Nerds don't respond to marketing; try technical documentation instead
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
Some here say that the difference lies in rational vs emotional appeal, with nerds being presumed to be more "rational." But I think the difference is somewhere else. I don't think nerds are any less emotional.
A lot of traditional marketing relies on a thing where the marketer tries to sell the consumer some feature of a product in a way that does not involve delving into details of the product (this avoidance is seen as good thing -- often the fewer details are specified, the more polished the marketer considers the message to be). To a nerd, that avoidance is a very bad thing, because a nerd prides himself on knowing the details. So the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd. This feeling of hurt is certainly an emotion, so I wouldn't say nerds are less emotional!
I can't say I like this characterisation!
A marketing message devoid of any useful details is really one that's devoid of any real indication as to whether it will work in your business' context. And let's be honest, the magic silver bullet that works flawlessly out of the box doesn't exist. It's never that simple.
If I need a product that does SAML2 or OIDC auth and $vendorA clearly advertises their support on their product page, but $vendorB has no detail available and wants me to talk to someone in sales and set-up a "demo and chat" where it might well emerge that there's no support for a feature I absolutely need (or the sales rep will have no idea what I'm talking about), I can tell you straight off the bat which vendor I'll see more favourably.
If I go searching for a product, and its marketing material can not answer my questions, I do expect that company (or whoever distributes it) to betray my expectations in a way that will hurt me a lot. Honestly, this feeling has a quite strong empirical foundation, so I'm not a bit ashamed of it and don't imagine it will ever change.
Switching POV now: I don't expect the details to be all front-and-center, but I do expect to be able to find them with some digging.
When the boilerplate response is "let's hop on a call and chat about your problem" I drop the product and move on. I know from experience that this will be a giant time waster, because the person who "hops on the call" will know absolutely nothing.
You parent comment basically says the very same thing, that you (a IT professional / nerd) are looking for different marketing messages (actual product details) than other users.
Others, who would prefer an "intuitive" product that "works out of the box" and is "so simple" that even the middle aged house wive can easily trade stocks on XYZ (which like 50% of the ads I receive via Alphabet Ads).
One asserts that nerds want to know the details for ego reasons.
The other asserts that he (presumbly as a self-proclaimed "nerd" in this situation) wants to know the details because otherwise he has no idea if the product is even useful.
If the product being sold is actually that simple e.g. "trade stocks with a few clicks" thats fine. But for anything that requires customisation, integration or any kind of technical support thats not true. You need to know the details to know if it will work.
This very much matches the stereotypical enterprise sales disaster i.e. buzzwords and flashy things sold to c-suite that are then suffered by those who actually use them and find that it doesn't do what they need
EDIT: also in this context where the article title specifically mentions "technical documentation" we are clearly not looking at the super simple type of product.
Car mechanic buying bolts needs to know thread and sizes of bolts, he does not care about "our bolts are best bolts in the world", if he would spend an hour with sales rep that feeds him marketing and in the end it turns out they don't sell what that mechanic needs, it will make him angry.
IT people or "nerds" know what they need and they have specifications to meet. Making it an "ego" thing is silly :).
A max strength before shearing/failure is just another req. for the task the mechanic wants to know, it doesn't make them objectively worse unless they were used in a situation where they needed to be stronger.
That seems pretty antagonistic for no reason.
> You parent comment basically says the very same thing
How so? The original comment said that a lack of information hurts nerds' feelings because having information is a matter of pride for them (so for emotional reasons, not rational ones). Your parent said they need information to make a well-informed decision, not for emotional reasons. How is that the same thing?
Taking the SAML/SSO example of the grandparent post, the odds are that the only time the poster will hear of the product is when they're asked to do the integration to make logins work. It is unlikely that they will know or even care about what shiny features the product has, since they're not the expected user base. If there's simple documentation on integration methods freely available online, it's easy enough to read it in half an hour or so and figure out how feasible the setup is likely to be in your environment. Going down the demo/chat route is likely to take a good 1-2 hours minimum, and the likelihood is that much of that is wasted sitting through presentations for the product side. That's great for the actual customers, but not useful for the technical staff the customers brought along to make it work. If you're lucky, you might get to actually speak to technical staff that can explain the SAML/OIDC setup steps in call 1; often, you might well have to set up a second call to actually discuss the technical requirements if not more. With many such integrations, the time quickly adds up...
It has nothing to do with ego or hurt feelings. I agree it might be emotional, but it’s more akin to a self defense mechanism.
No details ~= person telling you what you can read on the tin. Why are you subjecting yourself to listening to bullshit from a professional bullshit artist?
A marketer is a professional story teller. You get tired of hearing stories without substance, regardless of being a nerd. It’s more likely correlated with being cynical (or an expert in the field).
Of course you can present your product in such an attractive way that I hope you will be the winner when I compare you against alternatives, but beware that I will judge it on different grounds. So indeed, communicate details if you want to have a chance to be picked as the buying choice.
If they won't give me the details, it is reasonable to assume they are selling healing crystals until given reason to believe otherwise.
In my experience, products that lack details in marketing are usually geared to C-level execs for decision making, with their underlings being the ones who are then supposed to call a dozen vendors for demos.
Well, and if you don't know, or even stronger, don't want to know those things then it'd be much easier to sell you whatever the marketer is trying to sell you.
* details are so technical that they're hard to explain without "just look at the code type explanations". I've run into this roadblock trying to explain the Spark Catalyst optimizer.
* Not truly understanding all the details, so you can't explain the tech. Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
* the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
The inner workings of a proprietary query engine are a good example of all three. It may be great tech, but hard to explain and part of it are the secret sauce that they don't want to expose. Not exposing something doesn't necessarily mean they're hiding something / being dishonest.
That may seem like a valid reason to the seller, but as a user it's a red flag to take your business elsewhere
> Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
So lead your marketing material with the code and explanations or tutorials, or whatever. (But I'm repeating the article now...)
> the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
This one isn't reasonable. It's the detail of how to use and how it can be used that are important, not how it works. If you can't tell those, how do people use your product? Do you make your customers sign an NDA before they buy it? (Yeah, some products do require an NDA before you buy them, you can expect those ones to be very hard to sell.)
Also, we're jaded. We've seen tons of bullshit. If you're omitting the details, I immediately assume that the reason is that seeing those details would make me less willing to buy/use your product.
So yes, I agree completely: nerds just need different marketing, but they are very, very susceptible to marketing. And the susceptibility is just as much based in emotional responses and deviations from pure rationality as it is with non-nerd people. Nerds just tend to fool themselves by thinking "I am so rational, I'm not susceptible to emotional appeals!" and then just getting susceptible to emotional appeals that masquerade as rationality while non-nerds tend to fool themselves by not reflecting on the entire process at all.
I don't think being hurt (or annoyed) by condescension is a trait specific to nerds, either.
