
The tech world is wrong about marketing - samsolomon
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/everything-the-tech-world-says-about-marketing-is-wrong/
======
gk1
On the one hand: Yes, there is too much BS in marketing. There always has
been, but today the barrier to calling yourself a "marketer" is close to
nothing. These self-proclaimed marketers use a veil of buzzwords (eg, "growth
hacking") to deceive and cover up.

On the other hand: "The four P's" is a man-made concept, too. So is the entire
framework the author shows off. So why is "inbound marketing" a sham while
"the four P's" is gospel? That whole part is a rant about terminology more
than anything else.

There needs to be more skepticism and calling-out-BS within marketing, but
that doesn't mean rejecting every new idea because it doesn't fit a decades-
old mold. Rejecting everything is just as intellectually lazy as accepting
everything.

To give an example: I'm an engineer-turned-marketer and now consult tech
companies. I never received a "traditional" marketing education so I'd get
schooled on theory by a first-year marketing student, but I can automate
marketing operations, increase conversion rates, deploy code, turn more trial
users into customers, and so on. Between those things and "The Four P's,"
which do you think matters more to a startup?

Theory is useful but dismissing an entire industry (tech) because they don't
subscribe to an old theory or choose to use new terminology is ignorant.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
And inbound marketing is now used to refer to what used to be called SEO if
you have seen as may mistakes as I have a competent inbound marketing person
can improve your site.

I wont mention any names but I saw a mistake with canonical tags cost a major
UK company 1/2 a mill in less than a week.

~~~
magic_beans
Out of curiosity, how would a mistake in canonical tags be so catastrophic?

~~~
tremon
Those are RIAA losses probably. I.e., pick some outrageous high number, point
to a perceived flaw, and calculate the difference between actual revenue and
your "target".

edit: the GP didn't specify any units though. He could have been talking about
visitors or micromorts, not pounds or dollars.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Nope it was based on the cost of buying the lost organic traffic via CPC -
They are a big *ie millions of pounds monthly) user of ad words budget

------
acconrad
The last few sentences of the article:

> _Whenever marketers claim that “everything has changed” or that something is
> “dead” or that some new buzzword “is the future of marketing,” ask for
> evidence. Make them cite their sources and explain their reasoning. Most of
> the time, they are just full of it._

Somehow I don't think the author fully grasped the irony of his statement
given the title.

~~~
chris_wot
I'm feeling a little bit dense today, I just can't see the irony :( Not being
flippant, but can you help point this out to me?

~~~
wmeredith
The title of the author's article is in the same vein of the ones being
lambasted in his closing paragraph.

~~~
chris_wot
You do realise that article authors normally don't chose the title for their
articles? That's the job of the subeditor, and they don't always listen to the
author of the article.

~~~
acconrad
I don't think that's actually obvious to the HN crowd, most of whom are not in
publishing or journalism.

------
danpalmer
This might be a bit naive, or just wrong, but I feel like there's a difference
between "content marketing" and non-content marketing.

Content marketing, to me, means marketing where the 'content' of the marketing
is actually valuable in itself. It could be an educational blog post, or a
discussion started on Twitter, but it's something that I might reasonably
choose to consume in its own right.

Non-content marketing I would see as banner ads, TV ads, etc, where I would
never choose to see the content if I had a choice. I only see the adverts
because they tag on to another piece of content in order to get any exposure.

~~~
ConfuciusSay02
I think the author of the blog post would argue that traditional ads should
also endeavor to be valuable in itself. Like how people search out ads like
"Office Linebacker" or other high production value ads.

Where I disagree with the author is that he makes it sound like absolutely
everyone has forgotten traditional marketing 101. I personally haven't seen
that, but then again I'm not in Silicon Valley...

------
jpadkins
Overall sentiment of this article is generally correct. Lots of minor errors
throughout. One major one that caught my eye:

> to increase brand awareness and thought leadership (and those cannot be
> measured).

Brand awareness and thought leadership absolutely can be measured through
polling, search volume changes, etc. Be wary of any marketing that is being
sold to you where the claim is the benefit can't be measured.

~~~
takno
There are certainly things you can do to measure these things. The difficulty
is that these measures aren't as neat as the ones you use for direct
marketing, and are less likely to capture the whole value of the brand and
thought leadership spend. This means they can be used against each other, but
at a high level it's risky to use them to assign resources to the different
strategies

------
fny
Uh... Aren't the spread of buzzwords like "inbound marketing" and "content
marketing" the result of _insanely brilliant_ marketing? Isn't touting that
the Modern Internet makes old school marketing irrelevant a _genius_ marketing
strategy to take over the market of marketing?

Sure, the new product might be worse, but these "tech world" companies have
managed to take over, and I'd bet they'll keep repacking old wisdom in shiny
new phrases and blog posts until they push the ivory towers of marketing into
obselence. Hell, Brian Halligan, Hubspot's CEO, is even a senior lecturer at
MIT...

