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Comment by etangent | Hacker News Reader

It's not that nerds do not respond to marketing -- everyone does -- it's that they respond to a different type of marketing than those who don't consider themselves nerds.

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!

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> the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd

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.

Honestly your comment is so beside the point that I am not sure that you are not trolling.

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).

> Honestly your comment is so beside the point that I am not sure that you are not trolling.

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?

Not the person you're responding to, but those comments are not saying the same thing at all.

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.

I read the comments and I agree but I would describe that in my way:

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 :).

Car mechanics care about the standard. A grade 5 bolt is different from grade 8, even though grade 8 is objectively stronger there are many places where they are too strong and so you need to use the objectively worse bolt. I don't remember the terms metric uses for the above, but there are metric equivalents for the same reasons.

That's a misinterpretation. Best bolts in the world doesn't mean strongest, that's where we'd use the word strongest. Best bolts is an opinion.

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.

I didn't want to type in a 1000 page engineering textbook. What I wrote is close enough to make the point, but you are correct as well.

The real issue is that the people who want to use the product and the people needed to make it usable aren't necessarily the same. Marketing generally caters for the former set of people, who are the people buying the product they want to sell. The grandparent post is more about open access to technical support documentation to make the product work afterwards. (In the worst case, you frequently end up with non-technical people having to act as a go-between between their vendor and local technical staff, especially in sufficiently-large organisations.)

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...

Well, at least I do have a very strong emotional response to empty marketing. The GP just got the wrong emotion, it's not a hurt ego, it's fear and distrust.

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.

You are right. It's not that it hurts the ego; it's that the nerd wants to know if it solves his problem or satisfies his need.

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.

> 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!

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).

I Agree. I think a lot of nerds start out a lot more naïve and idealistic. It seems the further along you go the more you distrust anyone saying something works out of the box without a good explanation of why as you have been burnt before. (Typically while trusting that Product B "completely integrates" into Product A.).

I feel like if we look at stuff like game console bits or suspect nanometer counting for processors we can see how the details can be fudged for marketing purposes in a way that is clearly targeted at nerds.

You have convinced me of the opposite of what you are stating here. Wanting to know the details has nothing to do with ego. You just like to know the details so you can try to make a *comparison between options*. Details like W/h, delta E, size, sheets p/m, resolution, 2FA, software features etc are factual information that allows for a more rational buying decision. People that cannot make any sense of this are going to rely on different mechanisms to make their choice.

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.

> You just like to know the details so you can try to make a comparison between options

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.

I'm with OP. I think in a way hurts nerd's ego. At least I tend to see marketing without details as condescending. "Do they think I'm not capable of understanding all the tech specs? >:-E"

I just see it as useless. :) The time when I start feeling some emotion is when it's really hard to find product details on the website. And it's those simple baby feelings of I waaant thiiiss. aaa.. nooOOW! :D Impatience, I guess.

> At least I tend to see marketing without details as condescending.

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.

I tend to see marketing without details as a bullshit story made up by professional bullshiters.

If they won't give me the details, it is reasonable to assume they are selling healing crystals until given reason to believe otherwise.

I don't dislike marketing that hides the details because it hurts my ego. I dislike it because I assume I am being scammed. Details are evidence of honesty, both in marketing and in real life, because every detail is a chance for somebody to slip up and expose their lies. If they're telling the truth, why hide the details?

I understand your skepticism when details are hidden, but there can be some valid reasons:

* 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.

> details are so technical that they're hard to explain without "just look at the code type explanations".

> 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.)

> the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company

That may seem like a valid reason to the seller, but as a user it's a red flag to take your business elsewhere

> To a nerd, that avoidance is a very bad thing, because a nerd prides himself on knowing the details.

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.

Conversely, providing lots of specs and details in slick tech documentation definitely triggers some emotional feel-good response, at least in me. That of course has a rational underpinning; after all, having more information can be useful to make a decision. But what's often ignored is that it also must be the "right" information - a sea of tech specs may after all be entirely meaningless and could actually hide important aspects by drawing attention to irrelevant details.

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.

It's not just about taking pride in knowing the details. Sometimes the nerd simply needs to know exactly what they are working with, because they already know what they need. If your product doesn't meet that need, it's irrelevant.

I think nerds are a particular type of power user, and power users treat traditional marketing (ads, landing pages, PR fluff pieces) as an annoying distraction that doesn't have a clear value proposition.

I don't think being hurt (or annoyed) by condescension is a trait specific to nerds, either.

In both cases, I think there's also an aspirational element. The perfect product is one with the perfect solution, but it just needs you, your skills, your powers. "Out of the box" just needs an astute cheque signer to make the right decisions. The skills to operate it are commodities, acquirable. Perfect... for an astute cheque signer like the one being marketed to.

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.

> 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.

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.

Not exclusively.

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.

Note that I didn't put a time frame between when marketing starts and when the sale happens.

You are very correct, marketing can often start years before a sale (and sometimes people never buy at all)

Sure... in the sense that everyone's job at a company is to make profit.

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.

> 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.

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.

> tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd

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.

It's a matter of perspective IMO. A developer naturally tends to trust their own problem solving ability, so they need tools that accelerate it, and need to understand these tools precisely.

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.