Perfect to a nerd is different. It needs to require them somehow. "Anyone can do it" is not going to win over a nerd. "You can do" it might. If you're selling AI cancer detection to a hospital, "out of the box" is great. If you're selling to radiologists, they'll probably be more skeptical of solutions that don't involve them. Products (or even just stories) that empower & require them might.
I agree with the blog, but it's a little naive. It euphemizes, or dances around the relationship between "marketing" and razzle dazzle. If someone is hours deep into your documentation, that's not really advertising. That's a real service they're consuming, and forming opinions based on how it tastes. Marketing is more about the impression they get in minutes, not hours.
Ideally, there's a healthy interplay between marketing, the impression that you're intentionally projecting, and doing. But, they're still kind of independant.
Anyway, nerds aren't that hard to market to. They're just like anyone else. Flatter them. Make them feel important, listened to, consequential. Appeal to their ego, their better nature, their fears, etc. Also deliver. Good documentation, as judged by those using it, is delivering. Making it seem like it it will be pleasant to use, is marketing. Making it look a certain way, but not delivering, is bullshitting.
No, marketing is about getting someone to contact sales to buy your product. (There is a fuzzy line between sales and marketing) I have personally spent days in the past evaluating two different products, which did put me hours into reading documentation trying to figure out how to make them work.
When Toyota sponsors a motorsport team, that's not about getting someone to buy tomorrow. Neither are most TV commercials, brochures, etc. Neither is rebranding, etc.
You are very correct, marketing can often start years before a sale (and sometimes people never buy at all)
By the same argument you could say that everything is marketing, including designing and making the product. This is true, I guess. You might borrow a mac for a week from a buddy before buying it. Still, making a laptop is generally not described as marketing.
Nerds respond to being told they are more rational or otherwise superior/cool/etc. That is emotional appeal and conference organizers and such play on it. You can see it whenever you look for it - calling attendees smartest people there are and such..
Not that it would make nerds different then other groups. Others like ego stroking too, just differently.
I wouldn't describe this as an ego injury just as I wouldn't describe someone selling a tiger-repellent rock to me as an ego injury.
For a business owner both third party and in-house solutions are more or less opaque, you just need to decide who you trust more and compare the bills.
I think you've hurt some egos!
Also, "nerds" often arrogantly feel like they're superior (e.g. smarter, more knowledgeable, better able to figure things out than anybody), so marketing that feeds their egos in that way will likely be more successful. However, the precise way these feelings manifest themselves is different than a lot of other groups, so more broadly targeted marketing may fail.
I'm not sure it's about some pride or hurting the ego.
If we accept that a lot of nerds are on the spectrum, and quite a few are full blown aspies - focus on details instead of the big picture is the core feature of this particular non-neurotypical demographic.
Obligatory citation (probably worthless, pls feel free to rip to shreds): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976176948...
Have you responded/posted an RFP before? These things often end up in very very pointed questionnaires of 200-300 questions that take a couple of weeks to prepare a response, and often sizeable teams to generate those responses.
Is it marketing or autism? Seems very common in B2B/enterprise.
It would have the added benefit of making sure product aggregators always have correct and up-to-date information. I don't understand why pretty much every company gate-keeps their catalogs so much. I worked on a project where we had to pay big money every month to a third party for such a dataset, because apparently companies hate selling large amounts of products to customers who want to automate the purchasing process with their ERP systems.
Surely they can do all of that without making engineers spend valuable time thumbing through paper, PDF or excruciatingly slow web catalogs to write down SKUs. To be fair, some engineering suppliers have started to see the utter retardation of that system, and have actually started to offer things like CAD files. But most industries still act as if they hate selling things to customers.
> mislead competition about what's happening (who is also probably scraping anyway.)
That's probably the biggest factor. Or prevent customers from comparing prices on equivalent products with competitors. But that's still stupid since everyone does it anyway, they just have to do it manually, scrape or pay third parties for the data. Not to mention that competitors often go as far as buying entire units to pull apart.
I'm not an MBA, so there's probably some obscure but really important nuance that I'm missing, but my naive understanding is that cash flow is kind of a big deal. The sooner you can turn the investment in a project, product or service into cash the better, so you want to do everything you can to make the conversion process as smooth as possible. I've been on the other side of the equation too, working for suppliers of pretty awesome products that didn't sell very well because nobody thought about this. Things like why would anyone want to buy SaaS that takes months to on-board because nothing is automated, when others just let you spin up an instance and get started in minutes? Not to mention that the only way people could find out about the product is if they happened to be cold called by a salesman.
And it's true, show me the specs and why it's a better value than the other guy, and I might be interested.
Yet in every sector, the businesses that market themselves do the best and grow the most.
It's almost as if people of all stripes are unaware of their subconscious influences.
If the claim was "Nerds don't respond to advertising," I'd have disagreed but potentially found the arguments to be reasonable.
But to say nerds are impervious to marketing as a whole says more about the author's understanding of what marketing is than it does about nerds.
No, a large part of getting people to buy a product is to first make a valuable product. Consider these two examples to see the point:
Example: You made a shitty product and try to market it by telling people exactly what it does. Nobody buys it, was the marketing bad?
Example2: You made an excellent product and try to market it by telling people exactly what it does. Lots of people buy it, was the marketing good?
The problem in the first example isn't bad marketing, instead to get more people to buy their product they should fix it.
Product, Price, Placement, Promotion.
I think you're mistaking "marketing" as only referring to "Promotion".
No sensible definition of marketing includes engineers fixing bugs or optimizing algorithms. It is true that sometimes good marketing teams also doubles as product managers where they ensures that the product is something consumers wants, but that isn't really a part of their field.
Marketing encapsulates everything a business does because everything impacts the desirability of the product.
That's not the same as saying your marketing department should be in charge of engineering. That's just an organization implementation detail.
The best companies understand that everyone in the company is involved in marketing, and the marketing department gets involved in an advisory capacity at every level. That's not the same as saying they're in charge, and I made no such claim.
And the marketing department doesn't truly control anything. There are many external factors that constrain not only price and product but promotion and placement as well.
But I can't emphasize enough that my comments have nothing to do with which department is involved or company hierarchy or titles or anything like that. I'm talking about the act of marketing.
Everything is marketing.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp
> Product > Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market, or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
I'll inform my CEO that we've been going about it all wrong, because someone on the internet believes product development should occur in a vacuum without worrying about things like market research. That's totally reasonable.
Unfortunately it's true. Marketing is now at the center of corporate-driven open source.
Shilling and meetups with free pizza quickly lead to hype and cargo culting.
The devops tools popular on HN are an excellent example.
I agree. Make the details hierarchically drill-down. Have a summary list of features and selling points, and one can click on each one to get incrementally finer detail. Multiple levels may be needed.
If the company is afraid of details, then don't bother trying to sell to nerds. You'll have to trick their clueless bosses instead using vague buzzwords and smiling lying fashionable actors. "If you select our product, you'll look 'in' and cool! Look at our fancy UI animations, the buttons look made of Flubber!"