------
petewailes
I think this hits the nail on the head for a lot of "tech" businesses at the
moment:

> “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a
> friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment
> banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The
> market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about
> getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

~~~
Zigurd
In cases where network effect is important and the cost of being a follower is
high, yeah, just get big. How soon do you think Amazon should do otherwise?

------
kordless
Marketing is about raising interest. Interest is one of the 8 basic emotions,
with the other being joy, trust, fear, suprise, sadness, boredom and anger. If
you can bootstrap interest into joy, you get optimism. Interest and anger
bring aggression, on the other hand.

When someone say "everything some other people says about marketing is wrong",
what they are really saying is "what they are saying isn't interesting to me
and therefore everything they are saying is wrong", which is the well known ad
hominem bias. Biases are good in this context because they bring efficiency to
systems. For example, when a marketing person uses buzzwords without context
to describe their business, you get the expected "bored" responses from
people. Does the Intercloud interest you? What if I told you the Intercloud
was a cloud of clouds and it needed a high trust federated network backed by
the blockchain to operate? Does it interest you now?

To be successful at marketing X, one must ignore everything anyone is saying
about X and try to understand two basic things: 1. What people (Ys) are
interested in X? and 2. What makes X equally interesting to more Ys?

Keep in mind sometimes those answers fall outside what you may already know
about X. This implies you must learn more about X and get to know the Ys to
raise interest in them with the stuff you know they don't.

If you pour a lot of resources into #2, don't expect all the Ys to respond
well. Part of what can make something interesting is others aren't interested
in it as much as you are. And, if you understand that, you will begin to
understand marketing.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _Marketing is about raising interest._

That's one component, but marketing is bigger than that. In fact, this is
seems to be a major point of confusion, that "marketing" is advertising.

Marketing encompasses bringing a product to market, perhaps even _creating_
that market. According to Wikipedia's definition:

"This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of
exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships."

------
houselouse
the raison d'être for a bus stop is not to sell cellphones, purfume or
clothing. It is exists to establish and protect a pickup/dropoff point. The
bus stop would exist even if the no ads were ever sold for it.

On the other hand, the rambling, first-hand, poorly-worded 4 page review the
latest sous vide exists solely to sell you that device. This is "content
marketing". The text and graphics are inseparable from the intent to sell.

Somewhere in the middle is the Slate webpage that links to the sous vide
review. It wasn't written to sell that particular appliance, yet ad revenue is
very much top of mind.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Let this comment be a manifestation of my intent to subscribe to your
newsletter.

------
golergka
Good article. Also, great content marketing for that book I'm already sick of
noticing at HN homepage.

~~~
exception_e
I agree. It seems so forced!

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phodo
Seems ironic that, as a marketer, it took this much verbiage to make his
point. Must have gotten paid by the word. On a serious note, the tech industry
in general suffers from non standard language when it comes to describing
roles. Consider pm for product manager, project manager, program manager. In
some cases these labels refer to overlapping roles and responsibilities, in
other cases they don't. Same with marketing, where u have different labels
meaning the same thing or partially expressing the same thing. Or take bd,
where in some startups it means sales and in others it means, well, bd.

------
siliconc0w
Marketing and Technology are two ways to solve the same thing - information
problems. Technology is better at it.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Marketing is the exploitation of information asymmetry. Firms are selective
with their message to maximize perceived value. Truth is hidden.

------
arafa
"Creativity cannot be scaled." Actually, in the book The Song Machine, they
pretty clearly show otherwise, with teams of topliners, beat makers, etc.
churning out hits in a machine-like format: [http://www.amazon.com/Song-
Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/039...](http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-
Inside-Hit-
Factory/dp/0393241920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460998698&sr=8-1&keywords=the+song+machine)

~~~
jraines
I thought that was more about maximizing your hits, given that you have found
some creative geniuses at specific parts of the process, like Ester Dean, Max
Martin, etc.

~~~
arafa
They are, but in the process have created a serious song and hit generating
machine. You have these hit factories that churn this stuff out at scales that
were previously unseen through the division of labor described, among other
things.

------
vonnik
TYPO: Missing an "e" in "the".

~~~
dang
We eliminated that by de-baiting the title.

------
ucaetano
As usual, this article makes the very critical mistake of thinking marketing =
advertising.

Given that, I can expect the entire article to be bullshit.

~~~
dang
If you are so much more knowledgeable than the author and most of us here, it
would be better to post a comment that teaches us some of what you know. This
one just makes a grand claim with no explanation, surrounded by name-calling.
That's not a good fit for HN. We're going for thoughtful discussion here.

This is a good description which you might (re-)read:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

Many of your comments here have breached civility in similar ways. That's a
problem. On HN, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

~~~
ucaetano
My sincere apologies.

