
Silicon Valley distrusts marketing and devalues the people who practice it - anacleto
https://threadling.com/silicon-valley-anti-marketing-bias/
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Latty
I mean, given that vast majority of marketing I experience annoys and offputs
me, it's hardly surprising there is a distaste.

This article popped up a full-screen covering banner. Kind of makes the point.
That kind of marketing actively makes me dislike you.

~~~
TheCoreh
Marketing is not the same as advertisement, though.

There's a lot more to it than that.

~~~
anacleto
So many people still don't get this.

~~~
probably_wrong
I guess they need better marketing

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davidivadavid
They don't. A few years back, clever SV marketers renamed marketing "growth
hacking" and everybody's been swallowing it whole ever since.

~~~
synicalx
I'm yet to hear the term "growth hacking" used outside of a joke.

~~~
davidivadavid
Googling for "growth hacking" will show you a few (thousand) examples.

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geophile
I skimmed this article, but isn't it basically saying that the distrust is
justified? The examples of success are unhealthy, consumer-oriented products
(e.g. breakfast cereal, cigarettes, Trump), or marketing aimed at marketers.
They couldn't give _one_ example of the value they add to tech startups?

~~~
Devolver
That's a very good point. I could add that Steve Jobs was marketing genius at
core, that Salesforce's success (especially early on) was heavily driven by
marketing, and that Snap's recent rollout of Spectacles is one of the best
product launches I've ever seen.

I'll think about that.

~~~
kristianc
But then the three examples you give are of product launches, not acquisition
and retention.

Apple is an example of a product driven company. A really well marketed
CreativeRiver is not an iPod, a really well marketed Motorola Razr is not an
iPhone and I wouldn't substitute any Galaxy Tab device for an iPad.

Also, since Tim Cook (who is no ones idea of a marketing genius) took charge,
Apple's stock price has more than doubled.

~~~
Devolver
Also, as Steve Blank points out (perhaps a bit too harshly), Tim Cook is a
brilliant operator and optimizer, but very far from a visionary or brilliant
product/marketing mind. So far, he's taken the foundation that Jobs built and
made it sing.

[https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-
ball...](https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ballmer-and-
why-he-still-has-his-job-at-apple/)

But so far, the products Apple has launched under his leadership haven't
actually been all that well conceived.

V1 of the Apple Watch was a confusing mess that didn't have a real, concrete
purpose or place in anyone's lives.

With v2, they stepped back and focused a bit (on the active/athletic market),
but it's hardly a breakthrough device yet.

Meanwhile, the iPad is (so far) falling far short of its potential to
revolutionize computing.

All of this could change. But for me, despite the stock price, the jury on the
Era of Cook is still out.

~~~
kristianc
C.f Apple Watch - its too early to tell. v1 of the iphone, which shipped
without third party apps, and which WIRED recommended that you should
jailbreak if you bought it, took many generations to reach maturity.

The iPad takes a beating - somewhat unjustly - for failing to live up to the
promises made of it by its marketing. Judged against almost any other product
other than the iPhone, it's an enormous success. It created an entire product
category, it sold more devices on its opening year than all previous sales of
tablet sales combined. It captured an enterprise market that almost everyone
said Apple would never be able to touch. It changed the behavior of the
competition - BlackBerry, Google and Microsoft all rushed devices to market
and Windows 8 was of course heavily inspired by the need to run well on touch
devices.

~~~
geophile
My wife works in an Apple store. During her training/indoctrination/kool-aid
drinking, she was asked her impression of the iPad, and she said that it was a
device for couch potatoes, consuming content. She was slapped down pretty hard
for that. At the time, the ads for iPads showed users climbing mountains,
exploring caves, writing symphonies, etc., with the iPad being an essential
part of the activity. If the iPad is used in this way at all, it must be with
a very, very tiny fraction of users, but maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe
the point was to appeal to couch potatoes who imagine themselves to be more
active and creative?

~~~
kristianc
I'm not sure there's anything majorly different with iPads in that regard.

A lot of the Surface book and ultrabook adverts have focused on more creative
and sexy applications. I haven't seen one for a while that says 'Runs
Powerpoint like a motherf*cker'

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pnutjam
Good, marketers and salesmen are basically middle-men who skim from everyone's
success. Our current economy favors these types, but we need to move past
that.

