I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie

- Good marketers are troubleshooters. Is the problem you are not getting enough new prospects? Fix/invest in something there. Not enough trials? Tinker the problem there. Too much churn/dropoff? What are the fixes the product needs? If your marketing people can't separate out distinct problems and provide data points to troubleshoot them, get rid of them.

- Marketing strongly favors the upstart. Big companies have to saturate the channels for increasingly diminishing returns. You are forced into lower ROI activities just to feed the business. Small hacky companies can get by with a lot less. But this is also why you have such large departments at big companies seemingly just spinning their wheels.

Did you mean:

1) A whiskey company sending a bottle of their whiskey?

or

2) (e.g.) "Microsoft" sending a bottle of whiskey?

The second sounds unethical and it would shock me to know this is common.

When I actively look for products, I don't consider it advertising, I consider it information. When I go to a market or open the store app, it's because I want to look at products. I only object when companies start trying to shove that information in front of my face without my consent.

Cultivating reputation, word of mouth, real world events... It takes time and money. It's much easier to just spam people with ads. I don't think that should be allowed.

And they would statistically be right, as most games don't sell.

On a serious note, though — there's plenty of marketing specialists in game industry that have a lot of experience with new and indie titles; some companies like indie publishing houses are built upon this. I've worked in one and seen this first-hand. Generalising negative statements like this about a whole profession seem like a product of arrogance.

You can't sustainably market a product users don't find valuable.

Based on the above two, people would rather focus on pattern copy / incremental improvements vs big risks.

Sometimes, something IS extremely valuable that breaks existing patterns.

It's important that marketing is bought into why it's breaking the existing patterns. If they are, they will market it.

To your Nintendo example, I don't know anything about how they work. But you may be surprised that seemingly-disparate games may actually fit a known success pattern internally. They know their audience and what they value, and new XYZ game fits that pattern.

Some of the best can, but it’s not the way they’re generally wired - similar to Engineers and art. For lawyers, you’ll usually have more success giving them a concrete contract or scenario and asking them for all the things that could go wrong.

That, any competent lawyer will do well at. You can then go down the list, ask questions re: risks, etc. then.

For marketers, you’ll often get better results (as noted by a peer comment!) giving them something already and asking them to market it.

It’s less unbounded that way, less analysis paralysis and you kick things into the gear they are used to using all the time.

Knowing what is marketable is a different skill than marketing, in the same way engineering design and systems architecture is different than writing code.

If you are average publisher you have none of those options, so you have to either sell your game on merit or on following trends. Unfortunately most publishers choose the later as it is more perdictable.

Give us more story and levels to play in. The novelty coming from applying well known stuff to new scenario.

In non-co-op land, Half Life 3? Just finish the damn story Valve!

My expectation would be that new Product work would, at some high-ish level, be sanctioned by company leadership. Or you wouldn't be spending weeks/months/years on it. Ideally Marketing would be involved in that leadership decision, and this is where they could raise that kind of concern. But even if they are not, Marketing's "boss" (CEO) could/should tell them they need to market it or go pound sand.

What? No we don’t. Maybe some of us I’m sure, but I’d wager only a small minority want to build a 10x product as a priority. I suspect the category is far too wide to generalize about this, but for myself (programmer and entrepreneur) I enjoy the “craft” as cheesy as that sounds. The satisfaction from pouring effort into something you can be proud of. Awesome if it pays the bills (even better if I no longer need to care about bills), but 10x w/e isn’t even something I’m thinking of.

What if we just trusted people to decide for themselves when the 10% improvement is good enough for them to switch? Rather than, say, manipulating them via cognitive flaws so that we can fill our own pockets.

Many, many products are 1.2x for one demographic and .8x for another.

As a result, once the market of successfully marketing products and services has reached equilibrium, marketing specialists are no longer competing and being selected for being better at selling marketable items—they are competing and being selected for being better at selling their own services to executives up to C-level.

It's easier to optimise the ability to sell one particular service to a known and relatively homogeneous audience than to optimise the ability to sell any arbitrary product or service to a broad and infinitely diverse population. Hence for instance the truism of "no publicity is bad publicity". What better way for the marketing crowd to evade the negative consequences of unsuccessful, controversial or even broadly hated campaigns?

Now I'm not saying that all successful marketing specialists follow this pattern. What I'm saying is that they are no longer at an advantage with regards to the bullshit sellers.

Found your answer.

This is especially problematic when you are not a marketer and hope to hire a marketer or marketing agency. The good ones, bad ones, and nefarious ones will all sound pretty much the same.

