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Comment by maroonblazer | Hacker News Reader

The title of the article belies its content. Several examples of marketing are cited:

- They identified a market: people who want to learn a language as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible.

- They analyzed and understood the needs and desires of the target market. Presumably they further segmented the market.

- They created an offering that met the needs of the segment(s) they were going after.

- They deliberately positioned their product so as to attract as large a share of the addressable audience as possible .

- They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth, an age-old marketing communications tactic.

This is marketing.

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Not to mention a high-profile TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_...

Yes, word of mouth comes cheap when you're a recognized professor and inventor.

You are nit-picking.

Marketing refers in this context to not or semi-directed advertising like ...

... ads. You know those stinky blinky patches of moving colors next to a text you would like to read. Never seen them do that.

Duolingo only relied on organic and peer-to-peer advertisement - very healthy - I like this a lot - kudos to them!

No, he's not. Duolingo didn't spend on advertising, but spent a lot in marketing.

And if the article is mixing the two, the article is just plain wrong.

Also PR. It's not just this article, either -- the founder gives talks and interviews pretty regularly, it appears.

Indeed. I suspect the PR played the larger role, actually. Before anyone seeded a word-of-mouth chain about Duolingo, they likely read an article about it.

Thanks for that, nicely summed, I get many clients who think marketing is promotions, they've already missed the boat and it's a tough job to pull them back far enough to re-assess their market.

I think you are being overly critical here unnecessarily (really don't know why such wit is needed). The point the title is trying to make is they didn't spend on traditional ad channels. Most startups who start with zero users on day one can't use these very organic marketing means to reach that number.

s/marketing/advertising/ would be useful.

And they created a product that is useful and fun to use.

Marketing: noun, the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

The keywords there are "action", and "promoting". The first 4 items you list are not marketing. They are preparing for the market. The only thing there that is actually marketing is "They increased awareness and trial of their product via word-of-mouth" and that only barely counts because most of it is OTHER people marketing it for you, without your consent, control, or even input. So, it's not Duolingo marketing themselves. It's Duolingo's users marketing it for them. That's usually referred to as Evangelism and Guy Kawasaki has made his career out of explaining and promoting that idea http://guykawasaki.com/

You - and the article - are conflating advertising with marketing. From the man who literally wrote the book on marketing management[0]:

"Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of serving best and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services."

I.e. advertising and promotions are just one part of marketing.

[0]http://www.kotlermarketing.com/phil_questions.shtml

Maybe the title was changed but the title now says without /spending/ on marketing. Your examples were, in theory, all free.

It costs money to pay people to do those things.

Maybe we can say "without advertising or promotions"?

I think marketing spend is the right term. They pay for marketing salaries, but had no marketing spend.

It's a distinction without a difference. They invested effort - time and money - into marketing activities. Whether or not those efforts were outsourced is immaterial.

There is a difference. You are lumping many aspects of starting a business into the marketing category. Identifying a market? That's one of the first things you do when you start a company. It's finding a group of people to market a product to. If that's marketing, then almost all aspects of a business are marketing.

Perhaps you're too young to remember but there was a time when businesses didn't do things like identify a market. They started with a product and focused primarily on how to manufacture and distribute it for the least amount of money. I.e. their attention was directed inwardly and the focus was primarily about economics.

Those dimensions of starting a business that we now take for granted - from identifying a market to branding and visual design of the packaging and other consumer-facing materials - come to us by way of the discipline of marketing management.

Do you have any interesting articles or reading about your first paragraph? I'm too young to have even realized that was a regular thing.

Leave it to HN to get all pedantic. Yes, its a bit link-baity, but I "got" what was meant by the title.

Besides confusing advertising and marketing, this marketing article contains a few other inaccuracies. E.g. it says: "In China alone, points out Luis, there are 400 million people learning English who require some form of certification to prove their proficiency for a job or studies abroad."

Perhaps it should read "... people learning English who may require some form of certification ..." because not all of those 400 million Chinese are looking to work or study abroad.

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