The tech world is wrong about marketing | Hacker News Reader

The tech world is wrong about marketing

techcrunch.com

75 pointssamsolomon39 comments

On the one hand: Yes, there is too much BS in marketing. There always has been, but today the barrier to calling yourself a "marketer" is close to nothing. These self-proclaimed marketers use a veil of buzzwords (eg, "growth hacking") to deceive and cover up.

On the other hand: "The four P's" is a man-made concept, too. So is the entire framework the author shows off. So why is "inbound marketing" a sham while "the four P's" is gospel? That whole part is a rant about terminology more than anything else.

There needs to be more skepticism and calling-out-BS within marketing, but that doesn't mean rejecting every new idea because it doesn't fit a decades-old mold. Rejecting everything is just as intellectually lazy as accepting everything.

To give an example: I'm an engineer-turned-marketer and now consult tech companies. I never received a "traditional" marketing education so I'd get schooled on theory by a first-year marketing student, but I can automate marketing operations, increase conversion rates, deploy code, turn more trial users into customers, and so on. Between those things and "The Four P's," which do you think matters more to a startup?

Theory is useful but dismissing an entire industry (tech) because they don't subscribe to an old theory or choose to use new terminology is ignorant.

And inbound marketing is now used to refer to what used to be called SEO if you have seen as may mistakes as I have a competent inbound marketing person can improve your site.

I wont mention any names but I saw a mistake with canonical tags cost a major UK company 1/2 a mill in less than a week.

Out of curiosity, how would a mistake in canonical tags be so catastrophic?

Mucking up rel canonical can cause massive indexation problems in search engines... No indexation, no rankings, no traffic, no sales.

Those are RIAA losses probably. I.e., pick some outrageous high number, point to a perceived flaw, and calculate the difference between actual revenue and your "target".

edit: the GP didn't specify any units though. He could have been talking about visitors or micromorts, not pounds or dollars.

Nope it was based on the cost of buying the lost organic traffic via CPC - They are a big *ie millions of pounds monthly) user of ad words budget

It was a big Job sites in teh UK (I wont embarass them) they canoicalised all the jobs to the category pages lost 20% of trafic just like that.

  "The lack of those fundamentals has been the main trouble with
  advertising of the past. Each worker was a law unto himself. All
  previous knowledge, all progress in the line, was a closed book to
  him. It was like a man trying to build a modern locomotive without
  first ascertaining what others had done. It was like a Columbus
  starting out to find an undiscovered land.
  Men were guided by whims and fancies - vagrant, changing
  breezes. They rarely arrived at their port. When they did, quite by 
  accident, it was by a long roundabout course. " - Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

That was published in 1923 and still rings true.

I think the crux of the issue is that some areas within an organization are judged by the metrics equivalent of divination.

That looseness and lack of maturity allows a lot of cruft to accumulate, and trends to take hold in the larger ecosystem. Think of how little room there is for trends in physics, commission based salesmanship or C compilers. Then compare that with software development methodology, marketing and whatever the hot new .js is up to. And with the low barriers to calling yourself a "marketer", you end up with n-th derivatives of things that were cargo-cult to begin with.

The last few sentences of the article:

> Whenever marketers claim that “everything has changed” or that something is “dead” or that some new buzzword “is the future of marketing,” ask for evidence. Make them cite their sources and explain their reasoning. Most of the time, they are just full of it.

Somehow I don't think the author fully grasped the irony of his statement given the title.

Or seen the decline of old school yellow pages companies - something changed there

I'm feeling a little bit dense today, I just can't see the irony :( Not being flippant, but can you help point this out to me?

The title of the author's article is in the same vein of the ones being lambasted in his closing paragraph.

You do realise that article authors normally don't chose the title for their articles? That's the job of the subeditor, and they don't always listen to the author of the article.

I don't think that's actually obvious to the HN crowd, most of whom are not in publishing or journalism.

This might be a bit naive, or just wrong, but I feel like there's a difference between "content marketing" and non-content marketing.

Content marketing, to me, means marketing where the 'content' of the marketing is actually valuable in itself. It could be an educational blog post, or a discussion started on Twitter, but it's something that I might reasonably choose to consume in its own right.

Non-content marketing I would see as banner ads, TV ads, etc, where I would never choose to see the content if I had a choice. I only see the adverts because they tag on to another piece of content in order to get any exposure.

I think the author of the blog post would argue that traditional ads should also endeavor to be valuable in itself. Like how people search out ads like "Office Linebacker" or other high production value ads.

Where I disagree with the author is that he makes it sound like absolutely everyone has forgotten traditional marketing 101. I personally haven't seen that, but then again I'm not in Silicon Valley...

Overall sentiment of this article is generally correct. Lots of minor errors throughout. One major one that caught my eye:

> to increase brand awareness and thought leadership (and those cannot be measured).

Brand awareness and thought leadership absolutely can be measured through polling, search volume changes, etc. Be wary of any marketing that is being sold to you where the claim is the benefit can't be measured.