The best advice I can give if you are looking for marketing help is to find a trusted advisor. The second best is to trust the one who tells you hard truths. You will hate it when they say your product won’t sell at the volume you want in the current form, but most marketers develop a sixth sense for what will and won’t sell and often have some ways to estimate demand for a particular niche or industry.

Most agencies won’t tell you that your product won’t sell because no one likes to hear that. It actually shows a lot of honesty and directness to tell a client that it won’t work.

These types of marketing messages focus on bringing a previously unknown problem/inefficiency to someone's mind and show the solution.

All of this is still marketing.

Good marketing informs people of the existence of the product and the benefits to the user. Selling things people don't want is not good for long term business.

I agree in general but there is also a lot of value in reaching out to someone and helping them decide if/when they need it. THe point of marketing is to make people aware of you who are and if they could possibly be helped by you now or in the future.

Sometimes, people are lazy and unless they have hair on fire problem, they don't actively look to solve their problem. However, if you reach out to them (considering you did your homework on them), there is plenty of value in that. We have won customers for our company doing that and there is no need for coercion of any sort. You just need to start a conversation and truly go with a consultative approach.

But as we look towards advertising and sales, it looks to me like both an arms race and the tragedy of the commons. Between companies' own websites, professional reviewers (Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, etc), and community discussions (Reddit, etc), these days consumer information needs are for the most part easily satisfied.

But because competitors try to manipulate purchasers via ads and sales techniques, other companies are obliged to follow suit to some extent. That's the arms race part. And the tragedy of the commons is that so much of the information space is filled with stuff whose information value runs between low and negative. Another commons that its harmed is the ethical one. With so many people whose jobs depend on manipulation to one extent or another, it makes manipulative behavior more generally ok.

I think you're also right about push vs pull. Push systems so often have pernicious negative side effects, and this is no exception.

1) Understanding what the user wants and needs without him needing to type out the full context.

2) Having a database of all the world’s information extracted from sources.

3) A search algorithm that brings query and data together in the way the user expects, including ranking the results.

We have marketing because such a system does not exist. (We also have it because most people do not know what they want, and do not care to formulate a proper question, and instead want somebody else to tell them what they should desire.)

What's worse is the pages with the best ROI tend to be scams, so you're basically guaranteed to see scams because they can always afford to out-bid on their relevant keywords.

Not pointing the blame, but the state of dystopic state of marketing is due to symbiotic relationship between makers and creators.

I don't have a solution, but I'm not sure laying the entire blame at sellers and marketers is correct.

Marketing is in effect good communication. It's much more valuable than a good product, because we as humans are en-large lazy and good marketing bridges that. However, a good product plus good marketing are unbeatable. The Microsoft's and Oracle's of the world won not because they had the best product (they didn't), but because of great marketing.

it's not a technological problem at all. it's a sociopolitical "problem", of wanting to influence others for personal gain. it's more practical to consider this an axiom of the human condition to be channeled rather than suppressed (much like greed in relation to capitalism). we'll never be rid of the desire to influence, and more extremely, to coerce, others.

you can invert the perspective and think about ways to obviate the core need for marketing, which is to match idiosyncratic needs with pre-determined solutions. then you could apply technology to that aim, for example creating a search engine than anticipates all your desires (google's ultimate goal). there are dystopian traps all around though, so it's not clear that technology is a net-good approach.

Do you figure what you want to watch and then open Netflix? Sometimes. People also open Netflix and see what is available before deciding.

In fact, even determining what to watch then opening the streaming service relies on having a concept of what streaming services have been marketed to you.

But nearly every product you use has a marketing budget and the only reason they are around is because they spent that budget.

To me, marketing is a sign that you are serious about your product and you are willing to spend a lot of money to promote it. It’s not a sure sign of a good product still but there’s no such thing anyway.

In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin. see: all the unmarketed direct-from-China clones of more or less the same product on Amazon with weird brand names

I think we as engineers are biased to think that people can/should pull information out of the ether and then reason about what's best for them by rationally going through the pros and cons of a product. The thing is, not everybody acts and thinks in that way. Many people (even engineers) are more likely to be swayed by emotion and stories, hence marketing.

However, I do think marketing has gone overboard nowadays. Every possible place you look or listen is filled with advertising. I've started reading books again in the past few months and one thing I love is knowing that when I turn the page, there isn't going to be a distracting ad trying to vie for my attention.

For some religions, and a number of athiests, instead of a little devil on your shoulder, it's a tiny marketing person, telling you you're not good enough, you're not safe enough, you're not happy enough.

If capitalism stopped at "let's just meet existing demand and nothing more", we wouldn't have had the Industrial Revolution.