> So the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd. This feeling of hurt is certainly an emotion, so I wouldn't say nerds are less emotional!
I think you're missing something fundamental here, possibly because of some connotation about "nerds".
When I buy something, I want to know details about what it does and how it works, not because I like knowing a million details, but because I want to do stuff with it. If I buy a laser pen, I'm going to use it to play with my cats, but I also want to use it as a range finder with a diode, so I want to know the beam spread and wavelength. If it doesn't fit the specifications, I don't want to know about the other features, they don't matter at that point.
Having sold high tech products B2B, I can confirm this.
Also "out of the box" can work with nerds if that feature allows them to do what they "really want to do" more easily and faster.
Yes, this is it.
"Nerds" are just another collection of market demographics. They (whoever they may be) are driven by a complex mix of desires and emotions just like everyone else. I don't think advertisers even bother to have a bin that one would label as "nerd". We are FAR beyond such coarse distinctions in the era of surveillance capitalism. Isn't that the point these days? To market at such a fine granularity that it becomes individuals?
Sure, turn on your adblockers, fire up your pi-holes and make intricate ublock-origin filters. You're still being marketed to, and if you're buying stuff, it is working.
So you entirely reject the notion that someone might buy stuff for any reason other than marketing?
That's FAR from the norm, however.
As long as the marketing algorithms still go "hey, I see you bought a fridge. Here are ten more fridges you may be interested in", let me express some skepticism at their supposed intelligence.
Other than some small number of exceptions(). I am not convinced that marketing budgets are fluff.
() Huy Fong Foods (Siracha Hot Sauce) -- that's literally the only product company I can think of that doesn't do marketing, apparently?
--> I don't want it.
Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door. We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads.
Promoting technical documentation as marketing is a bit odd though. Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.
The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. The best defence is having unusual preferences ... which is no defence at all if someone takes the time to figure out what they are.
Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate.
^^ EDIT Consider the should-be-famous story of Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Mathematical genius, Master of the Mint, totally in his element. Successfully identified the bubble forming. Caved to what was essentially social pressure anyway and bought back into the bubble after a few months. Being right in defiance of social pressure is excruciating.
You only have to evoke the illusion of making a decision based on statistics. Many "nerds" go crazy for benchmarks in marketing (and e.g. presenting them as a graph rather than a simple statement like "20% faster"), even though they are usually only meaningful if you really dig deeply into them.
Really? "Status markers"?
I suppose I respond to "status markers" subliminally, like anyone else does. I recognise brands that have been advertised, and I rate them higher than unknown brands.
But I despise advertising, especially the shotgun advertising that encroaches/takes-over on public space; and UBE. Turning buses and taxis into advertising billboards has degraded public space. And a lot of shotgun advertising involves externalising costs - UBE in particular costs an awful lot in terms of the inbox-owner's time.
I'm conflicted about this. I'm OK with brand promotion, which began in times when many products were adulterated (e.g. flour mixed with brick-dust), and a brand tied product quality to brand reputation. But brand marketing seems to have gone hand-in-hand with price competition, so that "top" brands nowadays are often correlated with cheap components, built-in obsolescence, and crap service.
If we're considering a tech product (think SaaS), then a website that has obviously been manicured by someone from Marketing is a serious turn-off. Especially if the marketing dude has removed all useful information.
I think that there is some form of automatic anti-persuasion feeling going on too. You feel more negative about something when you feel that it is being pushed 'too hard'.
Isn't there also some component of effective demand to this? If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. If you don't care about being seen as uncool and don't like smartphones, you're not going to get one. Etc. In the extreme, a hermit monk would just reply to a sales pitch with "still tethered to your possessions, I see".
I'd argue that the way it works is that they create desire on the one hand and sell their products as solutions to things that they aren't on the other. To explain the latter, for example, selling beer or handbags to fill a need for self-esteem or something.
If you think about it, a lot of people have most of what they need and are persuaded by these created desires anyway.
Then you also have to consider that people are trying to get you to buy their butter rather than the other butter. That's the third part.
In summary, being satisfied is not a defense since they can make you unsatisfied.
It's a mistake to think that nerds have a suppressed or lacking emotional sphere. It's just wired differently that the neurotypical one, but it's very much there.
Nerds are just like any other human, and the worst thing one can do is to fool himself thinking they're imune to advertising or any sort of influence - it makes you a sitting duck.
You'll be eating advertising completely unaware of it, from a weird sense of "superiority" and because of an adblocker.
The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be.
So then you are aware and not affected, doesn't that mean you are aware you are no longer affected since you are aware of the effects of marketing? My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on.
Like, I am aware that I am not significantly affected by marketing. I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product.
Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money.
But like sure, I feel an emotional tingle from ads, but I recognize it for what it is and just shuts it down. It isn't hard to do for me, rather it is hard to actually feel like the products would be meaningful. I think that many who recognize that ads doesn't affects them significantly works similarly.
Saying you're imune to marketing it's like saying you're imune to pricing, or buying things at a particular store. I'll dare to say that whenever there's an exchange of value most likely there is marketing involved, even if it was not thought that way. For example content marketing, some is designed to be content marketing, other content happens to be content marketing.. which has been done for centuries.
Simply recognizing the fact that you are influenced, and that you influence others, is already a win.
>I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product
Here alone you're saying that price is something you value (which is one of the classical 4 P's of the Marketing mix - Product, Price, Placement, Promotion). The ingredients are also chosen deliberately, especially nowadays with brands that know some people value foods without added sugars, or that are processed, etc.
So basically you mentioned 2 marketing variables that influence your decision. You might think that, "oh no, it just happens to be that those products were on the shelves/website!", except everything about those products are deliberate decisions: the marketplace, price, packaging, ingredients, even the font size for the ingredients, the list goes on, nothing is left to random chance.
>Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money.
Don't look at it like that, a better frame would be that you are indifferent to some companies and treasured by other companies. Wastage of advertising is factored in it's costs, the less wastage of contacts the better of course, but it's part of the game - just like people that were shouting in markets selling fish, where people that hate fish would eventually pass by. TV ads are a great example of wastage that was worth it.
I'm sure there are products or services you use that you enjoy greatly, either for it's practical value or simply because how they make you feel, and somewhere along the line something brought such products/services to your attention, a friend, a coworker, a piece of content, a character in a movie, even maybe an ad you saw when you were a child.
This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Thankfully you find the products that suit you, that's good marketing on their part - even if they were lucky to come across you they had to do something right for you exchange your money for their product, like a simple 5 cent price drop to be first on the list of those who sort by "Cheapest".
With that said, of course there are scumbags, scammers, manipulators, that use this to take advantage of people, just like people lie to try to get something out of each other.
