
Interviewing expert marketers - Kortaggio
https://billmei.net/blog/marketing
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ameister14
So basically, there's no silver bullet, to market properly you need to
understand your audience and speak their language and most of the basic
principles haven't changed in a long time.

I'm assuming the author didn't speak to the people running campaigns for
companies like Coca Cola, Yum! Brands or any enterprise company that's more
than ten years old - I assume this because he believes that great marketers
don't climb the ladder. Some of the best have done just that. For example,
Ogilvy on Advertising was mentioned; David Ogilvy started in sales, and worked
as an account executive for Mather & Crowther for years before he started
Ogilvy & Mather.

>What will you do a better job at selling: A product you spent the last 10
years building, polishing, and shipping yourself? Or someone else’s product
that you just learned about last week?

Honestly? I know a lot of people that would do much better selling the latter,
because the former has their ego wrapped up in it. You don't have to have
built a coffee machine to sell one well.

~~~
shanghaiaway
Agreed to your last paragraph. You need distance to market a product. I am
horrible at marketing my own side projects.

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alexpetralia
This essay felt sparse on the detail. Every tech person on HN knows their
product and problem domain quite well - how to market it is a genuinely
different problem.

Mentioning "listening" is a great point - but this is not particularly novel
(any book on sales & marketing would suggest this first step as well).

Some points I was expecting:

\- Story telling, vision setting and narrative building (I would recommend
"CopyHour" for anyone interested)

\- Visual imagery (design, photos, icons)

\- Content marketing (informing your customer, aka. "thought leadership")

\- Sampling across various marketing channels, then scaling on those which
perform well ("Scientific Advertising" is a very quick read here)

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codingdave
The first point is 100% wrong in my experience. I know multiple great
marketing people who climbed the ladder and do the job quite well. In my
experience, the people who only market their own products do succeed for the
reasons the article mentions, but they have minimal capability to break down
why they succeed and translate it into success on future projects.