~~~
saycheese
Might be true if you belief in magic or slavery — otherwise, believing sales &
marketing are skimming from everyone's success is like saying intellectual
property should not ever be owned.

~~~
codeonfire
Our marketing department is literally making its revenue by adding hundreds of
trackers and ads to our site, which goes counter to the goal of the actual
business of selling our goods and services. I call that skimming.

Marketing has taken ad networks and ad to sale attribution, and turned it into
"we are going to sell all our customer's data and every click so marketing can
claim revenue."

~~~
shostack
Sounds like you should move to work at a company that is beholden to its
paying customers. As a marketer at such a company, my job is twofold--to help
people find our product (because they can be in market for what we offer but
not know we exist), and get them the info they need to make their experience
as positive as possible since there is a bit of a learning curve and our data
shows that, shocker... people who know how to use our product are more likely
to buy it and remain customers because they get more value out of it and
unfortunately it isn't always easy to surface that info within the product.

We don't sell or auction off our data because that would not be in the
interest of our customers. Admittedly it can be confusing for sales reps from
companies who want to put ads on our site when I explain why we wouldn't sell
out our customers like that, so we are probably not the norm.

As a marketer it is frustrating when things are done that harm the reputation
of the profession just as i imagine many engineers hate bad actors who write
malware or people who write basic CRUD apps, talk it up, and give the
impression that software engineering is overly simple.

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commentzorro
Awesome marketing blurb to trick people into believing this marketing company
is different and better than other marketing companies and, in fact, has a
marketing strategy that can change the world. Well done!

~~~
angstrom
Marketing is like makeup. This is why "putting lipstick on a pig" won't make
the bacon better, but it might make you think the pig needs a wig and push-up
bra to match the competition.

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Mahn
Don't bother reading this, it makes a bunch of baseless assumptions and
arguments (Google Wave failed because of marketing? No market need can be
fixed with marketing?). It has no substance other than the catchy click-bait
title.

~~~
Devolver
Please elaborate on the source of the disconnect for you.

Perhaps I failed, but I tried to make it clear that the foundation of great
marketing IS building a product the market needs...because doing that well
usually means knowing what the market needs in the first place.

Knowing what a market needs and understanding those needs all the way through
is exactly what I mean by "marketing."

Once you understand the substance of that argument, the ideas that Google Wave
failed because of bad marketing and that building a product that the market
doesn't want IS bad marketing make a lot more sense.

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kristianc
This post is incredibly reductive and feels like a restatement of Sturgeon's
Law - 90% of everything is crap - which doesn't tell us much in and of itself.

I'd argue that much of the time, the distrust of marketing becomes a self
fulfilling prophecy.

Marketing does a bad job at highlighting what it can provide to the business,
and thinking strategically about what it can achieve.

This leads to resourcing conversations largely focusing on 'we need someone to
write one or two blog posts' \- meaning that marketing in startups is often
staffed by 2-3 people.

These 2-3 people are then burdened with keeping the entire marketing machine
for the company (blog posts, website updates, organizing trade show stands,
PPC, SEO, whatever the CEO feels like doing this week).

Surprise - much of the work ends up being crap. Poorly executed and overly
broad PPC campaigns to badly optimized landing pages that burn money.
Piecemeal SEO efforts that damage brand visibility. A lack of co ordinated PR
that rewards 'coverage' over strategic outcomes. Thin 'me too' blog posts that
don't add anything new to the conversation. Webinars where more than 70% of
people are inactive after the first ten minutes because of poor storytelling.

And then, the OP wants to sell us a 'framework' that is going to fix it! Sorry
- I don't buy it. The ability to sort 'leads into buckets', content marketing,
nurture marketing and other tactics like that are definitely useful - but only
steps that can be taken if the rest of the puzzle is in place.

~~~
Devolver
Hmm. Doesn't sound like you read this closely.

For one thing, the subtitle of my post says "In which the tech industry's
stigma against marketing creates a SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY that leaves a
trail of failed products, fire sales, and wasted years in its wake."

There is also a big header that says "Our anti-marketing bias has created a
self-fulfilling prophecy."

Not quite sure how you missed both of those.

Also, the entire point of the article (and the framework I'm promoting) is
that building the right marketing foundation is one of the major keys to
getting "the rest of the puzzle in place."

The core of the framework itself has nothing to do with sorting leads into
buckets, content marketing, nurture marketing, etc.

It is about building the right foundations. It is about solving the puzzle. It
is about getting to the center of the Maze.

But perhaps "The Maze is not meant for you."

~~~
kristianc
We're in disagreement about the source of the problem. You say it's SV anti-
marketing bias. I'd disagree and say the problem is more nuanced than that.