Also, you can't buy a product without engaging in some form of product listing. If that disqualifies you from being affected by marketing then it is impossible by definition to be unaffected by it, so this whole discussion is nonsense. Hence it is a bad definition, when people say "you are affected by marketing" they don't mean "you care about the price when you buy a product". Instead it implies that you make irrational decisions based on marketing material you have seen, because otherwise it is just a null statement since it is true by definition.
It doesn't matter who does it, it's still marketing. Per definition.
Unless a listing for you is a list of technical product specs. Dimensions, weight, number of screws, power consumption, then that's barely a listing, it's just a list of technical specs. When you're creating your listing on Amazon you have dedicated fields for product specs though.
I surely wouldn't enjoy launching a Nails or Screws brand to sell on Amazon.
>Also, you can't buy a product without engaging in some form of product listing. If that disqualifies you from being affected by marketing then it is impossible by definition to be unaffected by it, so this whole discussion is nonsense.
That's my point. It's not nonsense it's simply how things are organized. Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Product Development, R&D, Accounting, etc etc.
Who deals with customers post purchase? Customer Support. Who develops new products? Product Development/R&D Who deals with direct sales? Sales. Who deals with communication? Marketing. Is it linear, and always like this in every company? Of course not, still the disciplines are there and fit into each bucket. A single founder does everything on it's own, he is wearing all the hats.
>Instead it implies that you make irrational decisions based on marketing material you have seen, because otherwise it is just a null statement since it is true by definition.
I never said it's irrational, you're the one that is implying that. People aren't dumb, and advertising isn't a magic bullet that takes control of minds, yet everyone is still subject to influence.
Maybe it's the case that you simply underestimate the decisions that are made, and how effective they are.
Unfortunately this same thing happens every time when the topic is discussed on HN.
What would you consider pricing and placement to be if not marketing? Selling in Whole Foods is the same as selling in Walmart? It's the same type of consumers that shop around those places? A 1000$ smartphone vs 299$ one are targeted at the same people?
Or price is just an arbitrary number given a cost and a random profit margin?
My point still stands, that "nerds" are influenced in their purchase decisions just like anyone else despite using adblockers.
The "Marketing Mix" was first approached in the 60's, it's not something I made up along the way to try to prove something. It's a whole discipline for some reason.
I'm ok with calling it marketing (I don't particularly care). It's just that I don't believe we can have fruitful discussion without first defining and scoping the terms enough that people don't constantly shift goalposts and talk past each other. This kind of thing just leads to very frustrating "discussion" where no matter what you say, someone is going to interject because they have a different idea of what the discussion is all about.
Now the submission unfortunately doesn't define what it means by marketing, but I don't think it's talking about pricing or the decision where you sell a product. Kinda have to read between the lines, but it's probably talking about promotional content about the product. Definitely not pricing or the location where you choose to make a product available for purchase.
My reading is that "the language and content traditionally used in promotional materials about a product do not appeal to nerds." It's probably off but not too far off. The author just didn't find the right words to say what they mean (or assumed the reader can infer), and instead said "marketing." Even with that interpretation, it wouldn't make for a very fruitful discussion, but at least it'd be a whole lot better than having someone explain why they don't think a typical startup landing page persuades them only to be argued against because "no, actually selling cookies at your local grocery store affects you!" I'm paraphrasing of course but I've seen the same discussion here over and over again. It's predictably silly.
> My point still stands, that "nerds" are influenced in their purchase decisions just like anyone else despite using adblockers.
Sure. I don't think the article is about that and I don't see what's the point of going down the "everything affects everything" line of reasoning in comments. That doesn't really say anything new, useful, actionable, or interesting.
Well I was replying to a user that said he was not significantly affected by marketing, because he does things like sorting products by "cheapest" and reads the product ingredients. I simply said that those decisions are made purposefully and are not random. It's a way to position products.
A product it's cheap because it was designed that way. It won't lose value over time dropping the price tiers until it reaches the price with almost 0% margin, rendering it into a great deal that simply followed some natural event of dropping price while retaining it's value.
About the main article I simply said that we should be aware that "promotional content" is everywhere, and relying on the illusion that "the marketing never catch me, I use adblockers" is just that, an illusion. That probably won't even make them wonder they are actually being promoted to. Flagging content as promotion is the exception, not the rule.
If I read Jensson's comment in the context of this article and the comment they were replying to, then I think they are saying that they are not affected much by promotional marketing material. Coming out of the bushes to say that the things they care about (ingredients, price, store) is also marketing (for a sufficiently wide definition of marketing) isn't adding any insight. It feels like deliberately missing the point just to argue for the sake of arguing.
It's pretty straight forward, second sentence: My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on
Then he goes on about his buying habits and said that "Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway.", so for me it was pretty clear he was talking about marketing in general, then he went more specifically about ads.
I simply said that pricing, packaging and placement are examples of marketing tools used to position products and services. This has been in text books since the 60's. A product listing is literally being marketed to, per definition.
So I really don't understand how this is missing the point, or how I'm deliberately missing it by pointing some marketing tools used in the Marketing Mix.
Example of product launch without marketing: A product manager have an idea of a product that doesn't exist yet. Engineering developers the product. The manager decides the price based on what they need to deliver the product and tacks on some extra. They determine to distribute via the Android and Apple app stores, so launches the products there.
Marketing is what happens after all of those decisions has been made. Marketing might have feedback that they should also release a web version, or that they might be able to increase the price, but that isn't the main function of marketing.
Most decisions go through many departments, each with their own arguments, each more important than others. Who gets the final call on pricing? Most likely financial dept. and any other price changes will come out of marketing budget.
Plus it differs from organization to organization. FMCGs, auto, media, all of them have different structures and relationships between these departments, each with different weights.
You gave me an example of people launching a product without a marketing department, nothing else. You know what? It's the product manager that will give support to customers, and that doesn't mean they aren't doing customer support.
I can give you a real example:
There was an American company called Hasbro that in the 80's bought the rights to sell some Japanese toy, made in japan, rebranded to Transformers and the marketing guys decided to launch an animated series to try to help with sales by giving a background story to the toys. I think it was an advertising agency that wrote the scripts but I'm not sure. So yeah... Transformers, one of the most popular media franchises, was literally content marketing to sell rebranded japanese toys.
So, no product development, no engineers, etc, an example without any of that.
Pricing and placement are very much marketing. Even where to place products on shelves is a form of marketing (e.g. whether to place them near the cash register or near other products, etc.) There are analytics done on which products people pick when they are placed next to other products. Even when you think your purchase decisions aren't influenced by marketing, they are.
As for pricing: there are people whose job it is to find the best way to price products in order to "sell" the idea these are budget items or luxury items, etc. It is well known that pricing some things lower than a threshold is a bad strategy because people expect them to be higher priced. There's also the strategy of "anchoring" prices. All of these are examples of marketing, and there are many more.
Man, I've been a professional nerd for years and I didn't know I was supposed to like any of this stuff. Better get some joke t-shirts
Notice how successful geek marketing talks about the type of person who use the product rather than just about the merits of the products itself.