Also, how do you differentiate between "organic demand" vs inorganic (i.e. coerced from prior marketing efforts) when estimating what "already existing demand" is?

If your product offered a 5x better way to do something, but nobody knew about it, wouldn’t you be a little frustrated for both yourself and them?

I am glad because I tend to buy all of the shiny objects that catch my attention. On the other hand, there's a lot of cool things I am missing out on because of my lack of engagement on more things that just my very focused hobbies.

For example, I got a Garmin sports watch recently, and one of the reviews I found was from DC Rainmaker, who is exactly the sort of detail-oriented obsessive I love reading reviews from. That got me to read some of his other reviews and I discovered that there's now a whole category of bike radar units that let you know when somebody is overtaking you. That's amazing! When I return to cycling, I will absolutely buy one.

Does that mean I have to be in favor of all blogs? Or that my life will be worse if that blogger stops reviewing? Definitely not. I could have learned about this product in many other ways. Bike stores! Bike forums! The manufacturer's website! Other cyclists! Review sites! Bike magazines! Etc, etc.

There is an aspirational claim of marketing: it's trying to raise brand awareness and make sure customers know that your product is an option when a customer decides to purchase a product in the segment (i.e. When a consumer needs to replace their knives we want to make sure CutsAwesome is on their brand radar)... but marketing in the modern world is much more about creating demand when there was none ("Feeling depressed and lonely? Well drinking our beer will surround you with attractive people!").

I think consumer oriented marketing is an externalized cost on society - we are lowering everyone's productivity so you can sell three extra cans of coke and it's hurting us economically.

Unsolicited advertising is a cancer on this planet. It should be completely banned.

- Writing clear and effective home pages (e.g. the Get Started button is the most prominent affordance on the https://reactjs.org/ homepage)

- The design of that homepage is marketing. Have you ever felt more comfortable using a product that has a nice website?

- Engineering blogs (e.g. the https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ seems to make it to the HN homepage every few months... they aren't just writing this stuff for fun)

- Making your product easy to get started with isn't strictly marketing, but letting people know that it's easy to get started with sure is (e.g. good documentation)

- Having a good pricing strategy is marketing. (e.g. make three tiers for different customers, but try to steer people to the middle one)

- Having a good pricing discount strategy is marketing. (e.g. AWS is basically free for students because they know who those students will want to use when they are making decisions in the work force in a few years)

A key thing is that not all marketing needs to be done by the marketing department. Marketing is about understanding the market and what will make them use your product. This is important even for software engineers.

Edit: fixed typo above and adding below. =========================================

Also, there are ways of getting the word out that aren't advertising but are done by the same sorts of people. For example, GoPro didn't buy online ads or TV commercials when they were a young company. They gave away GoPros to people doing crazy stuff and had them upload their footage to youtube.

Trader Joes doesn't buy advertising, but mixes up their inventory regularly in order to generate buzz. They'll even take popular items out of production, which I've always suspected is a marketing ploy meant to get people talking about them.

Lamborghini is another example of a company that doesn't make ads, but they fiercely guard their reputation. In fact, their marketing department is hiring right now for someone to manage their "car configurator" (https://configurator.lamborghini.com/), a product that they see as part of marketing.

I found myself nodding when I saw Carmack's tweet precisely because I'm finding myself at a point where my time may well be better spent marketing what I've already built rather than continuing to improve the product.

To me that says you're still influenced by the marketing - just by second remove (or more).

Genuinely curious as to why this is

I spent several years in sales and then dabbled in marketing.

It is entirely possibly, even superior, to have a completely ethical sales process (at least in a technical market).

In marketing, psychological manipulation is part and parcel of the task. You can’t get to step 2 before you want to take a shower to wash the ick off.

Only in the short term. Eventually you end up where we are now, no one believes anything you say. Then the cost of chasing customers rises because you have to come up more ways to get your lies to come off as not advertising.

As someone who worked in public relations, I'd like to play the devil's advocate for a moment.

The ultimate goal for all business is to drive revenue, and it is imperative that this is achieved in a legal manner that abides with the local regulatory/compliance requirements.

Public relations provide a crucial role to a business by expanding its market reach through raising awareness and educating the public on the potential benefits of a product. Other times they shield a company from potential negative, and often unjustified public outrage by carefully shaping the social narrative.

At the end of the day, it is up to our governments to create legislations that provide guidance and restrictions on what's allowed in advertisements. It has been established that a legal imperative, and thus a financial incentive will always triumph over the perceived "moral" choice, which often provides suboptimal value to the shareholders.

Here is my lie: https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/