My humble request to developers: Stop being dismissive of marketers, they are an essential part of the equation.
The best "sales" guy I ever met was a guy who just stopped and listened. He would ask a few questions, work to understand the underlying problems, and if he couldn't help directly, he'd put you in touch with someone who could.. and then buy a beer the next time he saw you.
I believe marketing should be the same way.
(Disclosure: I report to the OP at Twilio.)
Sidenote: I love Twilio as a company and have ever since you guys sponsored a Startup Weekend in Chicago about 3 years ago. I wish y'all were hiring.
I'm Austin based.. and it's way better than SF. ;)
That's covered under points 1 and 2 in the article. I found GoDaddy's "informational" videos to be even worse than the ads (at least the ads were just driving traffic, but the videos were incredibly condescending and treated the models as furniture). But I know that those were A/B tested with a lot of variations, and conversion is highest with "booth babes" and saying awkward things.
The way we see marketing is often the way a lot of people will see us, so it's something worth learning more about.
In programming, there is a culture of calling people out for their bullshit. In most other business cultures, it's a bit less belligerent.
My daily struggle is to quantify my accomplishments, it really is too easy to dismiss the "marketing guy".
Marketing can be every bit as confrontational, but it's usually more passive aggressive. You'll rarely get called out in a meeting, but you'll get outmaneuvered or back-channeled after the meeting is over.
The field is incredibly political. When I worked in marketing, I felt like I was a character in "Game of Thrones." The constant alliances, shifts, backstabbings, feints, etc., were exhausting. Obviously, a great deal of this depends on company culture. But as general disciplines, marketing and sales seem to attract political types.
Given the choice between the two styles of confrontation, I'd much rather have it out in the room, all agendas laid bare on the table, than have to play GoT every day. But that's just a personal preference.
The passive aggressiveness in the industry is suffocating.
The problem with the discipline of marketing is that it's often a complementary discipline. It's sort of like the Steve Nash or Magic Johnson of company operations: if it's performing well, it's enhancing the performance of everyone else on the team.
In certain industries, by contrast, marketing rules the roost. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) business, for instance, is directed by marketing. A marketer at a CPG firm, known commonly as a Brand Manager, is exactly that: he or she is running almost every aspect of a major brand. Accordingly, the performance of brand managers is (relatively) easy to measure. You've got sales, margins, market share, etc., and all of them tie fairly directly to your business decisions. Brand management is akin to general management, and many brand managers would argue that what they do is full-spectrum marketing; everyone in marketing in other industries is just performing a subset of what the brand manager does.
Still not sure if it applies universally, but generally acknowledge it can be the catalyst for a great product to get widespread adoption.
This sounds fucking awful.
I think a company where sales and marketing becomes more about politics and less about analysis and creativity is doomed to fail (or at least not achieve its real potential).