"The BingWiz languages are used by true 10x geeks who are are tired of group-think and corporate bullshit and don't want to be tied down by mediocrity. Mediocre corporate drones uses FlopFlup because their feeble minds are unable to comprehend the true power of BingWiz."
It was always to reduce headaches and friction. Better workflows for dev teams. Fewer production outages. Reduce/mitigate security incidents, etc.
I think the only ads I get is either product placement or sponsored search results, I don't read any spam or unsolicited ads/emails/messages.
However, I do not recall any purchasing decision that was not driven by some need/headache to solve and involved some peer-review/references by others to make sure I don't have blindspots.
Is this unusual in commercial/B2B context? I don't think there was all that much emotion, unless you call pain-relief an emotion. Couldn't care less what it looked like, branding, or anything like that, all I wanted is to solve my immediate challenge and forget about it.
Marketing is used because it works. Of course your decisions might be purely rational, if such a thing is possible, but in general marketing have an effect.
I fact the article seem to be itself a clever piece of marketing, and the minds of HN is eating it up because it confirms what they want to believe about themselves ("we are too smart to fall for marketing.").
to be precise, marketing is just a way to engage with the target audience and potentially start a conversation/relationship.
It's not that hard to reach or even meet "geek" decision makers face to face. Just go to any tech conference. send something insighful to the mailing list with non-intrusive link in the signature. hit them up on linkedin/other interest groups. I'm totally OK with vendors get into bidding wars over SEO keywords so I can find what I need this minute much quicker.
Ads, however, likely do not work on non-neurotypicals as well as on normies. Some of studies on that (probably worthless fwiw): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976176948...
Why would anyone want to have someone shitting into their brains anyway? There is reason ad-blockers and such are so popular.
Geeks just tend confuse marketing and ads, not sure why. maybe most of them never tried to market/sell anything?
Of course, ads do work on everyone, to the extent they manage to capture your attention. When was the last time you bought anything because you saw an ad? All of them are pure cringe. Placed content/paid editorials? Just as cringe.
True to form, I've also duly ignored the article and dived straight into comment, to avoid any marketing potentially influencing me directly.
This is an oft-repeated meme.
Advertisers will produce statistics to prove that their kind of marketing "works". But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds.
Also: advertising != marketing. Marketing includes product design, pricing, channel development, and a load of other activities that are basically useful. Like, there's no point in developing a product that has no market; a marketer will warn you if that's what you're trying to do (just before he resigns). An advertiser will tell you that everything's groovy, your campaign is going great, and by the way, here's your invoice for the last quarter.
Or, say, running an A-B test and measuring whether people in the control group buy more of the product or feel more positively about the brand than the exposed group.
It won't tell you anything about the usefulness of plastering the world with billboards, nor of TV advertising.
Pick an ad. Assign users at random into groups A and B. Show users in group A the ad. Don't show users in group B the ad. Watch and see at what rate users in group A and in group B buy the product. (Or survey the users in the group to ask how they feel about the brand.) If there's a statistically significant difference between the behaviors of people in group A and in group B, then you have statistically significant evidence that the ad works.
Yes, this kind of thing is harder to do with billboards and with TV advertising than with internet ads. This is one of the selling points of internet ads over TV and billboards. If you buy ads from Google or Facebook or whatever, they can run this kind of experiment to measure how effective your advertising actually is. It doesn't involve peering into people's minds, just watching their internet behavior and/or surveying them.
Relevant links:
Google help page: https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/9570506
Facebook help page: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1693381447650068
- Buyers clicking on the ad, rather than just stashing the product name, and later buying it offline, or through another channel
- People not using ad-blockers
- The "statistically significant" evidence being statistically significant
The vast majority of ad views have no effect on the viewer at all.
Suppose 100,000 viewers are shown the ad (that's your group A); and 0.01% of viewers click on the ad, and complete a purchase. That's 10 actions - much too small for statistical significance. I have no idea whether these are typical numbers; but if that completion rate is in the ballpark, then I guess you need to show the ad to at least a million people.
But what about everyone else (group B)? That's the rest of the population of the planet. How many of them bought the product because they saw the ad? Zero, because they weren't shown the ad. You have no statistic for group B at all.
It makes more sense if you're comparing ad A with ad B. Which one produces more completions? That would be a more convincing statistic. But it still doesn't tell you that internet advertising "works", in any quantifiable sense. It tells you which style of ad works best, without telling you how much better it works than simply not bothering.
And it doesn't tell you how many people were sufficiently annoyed by the ad to vow never to buy that brand.
I'm not talking about measuring clicks on the ad. I'm talking about either surveying people or about measuring their post-ad behavior, e.g. whether they buy a product. Yes, this generally misses offline behavior, but it captures a lot more online behavior than whether or not you click the ad. People measure clicks on the ad too, but that's not what I'm describing.
What this requires is accurately tracking a user across the internet, i.e. being able to identify a user who is part of your experiment as the same user later buying a product (or visiting a website, or answering a survey). Which is an imperfect mechanism. But it works well enough to run this kind of experiment.
Ad blockers don't really mess this up. The experiment takes the existence of ad-blockers into account. E.g. if everyone used ad blockers, this kind of experiment wouldn't show positive results (except by random variation).
And you're right, you do need a lot of data to get statistically significant results when people don't buy the product that often (when "conversion rates are low", in the lingo), which is a challenge with measuring "conversions". It's a lot easier to measure those for, say, mobile games than it is for cars. If you're a car manufacturer, then measuring car buying this way isn't going to work.
When you do this in practice, it turns out sometimes the results are significant and sometimes they aren't. Probably because some ads work and some ads don't.
> It tells you which style of ad works best, without telling you how much better it works than simply not bothering.
The style of experiment I described is a "holdback" experiment. It compares showing people the ad vs simply not bothering showing (some subset of) people that ad. People in control group B are treated as though the ad under the experiment never existed in the first place. (Which typically means showing them some other ad in its place, because that's what would be done to users if the ad campaign under the experiment wasn't being run.)
>But what about everyone else (group B)? That's the rest of the population of the planet.
This isn't how A-B tests work. Groups A and B aren't "people who see your website with change A" and "everyone else, including people who never interact with anything you showed them at all". A good experiment design means a good control group that you can measure something about. These experiments aren't stupid. (Well, sometimes they are. You have to set it up well.)
> And it doesn't tell you how many people were sufficiently annoyed by the ad to vow never to buy that brand.
Well sure, but it can tell you if your ad results in people answering survey questions about your brand more negatively, which might help you notice that your ad is annoying and counterproductive.
Anyway, long story short, internet advertising is a whole lot more measurable than you were originally suggesting with "But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds."
Yes, there are limitations. Yes, a lot of statistics about marketing "working" is bullshit. But some of it isn't.
