[harryf]

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like...

- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product

- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people

- “I hate spam/push messages/ads therefor everyone else must do to” ... but engineers tend to be the grumpiest about this stuff. Drip marketing to get users to engage progressively with your app, for example, can be valuable to users that even forgot they installed your app in the first place, because something distracted them right after

- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc

And many more. You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers... I don’t mean that seriously for obvious reasons but think there’s some truth in it

[luckylion]

I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and not seeing that marketing isn't only spam, lies and shit.

I think most engineers associate marketing with sleazy SEO/affiliate/self-promotion people who offer little to no added value to the web, society or humanity, who will lie, cheat and steal to make a buck. Most engineers don't want to be like those people in any way, and that's a good thing, because we'd all be better off if those people were gone.

But not all of marketing is "I have a shitty product, it has no encryption, but I will just say that it has super mega NSA encryption because stupid consumers will not know the difference". A lot of marketing is just getting the information out there.

I think it's similar to SEO in that sense. There's the shit that's manipulating Google (and Google is willfully playing along) by just spinning the same text thousands of times and stuffing keywords into it. Everybody would be better off if that disappeared. But there's also the basic common sense SEO. Make sure your HTML works, well, make sure you have your headlines in <h1>, <h2> etc, make sure the important pages you want found can actually be reached with links on your site, make sure your site loads fast etc.

[hnick]

I think it's less narrow mindedness and more of the engineering mindset that deals with the tangible, the literal, the quantifiable, and the possible.

From that perspective, if you are not lying in your marketing, then you must just be telling truths about your product. So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words?

Obviously this doesn't work for most people. Long feature lists can even be a turn off. But I think software people often see products through the lens of what it can do instead of how it makes them feel. That is the hurdle I think a lot of us have to get over because we are so used to writing code to make programs do things and not to make people feel things (I can't imagine how that unit test looks).

[walrus01]

> So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words?

From the perspective of an engineer this works really well if your target market is also engineers, in a very clearly defined vertical market for a highly technical product. Such as components for UAVs or DWDM transport systems.

Some engineers choose specifically to work for companies in a niche field because they find it easier and less stressful to also deal with customers who are their respective companies' subject matter experts on the subsystem.

[hnick]

Yes, definitely. Know your audience etc. When I'm looking at SaaS software and it's missing key info, features, and has the old "ask for a quote" it's code for "go get your manager, kid".

As a side note, this is why landing pages exist. Another marketing gimmick of course, but having separate pages that people won't reach by mistake lets the message suit the audience. I struggled with that concept for a long time. Shouldn't every page on our site be nicely accessible from a menu just like the contents page of a book? Not always. Give the wrong first impression and you might not get another.

[TeMPOraL]

I think your view on this will depend on what do you believe the distribution of good vs. evil in marketing looks like. Is it like this?

  ^  DECENCY                              PROFIT
  |  --->                                   <---
  |  --->                /----              <---
  |                  /---     \----
  |             /----              \----
  |         /---                        \----
  |     /---                                 \--
  +------------------------------------------------>
   EVIL                                        GOOD

Or like this?

  ^ DECENCY                               PROFIT
  | ->      |\                       <----------
  | ->      | \                      <----------
  |         |  \-
  |        /     \--
  |       /         \-----------
  |     /-                      \------------------
  +------------------------------------------------>
   EVIL                                        GOOD
   

I personally believe it's the latter. I added arrows indicating opposing incentives at personal level, and I believe the profit motive is much stronger than personal morals, for two main reasons.

One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.

Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do that".

[allendoerfer]

> One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.

I have recently learned here on HN, that this is called a Red Queen's race. Since like me everyone on HN loves expressive language I am spreading the word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

[Gravityloss]

Depends. If you're on the market for a time period, customer A who bought your shady competitor's product will see all its warts quite soon. Meanwhile, your own customer B will be happy with your honest product.