There are certainly things you can do to measure these things. The difficulty is that these measures aren't as neat as the ones you use for direct marketing, and are less likely to capture the whole value of the brand and thought leadership spend. This means they can be used against each other, but at a high level it's risky to use them to assign resources to the different strategies

Uh... Aren't the spread of buzzwords like "inbound marketing" and "content marketing" the result of insanely brilliant marketing? Isn't touting that the Modern Internet makes old school marketing irrelevant a genius marketing strategy to take over the market of marketing?

Sure, the new product might be worse, but these "tech world" companies have managed to take over, and I'd bet they'll keep repacking old wisdom in shiny new phrases and blog posts until they push the ivory towers of marketing into obselence. Hell, Brian Halligan, Hubspot's CEO, is even a senior lecturer at MIT...

I think this hits the nail on the head for a lot of "tech" businesses at the moment:

> “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

In cases where network effect is important and the cost of being a follower is high, yeah, just get big. How soon do you think Amazon should do otherwise?

Marketing is about raising interest. Interest is one of the 8 basic emotions, with the other being joy, trust, fear, suprise, sadness, boredom and anger. If you can bootstrap interest into joy, you get optimism. Interest and anger bring aggression, on the other hand.

When someone say "everything some other people says about marketing is wrong", what they are really saying is "what they are saying isn't interesting to me and therefore everything they are saying is wrong", which is the well known ad hominem bias. Biases are good in this context because they bring efficiency to systems. For example, when a marketing person uses buzzwords without context to describe their business, you get the expected "bored" responses from people. Does the Intercloud interest you? What if I told you the Intercloud was a cloud of clouds and it needed a high trust federated network backed by the blockchain to operate? Does it interest you now?

To be successful at marketing X, one must ignore everything anyone is saying about X and try to understand two basic things: 1. What people (Ys) are interested in X? and 2. What makes X equally interesting to more Ys?

Keep in mind sometimes those answers fall outside what you may already know about X. This implies you must learn more about X and get to know the Ys to raise interest in them with the stuff you know they don't.

If you pour a lot of resources into #2, don't expect all the Ys to respond well. Part of what can make something interesting is others aren't interested in it as much as you are. And, if you understand that, you will begin to understand marketing.

>Marketing is about raising interest.

That's one component, but marketing is bigger than that. In fact, this is seems to be a major point of confusion, that "marketing" is advertising.

Marketing encompasses bringing a product to market, perhaps even creating that market. According to Wikipedia's definition:

"This way marketing satisfies these needs and wants through the development of exchange processes and the building of long-term relationships."

> When someone say "everything some other people says about marketing is wrong", what they are really saying is "what they are saying isn't interesting to me and therefore everything they are saying is wrong", which is the well known ad hominem bias.

Not necessarily. They may be saying "For this actual evidence-based reason, everything they are saying is wrong". And you are committing a fallacy of your own, of imputing motivations to someone else without evidence.

the raison d'être for a bus stop is not to sell cellphones, purfume or clothing. It is exists to establish and protect a pickup/dropoff point. The bus stop would exist even if the no ads were ever sold for it.

On the other hand, the rambling, first-hand, poorly-worded 4 page review the latest sous vide exists solely to sell you that device. This is "content marketing". The text and graphics are inseparable from the intent to sell.

Somewhere in the middle is the Slate webpage that links to the sous vide review. It wasn't written to sell that particular appliance, yet ad revenue is very much top of mind.

Let this comment be a manifestation of my intent to subscribe to your newsletter.

Good article. Also, great content marketing for that book I'm already sick of noticing at HN homepage.

I agree. It seems so forced!

Seems ironic that, as a marketer, it took this much verbiage to make his point. Must have gotten paid by the word. On a serious note, the tech industry in general suffers from non standard language when it comes to describing roles. Consider pm for product manager, project manager, program manager. In some cases these labels refer to overlapping roles and responsibilities, in other cases they don't. Same with marketing, where u have different labels meaning the same thing or partially expressing the same thing. Or take bd, where in some startups it means sales and in others it means, well, bd.

Marketing and Technology are two ways to solve the same thing - information problems. Technology is better at it.

Marketing is the exploitation of information asymmetry. Firms are selective with their message to maximize perceived value. Truth is hidden.

"Creativity cannot be scaled." Actually, in the book The Song Machine, they pretty clearly show otherwise, with teams of topliners, beat makers, etc. churning out hits in a machine-like format: http://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/039...

I thought that was more about maximizing your hits, given that you have found some creative geniuses at specific parts of the process, like Ester Dean, Max Martin, etc.

They are, but in the process have created a serious song and hit generating machine. You have these hit factories that churn this stuff out at scales that were previously unseen through the division of labor described, among other things.

TYPO: Missing an "e" in "the".

We eliminated that by de-baiting the title.

As usual, this article makes the very critical mistake of thinking marketing = advertising.

Given that, I can expect the entire article to be bullshit.

If you are so much more knowledgeable than the author and most of us here, it would be better to post a comment that teaches us some of what you know. This one just makes a grand claim with no explanation, surrounded by name-calling. That's not a good fit for HN. We're going for thoughtful discussion here.

This is a good description which you might (re-)read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Many of your comments here have breached civility in similar ways. That's a problem. On HN, please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

My sincere apologies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com