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Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

Who started this marketing thing? ; )

I have to say this is pure genius: I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off (once the site shall be back up).

Whoever started it it's amazing to see other companies quickly react: I guess seeing servers melt under the load of people ordering products made some able to react fast.

The only thing that is too bad it's that it seems very hard to reproduce: rarely are there such doomsday scenario that gather that many attention :-/

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Maybe there's a lesson in this for us: if you can tie your marketing to current events then you'll get greater recognition. I'm no marketing guy, so I bet this is pretty much marketing 101 and I'm probably quoting the already-well-understood.

I don't think you need another doomsday, use any current event; and you don't need to have your product be related to the event in any way. Sitepoint[1] always do a Christmas sale, for example, and web design books and Christmas have nothing in common.

I think anyone could tie anything to themselves:

- "have a look at our Olympic offers"

- "we have Royally stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Royal Wedding]

- "we have stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Christmas / Thanksgiving]

...er...er...you get the idea.

[1] http://www.sitepoint.com/

    I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off

Could you clarify on that? I thought it was a genuine sale. Not sure what the trick is.

Ya, my immediate move to purchase several high quality JetBrains products was purely because of the 75%, not the silly "doomsday" bit. That's cheap.

Oh, I'm sure they're just having fun with it. It's just a silly theme for the sale.

it is a trick to get you to surrender your money in exchange for goods and or services

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