Can you show examples of that kind of marketing? I just don't remember ever seeing such a thing, and I certainly don't think I've bought a product based on such marketing.
Is that really successful marketing? I find it extremely cringy and a sign that this is a product to avoid, especially if it's a tool for work and not purely a gadget for entertainment purposes.
For me it goes like this:
* see an article or link description that promises something interesting. If it has a sound rationale and not too many buzzwords I continue.
* quickly skip the homepage/brochure to look for hints of real use-cases or some hard, tangible problem they solved, ignore the rest.
* check the pricing tabs to get a rough idea of the features, figure out if I'm in the target audience and to find out whether the pricing model scales with my needs or with theirs.
* check the documentation, look for quick starts, specific guides, integration with other tooling.
I often compare products by their docs after filtering the pricing pages. So if you show up on Google for the thing I need I likely end up in your docs. Good docs are a selling point for me :)
Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. It might not be a sports shoe but the same emotional dynamics are in play.
"Used to". These days i'd think "how long till they cancel it?" instead.
I think this is the phrase that captures most sibling comments.
And that is the truth to paraphrase the well known phrase. The software industry at least in the big central areas like the Bay Area is extremely prone to trendy tools. Case in point infrastructure, ML, web dev, crypto currency space: always jumping on the new tool that will be world changing with the underlying motives of the tools of course being making money one way or another by dominating and establishing a good enough solution that will drive people to them.
I would accept this statement to hold on more conservative spaces like aerospace but the customers and b2b relations are different there. Not my space but I would be surprised if there was a tool to sell and no marketing there.
They don't, marketing to nerds isn't very profitable which is why it is so cheap to buy ads for them relative their purchasing power.
Don't make assumptions.
The audience here is usually very critical and eager to flag/downvote anything not providing information to the topic
Classical marketing approaches are hard here - I think you would indeed be better off to just provide solid technical details and arguments for the product.
McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It"
Kit Kat "Give Me a Break"
State Farm "Like a Good Neighbor"
Con artist expert Paul Wilson claims people who think they can never be conned are the easiest marks [1]. People who similarly think they’re invulnerable to marketing are practically guaranteed to be buying bad things from bad people, because they couldn’t possibly be misled by marketing.
I'd say that fewer than ~5% of the adverts I see increase my opinion of the advertised product/brand, and around 80% of them actively reduce it. Based on my other interactions with people who can be described as "nerds", this seems like a reasonably common sentiment.
In short, it's not that people think they're invulnerable to marketing, they just think that they're invulnerable to shoddy marketing aimed at the lowest common denominator with no thought beyond "let's just yell at them every 5 minutes until they buy our product". Which could very well be true.
Some ads have been proven by measurement to un-sell a product.
The worst companies do a poor job of measuring the effectiveness of their marketing and un-sell their product.
A good advertiser will measure for this affect and change their ads accordingly.
But yes. Not all ads improve sales. Many ads do un-sell product.
Would a fancy jingle convince you to sit 40 mins in traffic for the same crappy burger with slightly different sauce from the same Sysco truck?
The last major purchase (>$100) I've made because of an advertisement was a ROG Phone 3 (two of them, actually) late last year. I had not ever heard of it before seeing an advertisement for it, and upon looking it up it seemed like a really good option.
The last one full stop was a billboard advertisement for a block of chocolate with a flavour that I know I like from a brand I don't normally purchase. Decided to try it out, liked it a lot. That was about three weeks ago.
> Would a fancy jingle convince you to sit 40 mins in traffic for the same crappy burger with slightly different sauce from the same Sysco truck?
I don't think it's possible to sit in traffic for 40 minutes on my continent, so that's going to be a pretty tough sale.
I just got whatever had the lowest quote for the coverage I wanted, and filed it away. I know the broker name, but don’t know and don’t care what lowest cost regulated carrier provides the coverage.
Having had the same auto insurer for 34 years and excellent service on a small handful of claims, I’m not shopping them on price (although they have a strong reputation there as well).
And how did your broker choose them? How did they choose which insurance companies to work with? Do you know for a fact that they took every possible source of insurance into account when providing you with recommendations?
Sounds to me like you may be naive about just how much of an effect marketing has your purchase decisions. It's not always as obvious as a jingle.
step1: scape the list of all licensed brokers in my jurisdiction from their regulatory website. step2: prepare the email clearly spelling out the request for quote. step3: spam all brokers. repeat in a week to make sure they weren't on vacation.
i emailed 200+ brokers with my RFQ, waited a week or so, and picked the lowest cost, then grind them down a little more on the price. I then emailed them my billing details and forgot about it.
Insurance in my area is tightly regulated. Forms, tables, amounts - it's all tightly regulated. It's a commodity.
Could you play devil's advocate and point out where marketing could've played a role?
So: Touché.
I don't think that's the norm, even among the majority if HN readers, but I agree that your process as described appears to remove any potential promotional influence.
* Marketing, as I've argued elsewhere, goes beyond promotion and impacts prices and the details of the offers, which obviously did impact your choices. But I think you and most people in this thread are referring specifically to the promotional side of marketing, so it may be pedantic of me to make my argument here.
It’s literally just amounts to letting people shit into your brain.
Edit: I assume all the downvoters have plenty of stories of when they got conned and lost a lot of money, since it is so easy to do and nobody is safe, so lets hear it!
You made an account so you could be part of the content marketing project of a VC firm.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this. You're having an (ostensibly) good time here and YC benefits, too.
HN is great marketing because people will convince themselves it's not marketing because they're too smart to fall for marketing.
Instead I evaluated the product that is HN as a forum, saw it delivered the features and discussions I wanted and decided to post here. It isn't more complicated than that. Can you give an example of a person joining a forum that you wouldn't say is marketing? Because it seems like you just did the "everything is marketing!" argument here.
HN is a forum and it is also a marketing tool. This isn't debatable. It's also not a bad thing.
You can enjoy the features and discussions here but you're also contributing to YC's marketing efforts. Whether you "fall for" the ads and apply to join YC or whatever is somewhat irrelevant. You (and everyone else here) being active and engaged participants is essential to the success of any discussion forum.
Alternatively, PG is a con artist, isn't he!
IMO, Google cons people daily, delivering one thing, after promising another. EG, we don't track, then being caught tracking.
But larger cons happen all the time.
For example, some kickstarters. Vapourware. And, even getting a tech person to pass on links about what if vapourware.
A con is not always about money from your pocket. Look at ponzi schemes. The original investors do very well, but are scammed into endless free advertising, which enables the end-con.
There are small cons, and big cons too. I suspect that the non-conned have been conned many times, they just don't get how.
My reference to a ponzi scheme is certainly in "con artist" turf, as is kickstarters and vapourware peddlers.
I don't see how I am moving an argument, when I am demonstrating cons which you seem to think are not cons?