The fence sitters on the marketplace might ask both A and B of their experiences and opinions. They will then calibrate that against A and B marketing. Maybe one or two customers might be random, but if it repeats over a longer time, things get quite obvious to everyone in the scene...

[wtracy]

An amazing number of people make purchasing decisions without seeking advice from existing customers. There are industries where businesses almost never compare notes with each other. (Independent restaurants come to mind. Really, any field with a high rate of turnover.)

Also, the sunk cost fallacy means that some organizations will continue shoveling money at the bad system they already purchased because of the shiny marketing. If you're prepared to sell "upgrades" and consulting services around your product, it's sometimes possible to make more money from a bad product than one that "just works".

I'm not cynical enough to say that the situations I described are normal. But they are common enough.

[allendoerfer]

Which I would counter with another short phrase:

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Your competitors earned some money and will gain interest on it, if they are smart.

[TeMPOraL]

And because they saved the money that you spent on building a good product, they now have more money to spend on marketing than you.

[Gravityloss]

Staying solvent is fine if one is profitable.

The "market" the quote relates to is the stock market. Very different than selling products to be used.

If you invested in the product itself (instead of marketing), that can gain you something as well in the long term.

[TeMPOraL]

If you haven't seen this, you'll be in for a treat:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It's a very thorough discussion of the topic. A rather long read, but absolutely worth it.

[amelius]

Interesting read. What I don't get is that they compare Moloch (total competition) to Nature.

> (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)

But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc.

Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.

[dinosaurdynasty]

The human body (and most systems like it) essentially have lots and lots of systems whose essential purpose is to prevent the cells in our body from competing with each other, and when these systems break and allow our cells to compete freely with each other it leads to cancer.

[cercatrova]

Organizations into cells, organs, systems, is basically describing mergers and acquisitions, and also that companies have different roles inside them, each doing various tasks: marketing, sales, engineering, management, etc.

[TeMPOraL]

By coincidence, the same author has wrote an article about that very recently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/. In particular, see section II.

I'm still processing the article in my head, but as I understood it: it's important that all cells in your body share the same genome. For some reason, evolution in multicellular organisms can be seen as two-tier - competition between the cells, and competition between collections of cells (organism). The higher-level competition forces the individual cells to behave in fully-cooperative way; those organisms that can't enforce order within get cancer and die prematurely.

The mechanics of it seem sound, and it's a nice model for a lot of things, natural and otherwise, but I'm still confused about how such two-tiered evolution could've arisen in nature wrt. multi-cellular structures.

[the_bear]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't think it's true that optimizing for profits makes you more competitive.

When a company makes a profit, it essentially means that they're capturing wealth that could have otherwise gone to the customer. The more wealth the customer captures, the more they want to use your product or service. This is why so many startups are unprofitable for so long. They burn money in order to compete with more established players until eventually they dominate the market, and then they turn the knobs to become profitable. All else being equal, profit is at odds with competitiveness.

Of course if you have outside investors (especially institutional investors) they'll eventually require you to start optimizing for profit. But it's not to be competitive, it's because the competition is now over because they've effectively monopolized their space, and now it's time to cash in.

I'm a big proponent of bootstrapping, and this is why. In the early days, you have to be a little bit profitable (you can't burn money for years like a Softbank-backed company would) but once things start working, you can stay in the "a little bit profitable" world which allows you to treat customers and employees well, instead of moving into the "maximize profit" world that most successful companies end up in.

[harryf]

> the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection

That’s a great quip. Was talking to a friend that works in banking (fund management) who made a similar point; bankers aren’t necessarily evil. It’s just a modern bankers view on the world is mostly in the form of rows in a spreadsheet that need optimizing. Whether those rows represent green energy or weapons, and what the consequences of trading in them are, are not things that a clearly visible to a banker on a busy day. The bankers view is just numbers going up or down.

[luckylion]

I agree completely, but that's no reason to not engage in marketing at all. If you're not touching it, you're losing by default.