CMOs can expect to make top top money. Most of the big problems that
businesses face and that CEO's prioritize have their roots in marketing. In
recent years at large enterprises the CMO has begun to challenge the CIO for
who runs IT overall.

On the whole though, those marketing staff do a poor job of communicating what
they can achieve to the business. Some of this is because they're old school
campaign marketers who simply don't understand what is possible. Some of it is
because they lack the technical ability to successfully implement cross
channel marketing. So they fall back on what they know - which is a slick
website and the same tired content marketing tricks everyone else is using.

It isn't Silicon Valley's distrust of marketing that is causing campaigns to
be poorly executed - it's that when asked, marketing fails to present a
strategic vision for what could be achieved.

It's hard to judge what your framework does - and what you quantify as
building the right foundations - as this post is just a laundry list of stuff
you don't like.

~~~
Devolver
Again, not sure you read the article closely.

I think I made it clear that it's a case of "Yes, and..." not "either/or"

The bias is not the only source of the problem. As you point out correctly,
the marketing staff falls short, too.

The real problem I define is the never-ending feedback loop between Silicon
Valley's bias against marketing and the relatively low quality of marketers in
the talent pool that results.

Hard to say whether the chicken or the egg came first, but it doesn't really
matter.

As for the framework vs the "laundry list of stuff" I don't like...

This is just the opening salvo. IMHO, great marketing and great products often
(not always) arise from a deep understanding of and insight into big unsolved
problems, unmet needs, and unfulfilled desires.

This post is my articulation of a very big unsolved problem and all of its
consequences.

More on the solution soon.

~~~
narrowrail
A huge part of the problem, which you continue to exacerbate is the conflation
of the terms 'marketing' and 'advertising.' It seems you understand the
difference, but look throughout the 59 comments in this discussion and you
will see people use the term marketing where advertisement or advertising
would be the more appropriate term(s); not to mention the places where
promotion was conflated with marketing.

There are many people that seem to think marketing is the sophisticated way to
say advertising, and it makes nuanced discussions difficult.

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manigandham
Marketing is quite literally "going to market". In the post-industrial age, it
had its beginnings in manufacturing and the supply chain but has evolved into
today's concept of understanding and meeting customer's needs. Marketing is
_the_ most important section of a business as it doesn't matter what you built
if you don't have a market willing to exchange value for it.

The comments here seem to highlight the very same misunderstandings in this
article. Marketing is not advertising (which is just a small subset of
distributing a message). Many ads are badly done, mostly because the ad
industry is setup for cheap volume and has work incentives that perpetuate
this (although it is slowly changing).

Telling a story, understanding your market and creating customers is the
primary purpose of marketing. Read any of several good books on this and you
will have the biggest key to success.

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iamdeedubs
Aren't we tech people taught that sales and marketing is the cost you pay for
being unoriginal?

~~~
ohyoutravel
Whether we're "taught" that or not, it is certainly not true and comes across
as an elitist attitude. There exists plenty of awesome, original content that
no one will ever hear about because it's on a website somewhere with no way to
really find it without going to page 10 of some specific Google search.
Marketing and advertising has its place, and I'm thankful for advertisements
sometimes when they have lead me to finding a new product or service that I
enjoy.

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andrenotgiant
Engineers: dont get ruffled, this article is not for you.

This marketing is marketing to marketers.

~~~
Devolver
I'm truly sorry you feel that way.

I was hoping to bridge the divide and help technical people understand that
their distaste and distrust of marketing hurts them more than anyone else.

Please help me understand how I fell short.

~~~
markhahn
marketing is amoral, and we all want to be right. people within the company
want to sell products because the products are good (but marketing is amoral,
so they'll sell anything.) customers want to buy the right products (but
marketing is amoral, so will sell them anything.)

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daxorid
How I wish this were actually true. It runs contrary to everything I see
around me (ecommerce, specifically).

~~~
daxorid
To the commenter who deleted their question:

Customer experience and technical debt concerns always take a backseat to
marketing in ecommerce. Marketing is, by far, the primary dictator of priority
in this industry.

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jgalt212
I don't even have to read this to know it's bunk. Apple is the world's most
profitable company and among the best marketers around.

