51–60 of 137 posts
If I have to walk over to the computer, I’ve already wasted too much time. Wouldn't the point of scheduling software be that, unlike his current phone solution, he doesn't have to do something when a customer schedules a time? Ideally he'd enter his work hours and holidays into the scheduling system, and customers could schedule a time without interrupting his workflow. Then he'd only need to look at his iPad once in…
I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…
As a guy that values earnestness and frankness (perhaps to a fault), I generally agree with you about marketing. However, marketing is simply coordinated public communication. That is to say that marketing happens naturally when someone places a classified ad or discusses their project with friends and strangers casually. Taking out a series of ads saying a new product launched and describing its features is surely e…
> "Being considerate about intrusions doesn't hurt either, though being annoying isn't always the same as being unethical."
I'd also say that anytime you put out any type of communication out into the world, you're going to have some people who don't like it.
The key is to reach people where they're at, and try to be helpful. Being tactful (and culturally relevant / appropriate) is important - but it can also lead to paralysis. If you're too concerned about how you're going to be received, you'll never put anything out there (or you'll water it down so it's boring).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing. If you think that, you probably don't understand what "marketing" actually is . Marketing is really just everything you do to communicate with your customers, to find out what they need, and communicate to them that you have a solution for them. There's nothing inherently "scummy" about marketing. Let's say you talk to your barber about sc…
That's just one side of marketing. A large part of marketing is in understanding how to manipulate the thoughts, desires and behaviors of people. If Coca-Cola was focused on finding out what their customers needed they would be out of business. If their marketing consisted of honestly informing the public of what their product is, their market share would be a fraction of the size it is now. I agree, marketing doesn'…
I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…
Here's an example of good marketing: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/product-alerts-older-than-2-m... The software is so good, he just has to make one post on a forum and people are queuing up to throw money at him. All he has to do is sit there and answer questions. A sample quote from a user: "Bought it without demoing, Due to Sean's great support/dedication." Note the length of the thread. Also have a look at the d…
I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…
-- Correct a Self-Sabotaging Mindset --
Marketing is bullshit. Marketing is evil. Marketing is everything that’s wrong with this world. Marketing is the root of all evil. Marketers should be shot. I have heard all these statements—and plenty more like them.
If you agree with any of them, you are not alone in your dislike of marketing. I’ve found that technical people, particularly programmers, tend to have a strong hatred for marketing.
Antimarketing stances stem partly from bad experiences with manipulative marketers and partly from a misunderstanding of what marketing actually is.
Wikipedia defines marketing in this way:
"Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers and what strategy to use in sales, communications, and business development."
At its core, marketing is about connecting people to solutions. For example, some people may have an interest in buying an environmentally friendly car.
Good marketing involves identifying this segment of the population, then devising a strategy to let that portion of the population know about the existence of your brand-new hybrid car and its benefits (in a style and manner that will appeal to them).
Though the ultimate goal is to sell a car, marketing isn’t about convincing people who are not interested in your product to buy it. It’s about exposing the right product to the right audience. Done correctly and in an ethical manner, it’s possible to promote without deceiving, manipulating, or forcing people to spend their hard-earned money on goods they don’t want or need.
It’s important to understand that marketing is so much more than just advertising. Marketing encompasses countless aspects of your product, including what you name it before it even exists.
If you still feel that marketing is mostly evil, I encourage you to reflect on the forms of marketing you already do, perhaps without even realizing that they’re marketing. Ever applied for a new job? Or dated someone? While you probably didn’t misrepresent yourself with your future employer or partner by blatantly lying, you still wore nice clothes and tried to showcase your favorable traits. In doing so you were marketing yourself.
In blogging, the aim of your marketing is to reach as many people who are potentially interested in your content as possible. As we’ll see in future chapters, you may also have related additional goals, such as promoting yourself professionally, marketing yours and other people’s products, and so on.