Dark patterns will yield great results, but you don't want to trick your users into buying something? There are alternatives besides having a website that's thrown together, doesn't pitch your product and requires the potential user to really, really want to try your product to suffer through the website.

It's true even in open source projects imho. If you want users to try and eventually use your software, it's good to make it easy for them.

[invalidOrTaken]

I tend to share your view, and your views in general (lisp, moloch, etc), and I wanted to run an idea by you.

I feel like much of the marketing problem comes from three places:

- overcompetition (too many useless products competing for mindshare) - inefficiency (if you can't target your marketing well, you just shotgun it out) - debt (pressure for cash makes people do things they otherwise wouldn't)

So we end up with a push-based economy.

The idle thought in my head is: what would a pull-based economy work? And not necessarily a whole economic overhaul, but for instance, what if I personally wanted to do things in a pull-based way, or encourage others do so? What would any of that look like?

[TeMPOraL]

About the three problems, I agree about the first two; debt definitely has impact, but I'm not sure how big and in what forms. You're probably right, though. I'll need to think more about it. For instance, there's definitely debt-based pressure on the low-wealth end of society, which makes people work on things they otherwise wouldn't. But what about the high end, the decisionmakers? Do they face similar debt-driven pressure?

Here's what I think a half-overhaul towards pull-based economy would look like. At a minimum, no advertising in push form whatsoever. That means no ads on the web, no ads in newspapers (on-line or print), TV, no product placement, no leaflets, no billboards. No ads of any kind where you'd encounter them by accident. Product discovery would be focused on company sites, on-line catalogs, mail-order catalogs, on-line product/service search engines, trade shows, and other outlets which were labeled up-front as product discovery. The goal here is that an ordinary person should have full control over whether and when they get exposed to advertising, and secondarily, to make it customer-driven. Make it easy for the person with needs to find solutions to these needs, evaluate different options based on trustworthy information[0], and pick one that works best for them.

That's more-less the idea I have on this topic. It's incomplete, probably a bit incoherent, and definitely not optimal for hundreds of reasons. I expect it to be torn apart, and I'll be thankful for criticism - I can't develop it further without feedback :).

As for how to make any of this happen for yourself, today? I'd start with the obvious - aggressive ad-blocking, avoiding exposing yourself to anything that smells of content marketing, getting rid of your TV service (the hardware itself can still work well for playing games on a console). Never doing product discovery on an e-commerce site. Asking trustworthy friends for recommendations of products and services, and giving recommendations if asked, qualifying your level of certainty and disclosing any conflict of interest. Being proactive about searching for things you need on-line. Perhaps subscribing to an industry magazine, but bearing in mind that it's - to quote Paul Graham, "a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine"[1], and otherwise not trusting it further than you can throw it. Inflicting social pressure on people who decide to monetize their friends and family, if you know any (MLMs, influencers). Also, learning to respect your money and not spend it on an impulse - to counter the long-term influence of advertising. Make each purchase a conscious one.

That's more-less what I do. I barely see any overt ads on-line these days. Can't avoid covert ads, can't avoid meatspace ads either, but I can make damn sure that if I feel sudden desire for a particular product or product category, I'll pause and spend some time researching it independently before making a decision. The goal here isn't to stop buying things, but to maximize the utility and happiness you buy per dollar spent.

--

[0] - Efficient market requires minimizing information asymmetry. To the extent advertising is spreading disinformation, it's making the market less efficient.

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[invalidOrTaken]

I guess what got me on this tack was the thought that advertising serves vendors. It should in the sense that they're the ones paying for it, but a bunch of problems arise therefrom. What would it look like if I, the consumer, took that responsibility on myself, and was willing to pay for it?

There's a case to be made that people get the marketing they deserve, as evidenced in their voting patterns and buying behavior. It's interesting to contemplate what things would be like if consumer groups, like department stores, had "buyers." YouTube reviewers or industry mags supposedly serve that role right now, but inevitably get corrupted because of where the money comes from.

