Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit. If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.
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This… strikes me more as self-aggrandizing than informative.
Yes, many technical folks are put off by certain marketing tricks. Good marketers just use different techniques when targeting people in this market, when they bother to at all.
We’re not immune to manipulation; and thinking that we are makes us more susceptible to it.
Agreed, it’s tooting his own cohort’s horn without acknowledging he is, inf act, susceptible to marketing. The actual topic at hand is marketing for software tools to software devs. Of course hand-waving marketing doesn’t work, it’s a technical field with technical products. The marketing he’s blasting is emotion-based marketing. Guess what, there’s plenty of other emotional decisions that will be affected by marketing in his life. Vacation destinations, artistic exhibitions, restaraunts, games, whatever. This article screams like it’s from someone who loudly proclaims marketing is dumb because they weren’t swayed to by women’s deodorant because of a YouTube ad.
You are not immune to marketing.
But you need to remember that those targeted practices are very few in comparison to the volume of neuro-regular/non-technical folks.
So we arent peone to the same bullshit in regards to volume.Maybe - but the marketing that won’t affect you isn’t what you need to worry about. It’s the parts that do still work on you need to be careful of - and if you assume nothing will ever work on you, you won’t even notice when something does take. Whether that’s buying a trinket that doesn’t actually make you happy, or joining a group that turns out to be a cult.
Always better to assume you can be manipulated, and check in with yourself periodically.
Programmer YouTubers is a good example.
We just get sold on opensource js framework with a sprinkle of SaaS (no rug pull I swear) to keep the investors happy.
Marketing 100% works on anyone. If you dont think it does its because the marketing has done such a good job on you you don’t even know it.
You sold me!
Not me. I’m pretty immune to ads.
Especially from McDonalds - now with their $5 Sausage McMuffin with Egg meal that comes with hash browns and a small coffee.
Ba ba ba ba baaaa… I’m loving it.
Spot on.
Removed by mod
developers want to read documentation
they won’t look at any white papers
?!?!?!?!!
White papers are shit written by marketing people who try to make their little ad sound like something academic. In truth these white papers are in equal parts misunderstandings, wrong and full of useless fluff. They are AI slop, often completely without any AI involvement.
If someone is serious about the content, they call it a documentation, reference or datasheet.
There are both
But product whitepapers are ads
Those aren’t white papers. They are scientific papers.
White papers are written by companies as a marketing tool. The first two papers you linked above are written by universities and the last one by a research-focussed non-profit.
As per Wikipedia:
Since the 1990s, this type of document has proliferated in business. Today, a business-to-business (B2B) white paper falls under grey literature, more akin to a marketing presentation meant to persuade customers and partners, and promote a certain product or viewpoint.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper
It’s a marketing presentation masquerading as a fake scientific paper.
While I’m not saying they don’t both exist, there are plenty of people writing the original definition for tech products, too.
And I’d argue that purely scientific papers are often written to promote products and viewpoints, too.
Yeah, when I first got a link to a whitepaper in the newsletter, I expected it to be a… a whitepaper (I read the meaning it had back then).
After reading it properly, as if I would an academic paper, I thought it was weird that I didn’t feel like I learnt anything useful.It would take a while (and a few other whitepapers) for me to realise what it had become.
DUH
Which is why they hate us
Plot twist: this is an ad campaign
As someone who works in marketing. We are not ignorant to how people operate and how to get in front of them. Go to the sentence that “Management makes most of the decisions”. We’ll be aiming for the people who actually buy things. Unfortunately in B2B sales that is usually the CEO/CFO/VP who has very little time to read and learn and would rather someone call and explain everything to make a problem go away. Typically they are of an older generation and hate digital media and wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit.
That said, I always say honestly sells itself. Embellishing the truth or straight up lies will only get you so far and it’s typically short term gains.
Agency’s love scummy marketing tactics. This because it’s good numbers to them and they could give a fuck what it does to the client. They just want them to see that the graph goes up sharply for the first month and than silently bleed them dry as it flattens out and they can push more tricks or services to make graph go up again.
Inhouse teams (like me) can’t shit where they eat, so have a more genuine strategy for the long term. We are vested in the well-being of our company.