You can try to argue that a group gets tricked in other ways, but that is a different argument, I just punctured the street con-man part of the evidence. You could even argue that the street con-man is good evidence that people actually aren't equally good at spotting cons, since some falls for it even though most don't. And since the effect is so dramatic for street con-men maybe the effect is similarly dramatic for marketing? Who knows, anyway it isn't good evidence in his favour at least.
And, your comment appears (to me) more general, as you just say conmen...
But anyhow, no biggie. Have a good one.
This sort of mindhacking really should be illegal. I know that won't ever happen though. This is a problem that can only be solved via technology. One day someone will invent sensorial filters for eyes and ears that will just block all this bullshit. Their return on investment will tend toward zero and they'll stop.
Do you have AR goggles that black out billboards on the side of the road? Signs inside of stores? Rounds .99 prices to the higher dollar? Headphones that drown out in-store music?
Do you somehow automatically detect and block sponsored content? Ads on podcasts that are spoken by the hosts themselves?
If you believe you've blocked "all marketing", you're the biggest mark I've ever met. It means you're unaware of the vast array of ways marketers reach you every single day.
There's no ad blocker in the world capable of blocking "all marketing". That's just an absurd statement.
I have a popular tech blog (https://mungingdata.com/) and have a ton of goodwill with my users, mainly cause I'm not trying to sell them anything. You can provide users with equally informative content if you can avoid making it overly biased.
Developers are understandably skeptical in the big data space because they're often given biased benchmarks. It's hard to replicate benchmarking results (e.g. person X says that XYZ runtime can run a certain query in 1 second, then they try out the tech and it's way slower).
Don't be surprised if you're building a big data technology and devs don't like your biased benchmarking.
If you give honest results and try to inform users about your project objectively (the pros and cons), then they're more likely to respond well. Your goal should be to give relevant information, even if it's only tangentially related to your product. Your product should sell itself when users are provided facts that aren't tinted by rose colored glasses. Disclaimer: I work as a Tech Evangelist at Coiled.
A lot of people have seen this argument. That's why every google search on a technical topic is now polluted by blogs describing "how to do X with Y" that are written either to sell Y, or for pure self promotion.
Unfortunately said blogs are useless for the advanced user since 90% are just a beginner's tutorial with info that i could have figured out from the docs in 2 minutes.
Yet another marketing strategy that failed the nerds...
That'll all be fixed/implemented in 1.0, anyway.
Now, for my own hobbies I have "wasted" money on a 3D printer, a drone and a VR headset, and who knows how many books. I'm OK with it since maybe one out of ten I find something truly interesting.
What we do respond to, especially those who are experienced, is a solid signal that the proposed solution (hardware, software, service, information) will in fact address real needs and avoid future pitfalls. Those of us with some experience under (or spilling over) our belts have been burnt multiple times, both by vendors and by "solutions" imposed by others in our orbit (managers, executives, clients, vendors, business partners). We may not have perfect bullshit filters, but we're highly sensitive to it.
For a long time my most highly-upvoted HN comment was "Please forward to marketing", my own set of recommendations for how to capture my interest. I updated that slightly and blogged it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/27d5xr/please_...
More generally, why programmers (and other technical types) hate advertising so much:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...
What I respond to:
- Documentation. Publicly-available technical documentation, preferably downloadable (an offline PDF or ePub on my ebook reader is a lifesaver when everything's gone to shit).
- Public bugtracking. I want to see what issues exist, and what resolutions and responses are like.
- Public support forums. This need not be the only support, but I've long found that user-to-user support is very often as good or better than vendor-based support. It's also an insight as to how open the vendor is to critical commentary.
- Generous trial and return/refund policies. I'm quite wary of crab-pot / roach-motel intake funnels. If I can't get out as easily as I can get in, I'm not getting in. (Similar rationale applies to data and other forms of lock-in.)
Some Orgs need this more than others. AWS has some pretty poor docs from some services, but their primary acquisition channel isn’t necessarily devs.
I would say these claimed nerds are very irrational especially those who only consume and barely create and sell software.
React, reactive, server-side rendering. software is a fashion industry.
"server-side rendering" nowadays only means "Nodejs server", there's nothing conceptually server-side paradigm.
I agree that developers are irrational as a group, but they aren't easily manipulated via marketing or companies would abuse that to sell them crap.
Give a few "Hello World" examples and then a a few slightly more in depth but minimal examples that do something useful.
Every single time I have to decode what the API docs are supposed to mean, and then deal with the reality become a war story on why not to integrate with "X".
The first type of comment is looking at the aggregate, including all the people who don't read HN and who are somehow labeled as "nerds." The other type of comment draws conclusions from a sample population of one HN reader and their aggregate behavior over recent memory.
I have definitely been moved by an ad once or twice in the past decade, and may have even made a small purchase because I thought the ad was brilliant. But I wouldn't say I generally respond well to advertising. Isn't this the scale of engagement that marketers expect? Something like ten thousand impressions yield one click?
It seems to me both types of comment are looking at the same behavior through different lenses. Or am I underestimating the effectiveness of ads on other markets?
I know it, because I am a huge nerd and I catch myself responding even when I think I am not.
It would be better to say that nerds respond differently to marketing. You better have something behind your product because nerd is likely to research the heck out of it before he/she pays for it.
I have become fond of saying that reality can't be reduced to a single variable, it's a complex multivariate problem.
I think I can say that most technical product sales do not depend on documentation. Some do. Some might, in part. Some not at all.
Selling is interesting. I didn't think so many decades ago. I was forced to learn to sell once my startup finally had a product on the table. Literally. A hardware product.
At first I sucked at it. I sold like I now recognize most engineers sell. It's terrible. I was terrible.
I enlisted one of my good friends and resellers to train me. Within about eight months I was selling as well, if not better, than they were. The reason for this was that I knew how to sell at their level but could go hard-core technical when and if it was required (rarely).
Towards the end I was able to sell our hardware without uttering a single word about the product. I'd show-up to a demo with the product, hand it to them, quickly help get it wired and then shoot the shit with the people in the room. Capable technical folk don't get you into a room product-in-hand unless they've done some research. Which means that you going on and on about the product is pointless. If they have questions, they will ask. I sold more product this way (millions of dollars) than by rattling off specifications, features and showing-off our documentation. I can't remember anyone ever asking me about the documentation.
Your mileage may vary.
I remember first reading Twilio’s docs - and Stripe’s and immediately knowing the company is fantastic. It’s about the level of effort and craft that’s gone into them, from their design, to the examples to the tone of voice.
(Twilio’s have now deteriorated badly in my opinion and become really overly complex)
It’s the same as Steve Jobs wanting the insides of the machine to look as good as the outside.
What will get my full attention, beyond documentation, is easy to try examples and a sandbox environment.
This. The best marketing tool you can have is an "API explorer" style documentation where each call's documentation page comes with a built-in form to fill out and make an API call and see the response.
Note that it has to actually work. If one of the form fields is "API key", you've squandered most of the potential.