It is fascinating how one sentence fragment about "the ego of the nerd" has been so triggering for so many. There are at least a couple-dozen replies here insisting that they take the opposite view, yet proceeding to describe pretty much the exact same view.

I think you've hurt some egos!

> 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!

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.

People forget that marketing is the ‘interface to the consumer’ and not a synonym for ‘bullshit’.

It's very interesting you are talking about "details".

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.

I think nerds respond the same way to the same slick advertising messages, the difference is just our compulsion to put specs in a spreadsheet or run it through a graphing package before making the final decision. Which could be solved easily at no detriment to the polish if every product had a machine-readable spec file to download via a tiny link at the bottom of the page.

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.

Then they cant: change prices on your, negotiate with you via raising the price of something you care less about to make up some profit, mislead competition about what's happening (who is also probably scraping anyway.)

> Then they cant: change prices on your, negotiate with you via raising the price of something you care less about to make up some profit

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.

Emotional nerd, reporting for duty. I don't respond to traditional marketing though. In fact, a lot of traditional marketing actively deters me from buying a product or service.

And it's true, show me the specs and why it's a better value than the other guy, and I might be interested.

Everyone claims marketing doesn't impact them. Nerd or otherwise.

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.

Marketing also leverages network effect: when all your colleagues buy into the hyped tool of the year you also have to use it.

Absolutely. "Marketing" encompasses anything and everything that gets people to buy.

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.

> Absolutely. "Marketing" encompasses anything and everything that gets people to buy.

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.

Guess you never heard of the 4 or 5 Ps of marketing? Because the first P is "Product".

Product, Price, Placement, Promotion.

I think you're mistaking "marketing" as only referring to "Promotion".

That is nonsense, you must have misunderstood what those P's mean. It makes sense if you say those factors determines the success of a marketing campaign, but it doesn't make sense if you say that marketing as a field includes creating those 4 things. Marketing can only directly control promotion and placement and only indirectly price and product. They can't choose to have a bug free high performant product, the quality of their engineering team determines that. Neither can they choose what the price is, the running cost of the company determines a lower bound there.

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.

It's literally taught on day one of any Marketing 101 class. It's hardly worth debating. I assure you I'm not the one misunderstanding the 4 Ps.

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.

Read this. It never says that creating the product is a part of marketing. It says that marketing is given a product and specs and told to sold it, and then they have to design the marketing campaign around that product. That is a reasonable definition of marketing and the 4 P's, yours isn't.

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.

Ah yes, Investopedia: The place all good marketers go to learn their trade. What was I thinking? And here I thought my 20 years in the field might mean I knew something about it. I should have just looked it up in a glossary and called it a day.

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.

But the parent is saying that marketing does impact their choices, just not in the way that the marketer expects. If I see a bunch of ads for something that usually tells me that a market exists for a solution to some problem. If I happen also have that problem then success! I'm now potentially in the market for your products. But the fact that you advertise a lot biases me against your product specifically.

> they respond to a different type of marketing than those who don't consider themselves nerds

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.

> 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...To a nerd, that avoidance is a very bad thing, because a nerd prides himself on knowing the details.

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!"

> 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 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.

I don't think that's the part where it hurts, what hurts is the fact that the marketer doesn't want to get into the details, so a nerd (myself included) would think they are trying to sell a bad product but make it look good. That's when it hurts I guess

Exactly! Thank you!

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.

as a watcher of a few usenet flame wars in the 90's, I can attest that nerds can be emotional.

The details are how you determine whether or not a piece of marketing is bullshit, i.e., an attempt to defraud the viewer. It has nothing to do with ego.

> But I think the difference is somewhere else. I don't think nerds are any less emotional.

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.

> 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?

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.

Such algorithms don't necessarily KNOW that you bought a fridge. They certainly change tack, however, when you stop clicking on those ads or click on others, or any of countless and unknowable other cues.

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?

Huy Fong marketed by networking within the Vietnamese immigrant communities of Southern California. Marketing is literally every action taken that results in sales - not merely paid advertising alone.

> 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?

Sure, I suppose there are a few pure ascetic folks out there who make all their purchasing decisions like Spock from Star Trek. If you're one of them, good for you.

That's FAR from the norm, however.

Not sure if I can agree. The Baker with the good sourdough bread does not do marketing. Yes, I know the name and where the shop is, but I buy the bread because I like it. Maybe also because I like their philosophy, attitude to the resources they use and way to run the business. But all that I learner after I started buying their products. On non food consumer items I can go further with you though.

How did you find their product in the first place though, if they don’t do marketing?

Every bakery has a sign saying they are a bakery. You see it as you walk past. Knowing that bakeries are unique people go in and try different stuff looking for products they like. That is as far from marketing you can get. If you define that as marketing then you are in the "everything is marketing" camp and we can just stop talking right here.

> It's fast, fun and easy!

--> I don't want it.

It's funny, most of the comments here demonstrate your point. They love having their egos stroked by this headline, thinking they're above the game :) They're the rational ones, above anything ickily "emotional."

Nobody is above "the game" which is why you shouldn't play it in the first place.

You don't have a choice in this society. Everyone is exposed to marketing. Someone's always trying to sell you something.

a big learning for me was that people who always call themselves rational tend to me the most emotional haha

I think it's just higher intelligence in "nerds". We know marketing lies.

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