Seems to me the difference between ethical and unethical marketing is the difference between trying to inform vs. influence your potential customer.
Products need a way to find customers, and customers need a way to find products - this is the problem marketing should be solving. Instead I see businesses hiring people trying everything but just informing customers.
The way I’ve always looked at it, a good product/service can typically stand on it’s reputation. If a company needs to spend millions on advertising to move their stuff, they’re probably not all that good or are overpriced. Someone is paying for all that advertising and it always ends up being the consumer.
You can’t really have a “reputation” in this day and age without marketing. The fact that things like Stardew valley exist really only prove the point.
I don’t know about that. Tiktok, Lamborghini, Tesla, Krispy Kreme, The Dollar Shave Club, Tupperware, Rolls Royce, Costco, Trader Joe’s, Go Pro etc all do little to no traditional advertising and do just fine.
Not that there’s anything wrong with some advertising to get the word out, but when you’re getting spammed with ads from every angle, that company starts feeling a little scummy to me.
The Dollar Shave Club, go pro
I specifically know who these guys are because of their massive youtube advertising campaigns.
Krispy Kreme, tesla
Please. Walk outside. Or watch cable for a bit. Just because you don’t personally see them doesn’t mean they don’t also have budgets for advertising as well. Tesla in particular straight up gave up on the strategy of word of mouth once their product stopped being known as quality, or at least, higher tech than anybody else.
https://teslanorth.com/2024/03/29/tesla-advertising-spend-6-5-million-2023/
https://ingenuitydisplay.com/what-is-krispy-kreme-s-advertising-budget.html
trader joes, costco
Exceptions to the rule, like Stardew valley, which prove the rule. They are famous as not having a marketing budget because not having a marketing budget is weird and unheard of.
While some now invest in some level of traditional advertising, it’s not what made them big. As you said with Tesla, they only started advertising when people started realizing they were crap, and even then compared to other vehicle manufacturers they spend little. Go Pro used influencers and content marketing by their customers, the Dollar Shave Club made it to fame through viral videos.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/viral-branding-10-brands-got-big-without-advertising-kent-lewis/
Tesla were advertising long before then, just not in the traditional sense.
They let YouTubers and influencers borrow their cars, and gave them a commission on every car they helped sell.
They purposefully stirred up controversy to get news article clicks.
They had a very outspoken CEO making outlandish claims and cosplaying as the saviour of humanity, bringing lots of attention to Tesla.
They launched a Tesla into space.
That stuff doesn’t show up on Tesla’s books as marketing, but it absolutely is marketing.
Go Pro used influencers and content marketing by their customers, the Dollar Shave Club made it to fame through viral videos.
All of that is marketing.
Yeah. The companies you mentioned are rare novelties because they chose to advertise very little. That means the thing that is normal is when a company advertises. Ergo, having a good reputation usually requires marketing.
Ya I get what you mean, it doesn’t always work out for everyone without getting the word out traditionally, but it does happen.
Personally I think advertising only goes so far before a company just starts looking desperate by saturating the landscape with ads. Maybe that’s just me tho lol
They tend not to work on neurodivergent people and there is a huge overlap between NDs and “nerds.”
Guess that’s why the big guys want people to be neurotypical.
To make it easier to sell them stuff.To advertisers, humans are just slabs of meat with eyes.
To advertising companies, maybe yes.
But to the ones making the advertisement, we are the wall between them and their money, which just needs to be gotten out of the way.
we are not immune, we are just able to install a fuckin adblocker. noone is immune to propaganda.
To be fair, the article body doesn’t actually say that anyone is immune. In fact, it lists out how to properly market to this segment.
Yeah, I think that line is getting used as a thought terminating cliche. While the statement is certainly true, not being immune is completely ignoring the idea that people can vary in how susceptible they are.
Yeah, I’ve caught myself almost falling for marketing BS a few times, before I dug a little deeper to find the actual information I need. I try to make informed decisions, and when companies present ads as information, it can be easy to be misled.
Marketing doesn’t target nerds. It targets their boss who is likely to enforce usage of the tool.
This is also true for other people.
Nice try. This is just trying to get us to lower our guard and become complacent!
Or it’s brewing up excuses for declining sales.