Like all tools, marketing can be used for good or in unethical, obnoxious ways. In this book, I advocate only white-hat marketing techniques that will get your content in front of the people who need to see it. So if you are the stereotypical antimarketing developer, please approach the rest of the chapter with an open mind. I promise that you won’t have to sell your soul.
The excitement of building something, using new technology, solving a problem (whether it exists or not) is exciting. Then you might start seeing dollar signs, or fame, or respect among peers, etc, in your mind. Nobody wants to INVITE someone to shut down those thoughts or feelings.... but we must.
I have a few ideas on my list that I think are really good. But I haven't started building them yet because I know I have to talk to a few people in certain industries first to confirm the ideas are good. They just sit there though. For some of these ideas, I'd rather they continue being a pipe dream instead of talking to someone and possibly have them shot down.
Or maybe I'm really not normal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it has value on its own without the paragraphs about buying his book, surely it would have just as much value if the author moved the final paragraphs to the front, and clearly identified it as an advertisement for his book. The fact that he did not do that indicates that he thought less people would read it if they knew it was an advertisement right from the start. So then the author thought he would have to tric…
The point is, there isn't a binary distinction between "it's an advertisement" and "it's informative content". It's a legitimately informative and interesting article, whether or not he mentions his book. So what difference does it make if he mentions the book at the beginning, or the end, or not at all? And putting that stuff at the bottom has nothing to do with being tricky, or sneaky, or unethical. It just makes m…
It wouldn't have been too much trouble to bring those skeptics back to the conversation by adding a short disclaimer closer to the beginning of the article. So why not do it? If the article is going to be both informative and promotional, some will want that expectation to be set right from the beginning. And if the informative bits can stand on their own merit, there's no risk to the promotional side in adding the early disclaimer. (IMO, it's not an unreasonable request, and not without precedent.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just one side of marketing. A large part of marketing is in understanding how to manipulate the thoughts, desires and behaviors of people. If Coca-Cola was focused on finding out what their customers needed they would be out of business. If their marketing consisted of honestly informing the public of what their product is, their market share would be a fraction of the size it is now. I agree, marketing doesn'…
I would consider what super-huge companies like Coca-Cola and GM do, to be outliers. Most companies aren't Coke or GM or whatever. Sure, some companies do unethical things, and I'll agree that things like "neuro-marketing" leave some interesting questions open. But I don't have any problem with marketing in the general sense.
But it's not just super-huge companies. Listen to conservative talk radio and it's not long before you hear local ads using fear mongering, anger inciting, self loathing or inadequacy inducing marketing to sell whatever version of local or small time (when compared to super-huge conglomerates) snake oil they have.
Is this advertising? Is advertising separate from sales and marketing and is where most of the evil is introduced? If so it still doesn't give Yum! and the financial industry a pass for what they sell and how they sell it.
I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy' and this article has done nothing to change that perception. I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples. Can someone describe for me the difference between scummy marketing and, I guess I'll call it 'ethical' marketing? I love building things that people e…
The chestnut for a while has been that marketing consists of 4 p's:
price (how much? how many market offerings? should price go up over time [discounts for early adopters] or down over time [getting rid of excess inventory]?),
product (does anyone want this? are we building a rocketship when they need a bicycle, or vice versa? Are we following existent demand, or creating a new market [iPhone]?),
promotion (this is what 99% of people think about when they think of marketing, but it's important to note there are good things here too. Spammers live here, but so does Apple's 1984 ad), and
place (Do we even want to sell this in Alaska, given that it costs a buttload to ship our product up there? Do the Chinese have an ancestral taboo about our product? Is it so fragile that it's hard to ship reliably, and if so, how do we deal with that?).
The full discipline of marketing actually involves some pretty darn cool stuff, that I guarantee would appeal to your developer mind. One that I'm partial to are shape grammars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_grammar), where brands try to figure out what about a design (of say Apple, or a Harley Davidson) screams "$BRAND" to a customer.