge brand. But it has that name to distinguish it from the more common sort. The used car salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross side of things. Long ago a friend told me about a meeting with a very successful serial CEO where the topic was hiring ad sales reps. The famous guy said that they needed to find people with a lot of personal debt, because salespeople needed to be absolutely desperate for the commission checks to really go out and sell. I suspect that sort of thinking underlies a lot of the problematic sales behaviors: desperate people do desperate things.

hammock 4y ago

>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. There is a saying in economics: “bad money drives out good money.” The same is true of news, and in this case marketing