If the procedure to get an API key involves more than entering an e-mail address (which will be @mailinator.com, because I don't want to have your sales pitches cling to me if I decide the API doesn't meet my needs), I'll have to be very desperate to bother.
If the procedure to get one involves talking a human (which often means "in a different time zone" or "not awake at the time I'm hacking on my project"), that means "you will definitely not be able to try this out within the next hour". Since I'm trying to solve something now not in a week, if there are competitors that don't create these hurdles, I'm going to go with them.
If I can solve the problem by either waiting 8 hours for you to come online or write code for 4 hours and no longer need your API, I might choose the latter, because I want this solved now.
Marketing: This solves all of your problems! We selected a soothing blue color to calm you.
Technical Documentation: This samples at 1 Hz.
Me: I needed 5 Hz or more.
When choosing a bunch of options to select from, I gravitate towards those that allow me to select based on the criteria I have. A photo of a group of people who are portraying professionals, carefully selected to look pleasant and satisfied, is only the absence of specification. And so I move on.
Show me FAQs, technical specs, system requirements, a pre-installation checklist ... if you hide these from me on your website, what am I to do?
Never really thought deeply about the why, but probably related to some of the offers appearing more relevant to me (in terms of context and not browsing history/social graph) .
I don't need a fresh college grad SDR telling me about their sales gates and arbitrary fufillment hurdles.
Keep it real, honest and well structured and have some feedback loop. There are no shortcuts, no tricks. We’re not stupid (in that sense), so just do it right.
To anyone who believes this, I encourage you to checkout this series of blog posts: https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html
Convince techies that a product is cool and they'll feel cool for using it.
If somebody does not fall for the hype they'll feel personally attacked by the "heretic" and jump in to defend the product.
MongoDB is an example of nerds resisting marketing from Oracle and going too heavily in the other direction. Nerds love non-mainstream stuff, so when you come with a solution and say "this is better than the mainstream!" they are prone to believe you. But then once mongodb became mainstream it died since then its selling point of not being mainstream was gone, and there wasn't many other reasons for using it, no matter how much marketing mongodb continued to crank out.
Care to spell out what they do right?
What all devs LOVE is documentation... Just throw some up and they will empty their wallets
Cannot respond to that which I do not see.
First off, the title:
> Nerds don't respond to marketing; try technical documentation
I read the full article and I understand what they're getting at. But I know from firsthand experience that some sales and business-side people will see that title and think to themselves "oh, we should put more marketing content within the technical docs site". The goal of the technical docs is to help your users understand your important concepts and get tasks done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sales and marketing content can quickly interfere with that goal because they are essentially non-actionable statements and therefore create more words to sift through just to find what you actually need. For example, in my docs I don't even allow subjective phrases like "powerful new feature X". I have no idea what you consider "powerful"!
> Developer relations professionals are called "tech advocates," "tech community managers," and "technical ambassadors," but their part is essentially the same - to bring software developers through a sales funnel.
This is a weird way to look at it but I don't disagree. One key thing it's missing however is the feedback element of DevRel. As technical writers or developer advocates we are usually much closer to your technical users (the external engineers who are building stuff with your API) than your engineers or product team. We try out your APIs and we monitor/interact on Stack Overflow or support forums to find out where your technical users are getting stuck. Sometimes that feedback work results in new documentation or videos. But often we just do a lot of advocating behind the scenes that your product and engineering teams need to prioritize fixing X so we can avoid the need for any new docs or videos. Effective DevRel is constantly trying to put itself out of business by making the product so good that docs and videos aren't even needed.
> So when a software engineer stumbles across clear documentation - they are usually pleased and often go to places like Twitter and forums to express their delight.
I wouldn't bank on this strategy too much. I was the only TW for Chrome DevTools for a few years. I'm pretty sure that I got the docs to a very solid place for a couple years. I would get thank yous on Twitter, sure. But given the scale of that product (something like 30M MAUs) the ratio of people who would go to Twitter to "express delight" versus the overall user base was probably far below 1%. The only one that has achieved this on a major scale is Stripe. And I'm not even convinced it's solely the docs and videos themselves. I think the slick UI of their technical docs is a non-trivial factor. The market that the product serves might be a huge factor too as to how much your technical users talk about it (e.g. Chrome DevTools was perceived as a sort of "public good" or commons whereas Stripe is solving a much more specific business need).
> Ensure that your marketing team has access to developer documentation
Absolutely agree that it's useful to get different perspectives on the doc. However, it should be clear from the get-go that the marketing team is a C role (in terms of RACI chart [1]). Your docs team should seriously consider the feedback from the marketing team but the marketing team does not have overriding authority to change the docs. You will quickly and completely demoralize your technical writing team if they no longer have agency over their baby, the technical documentation.
> Figure out which part of the sales funnel the documentation is nurturing (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)
I like this framing and have not seen it described in these terms. See also Divio's documentation system. It's another way to think about the need for different types of docs.
> Measure the impact of the documentation that you are publishing
Measuring documentation impact is a hard problem. For example, pageviews. Does your top viewed page have so many views because it's your most popular feature or because it's a horrifically broken feature? Or maybe there's just a link in your UI to that doc? (You can usually figure out which of the 3 it is, but the point is that you need to be careful with the data). One of my favorite techniques for measuring impact is to monitor support forums, detect a frequently recurring problem, write a doc on it, notify the support team, and then watch the support team just link to the doc in subsequent responses, rather than create an ad hoc answer over and over.
No comments about #4 (solicit feedback from QA) and #5 (give content a goal). Solid advice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matr...
Fill your tech docs with marketing crap (like spelling out Foozitronic Ambizlaber Frombulator Tessagram in full every time it is mentioned, or inflating claims as you've noted --- a powerful value subtraction method) and I will 1) run screaming 2) block your website at the router by DNS and ASN, 3) rely only on third-party independent documentation and 4) if at all possible find an alternate option or solution.
If I'm reading your tech docs, you've already sold me your shit, I've got a problem with it, and you're well on your way to unselling me on it. Your job is to not fuck shit up worse than it already is.
Let the trademark lawyers stick their mandatory talismanic incantations at the preface of the doc, and keep sales and marketing the fuck away.
Good docs (and good end-user support) are worth their weight in gold.
I can remember two specific sessions I had, both in the 1990s. One was for setting up an X terminal emulator on PCs, using XDMCP, where it turned out that the phone support was in fact a brain surgeon (well, neurology med student), another for a data analysis tool who walked me through IBM data formats for about two hours --- I could tell you their first and last names, this support rep was a legend among the users of that particular software.
Edit: why is this getting downvoted is comic books and star wars no longer considered nerdy now that nerd culture is mainstream?
Star Wars was never considered nerdy, it was mainstream even when it released 44 years ago. Same thing with the superman movie, it was released around then as well and was a huge mainstream success. So I'm not sure what you are talking about.