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.
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.
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.
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