Ergo, the valley respects marketing.

~~~
Devolver
"ergo" = therefore. Ergo, there needs to be a strong logical thread between
one side of the equation and the other.

The fact that Apple is great at marketing and super-profitable doesn't equate
to the Valley respecting marketing. Not at all.

Apple is one of the exceptions that proves the rule.

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davidgerard
Sales and marketing are as specialised talents as programming.

Competitive advantage: get a marketer you respect, and get marketing that
doesn't suck.

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spangry
I think the author makes some reasonable points. Although I'm rolling out the
'no true Scotsman' fallacy here, real marketers are invaluable in the same way
that real designers are. But you need to understand their true function in
order to make best use of them. Marketers also face problems that are similar
to those designers face; unsurprising given they employ similar methods that
produce outputs that are difficult to quantify.

I'm sure the designers here have all had the following experience at some
point:

\- designer: I'm a designer at x company.

\- other person: Oh, so you make pretty pictures in Photoshop?

\- designer: Urghh......

There are similar public misunderstandings about what good marketing is, and
what it does. Because of this, they get brought in at the wrong stage of the
process, where there's little scope for them to add value. Take talented
designers, for example. Ideally, they're part of the product development team
from day 1, working side-by-side with devs.

In addition to product improvements that occur when you use 'good design'
practices, a good designer will take early concepts and product prototypes, at
various stages of development, define appropriate metrics to measure
'goodness', and then test these pre-release bits of work on a representative
sample of your target market.

And I don't mean just focus group studies, I'm including other methods too.
For example, 1 on 1 'intense observation' type studies, to see how people
interact with your product, what they find confusing, unintuitive, annoying
etc. Observation, not asking (people lie, people post-rationalise etc.) These
insights are then brought back to the product development team and addressed
in future development cycles, resulting in a better final product.

If you don't understand this, you will bring designers in after the product is
done and you want someone to make a 'nice website' for launch.

Past-Apple and current-Apple are great case-studies here. Past-Apple was a
fanatically design-led company who understood design in the more useful sense
of the word: it's not about making things pretty, it's about making your
product meet the needs and preferences of your target market (one of which
might be 'prettiness'). Jobs, I believe, was designer at heart. Current-Apple
seems to have forgotten all this, and reverted to the more typical 'good
design is pretty things' approach. I won't get in to the results, as I think
HN is already well acquainted (going off the recent hand-wringing over the new
Macbook Pro).

Although some developers can successfully moonlight as designers, by-and-large
developers are terrible designers. Not only do they fall in to the same trap
that everyone else does (designing the product for themselves, instead of the
people they intend to sell the product to), but because they are highly-
skilled technical people, what may seem completely intuitive to them is almost
always unintuitive to the non-technical general public, thus compounding the
first problem. And you end up with a brilliant technical piece of work that is
unusable and unsellable

So, on marketing. Just as people mistake design for 'making things pretty', I
believe they also mistake marketing as 'spreading the word after the product
is bedded down'. If anything, the skills of good marketers are best employed
before product development begins. A lot of this work will revolve around
market data acquisition and quantitative analysis. In a sense, they're like
'strategic designers': instead of telling you your target market will find
your product hard to use (and here's how to fix it), they'll tell you _which
market_ is the richest target (giving you a starting point for your product
design), or that you _shouldn 't be developing your product at all_ (as
there's no market for it).

Good marketing is not solely (nor primarily) concerned with persuading as many
people as possible to buy your product, given a fixed product and pre-selected
market. I mean, yes marketers (even mediocre ones) can polish a turd, but at
the end of the day it's still just a shiny turd. It's trite, but good products
are easier to market than bad ones are. Stealing from 'The West Wing': "Bad
marketing wasn't the reason people didn't buy new coke; they didn't buy it
because they didn't like new coke". It was a product, which I'm sure had lots
of clever technical work put in to it, that had no market to sell in to.

I suppose the challenge is dealing with the high signal-to-noise ratio. There
are many more shitty marketers out there than there are good ones. The shitty
ones don't actually _do_ marketing (they're salesmen, who do sales). I think a
key part of this is understanding what marketing is, and how it can be used to
maximum effect.

tl;dr: When people understand the true function of 'design', it can be used to
great effect. The same applies to marketing, which is a remarkably similar
discipline.

~~~
gaius
They can complain all they like, while they try to monopolise the word
"creative", they're fair game in my book.

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omarchowdhury
Only because people have a natural aversion to being peddled to, does
marketing exist. Blame the consumer!

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golemotron
Considering its content, it's hilarious to see HN change the title of this
submission.

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pryelluw
Tech is eating the world and its changing everything. Even how we market. It
takes knowledge of tech to understand how those changes happen in order to
leverage them. The knowledge is also used as a barrier to entry. Which I think
is fair. If you want to market tech you better know how it gets built and how
it works.

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crucialcomments
Good.