[TeMPOraL]

> There's a case to be made that people get the marketing they deserve, as evidenced in their voting patterns and buying behavior.

I hate it when people make this case, or in general anything along the lines of "revealed preferences". This hides a certain divide-and-conquer that's happening. A single individual can't, in general, influence the market with their purchasing behavior. A thousand buyers simultaneously switching vendors would register on someone's radar, but real buyers are uncoordinated. Consider the 3.5mm audio jack and phones. If all the people who were unhappy about Apple having the "courage" to drop it would band together and announce that they'll hold off with upgrading their iPhones or switch to Samsung, Apple would quickly reconsider. As it is, you've got lots of people complaining, but buying anyway, because they know they alone can't affect the market, and they need a decent phone.

This is related to a general observation that you can only "vote with your wallet" among the options available on the market. You don't have a way to vote for feature combination that isn't offered, for a product that doesn't exist.

[jason0597]

Those ASCII graphs look nice! What tool did you use to make them?

[TeMPOraL]

Just Emacs in Artist Mode.

[gokceozantoptas]

I think that "decency"/"profit" forces are not directly a part of Marketing but rather business. It is not marketing's mission to maximize profits, it's business's. I'd say if your high-level management is not evil, then marketing is also not evil. This assumes competency, btw. If people involved are not competent, yeah, then easily shift towards the evil end without the profit maximization. But since almost all of the capitalist system is profit-driven, yeah, almost all of the companies easily discard "decency" for higher "profit".

[rottcodd]

People prefer dealing with machinery to dealing with bureaucracies. - jmc

[jagtesh]

> You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers

I'd argue it's a simple division of labor. Engineers need to stay focused on solving technical challenges. Also, when it comes to PM - it's more than just writing product stories or prioritizing them. Doing stakeholder interviews is as art. Asking the right questions is crucial.

So while Engineers stay focused on the how, the PM stays focused on the what. And the UX translates the what into an interactive map easily understood by target audience.

[sweetdreamerit]

well, no. They are different jobs, that require skills that an engineer is not required to have. It's not just mindest, it's about methods and skills and theoretical backgrounds. UX is about eliciting the needs, the knowledge, the mental models of the users and to contribute to create (digital) representations that help them (the users) to accomplish their goals. This is not what an engineer is asked to do, and not what (s)he has been trained to.

[phab]

I completely disagree. Engineering at its core is about building useful solutions to real-world problems. If you're not considering the user (including the theory behind the user's interaction with your product), you're not embracing your role as an engineer holistically. If I was hiring engineers, that is exactly what I would be asking them to do.

[neutronicus]

There are only so many hours in the day.

We sell a complicated product for professional designers. I am bad at using it and I don't have a great understanding of user workflows. I could learn more about that but then I would have less time to read our huge codebase and figure out how it works.

[egfx]

I think a frontend engineer needs to have both a very strong aesthetic design ability as well as engineering abilities. Marketing on the other hand is a different animal. A good marketer can sell bad code, U/X.

I worked in QA and I think this is similar. The best QA testers aren’t engineers because they don’t make assumptions. Marketers make assumptions but not about code but about human behavior like you said but I think this relates more to the U/X and marketing relationship vs the engineer to U/X relationship.

[tomcooks]

The reason for the grumpiness is that, marketing or not, software works and exists. The opposite doesn't happen.

Cue in the stereotypical markethead rappresentation: vapid, buzzword filled, socially successful.

[Sodman]

All of the "no code" websites you see (even on HN) asking for an email address to sign up for updates on a non-existent product (ie gauge interest) seem to disagree with you.

[juped]

I'd love to be good at marketing, I'm just... not. I'm good at empathizing with users, but that doesn't help if you don't have any because you suck at marketing.

[mronge]

It’s a skill you can train just like any other.

We all sucked at programming in the beginning too! Just keep at it and your marketing chops will improve.