In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information). The reason we can’t realistically do it right now is due to marketing effort manifested into spam, which turns it into a very difficult technological problem.
I would still feel derisive about marketing as a field due to that reason. Marketing nowadays seems to focus on overwhelming the audience and hope they makes bad decisions.
This is my primary complaint as well. It's nearly impossible to find a product even after specifying the exact name and type in many search tools. Even something as simple as a bolt with a specific diameter gets flooded with irrelevant products. It's like the original Search terms are completely ignored and replaced with fuzzy results and promoted products
Or your top results are a bevy of "Best threaded bolts of 2022" articles that, suspiciously, list the same handful of products maybe in differing order and all through affiliate links.
I've run into this, while searching for a replacement machine screw in fact, and it drove me batty. I ended up just running to a few local hardware stores and then more specialized supply storefronts to solve my problem.
I don't want or need a 'related product' I need exactly this product!
McMaster-Carr is your friend here. I used it use it a lot for robotics club in high school. It has a clear interface that makes it easy to find the exact parts you need
At this point its back to the brick and mortar for me for many goods. Being able to hold an item in hand before you put money down is such an advantage. It's not as convenient, but the ways its better are worth it compared to electronic shopping these days. Some items are also just absurd to order online with the shipping, e.g. if its heavy or fragile.
Agreed. The very existence of the IDEA of marketing has depressing implications -- you are always going to see what the top bidder or the person with the best SEO wants you to see, rather than what you want to see, at least as long as players like google are king. I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd.
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.
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s and early 00s and oh boy was it nicer than this shiny turd.
You mean when everyone became obsessed with beanie babies, Furbies, and got suckered into Enron / Worldcom scams?
Marketing just took different forms back then. It was physical, store-bound. It wasn't online because people were at the malls, reading newspapers and watching TV Ads. In some cases, people would listen to "boiler room" calls over their landline telephone to get pumped/dumped.
All that has changed, is that today we have centralized all forms of marketing to the internet. Instead of stores pushing us marketing at the front of the store as we walk in, we get hit with ads on the top of Google / Amazon's pages. Instead of boiler-room scams being pushed out by telephone, we get Facebook groups pushing cryptocoin rug pulls.
> I remember the pre-marketing internet economy of the late 90s
That reminds me of Web-rings [1] and later LinkExchange [2]. It was still marketing or at least advertising, but in retrospect is seems quaint and innocent.
Conversely, many portal pages [3] were still attempts to create a walled-garden.
Yes, my personal website had 20 or so affiliate badges / buttons from a lot of the skinning and UX customization sites I frequented. The early days of wincustomize/stardock were a beautiful time
For sure. I'm good with the part of marketing that is really figuring about how to market a product. Understanding audiences. Understanding their lives and their needs. Explaining how the current products can help, and providing internal input so that future products are better. That's all productive stuff!
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.
I’ve only done sales at AWS, but this wasn’t ever the approach I saw. Marketing might make wild claims, but it was out job in sales to make sure the customer could achieve their goals, even if that meant sending money to a competitor.
A pretty typical example would be Cognito, which is just mismatched with a lot of use cases. Referring someone to Auth0 just made sense a lot of the time.
The view of marketing internally was also not great.
Sure, not all sales is the manipulative kind. What you're describing sounds like the nice part of the "consultative selling" end of sales. And I'm sure it works well for a market leader with a huge brand. But it has that name to distinguish it from the more common sort. The used car salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross side of things.
Long ago a friend told me about a meeting with a very successful serial CEO where the topic was hiring ad sales reps. The famous guy said that they needed to find people with a lot of personal debt, because salespeople needed to be absolutely desperate for the commission checks to really go out and sell. I suspect that sort of thinking underlies a lot of the problematic sales behaviors: desperate people do desperate things.
But I think the distinction between push and pull is not so clear. When I want to pull information, at some point I have to query the world (because I don't have direct indexing into the world's knowledge). The response to that query is bound to be a powerful push of some sort, purely evolutionarily speaking.
I think that might have been true once, but I don't think it is now.
If I make a thing, I can put up a web page about it. I can ask Google to index it. I can put my product on Amazon with useful keywords. I can get myself in directories. I can go to trade shows. I can put a press release on PR Newswire.
None of those are push actions in the sense that I am intruding on recipients and trying to badger them into doing what I want. They're just all making offerings in a pull-compatible way such that when people with needs go looking, they will find things.
The last bit makes me think you might be using "pull" in a metaphorical sense, but here I'm using it in the Lean supply chain sense, which is about producer and consumer behavior.
Lean supply chain is maybe not the best analogy, because suppliers are limited, their properties are known, and deals and optimizations are made in advance. Knowledge foraging is very different in that knowledge supply is constantly shifting and basically infinite, and by definition you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
You can request your page to be indexed and your product to be listed, but so can a million other suppliers, so we return to the problem of how to prioritize and distill information when someone asks for something.
I'm not saying the supply chain is the best analogy. I'm saying that in that context, "push" and "pull" have very specific meanings, and that's the one I'm using here.
I agree that distilling information is challenging. Challenging enough that places from Google to Wirecutter to Consumer Reports make good livings from doing that. But advertising makes that problem worse, not better.
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.
> 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.
That's maybe true in theory. The point of practical marketing is to make people think they have a problem that you have an extraordinary solution for. Sometimes that is true, but the vast majority of the time the problem doesn't even exist, and even if it did, the product wouldn't do anything to solve it.
Basically, penis enlargement pills are the quintessence of marketing.
Indeed. I'm not sure talking about some idealistic form of marketing is any more useful than talking about an idealistic form of government where we get rid of all laws and just have people do what they're supposed to do. Sure, such a thing would be nice. It also doesn't happen.
The goal of marketing is to get people to buy something. It doesn't matter if they need it or not, it doesn't matter if there's a better option out there. The goal is to get people to buy. Considering most people don't need most products, and even when someone does need a product they're usually choosing just one of several available options, we can surmise that the vast majority of marketing is trying to get people to buy something they shouldn't be buying.
I would say that you've misunderstood the sprectral nature of marketing. Yes some marketing is immoral, but not all of it is. It's not black and white.
Charity advertertising or B-corp marketing would be on the other end of your spectrum. I still think they could also be put down as the "quintessence of marketing".
How do you imagine people pull that information? You still need to be “findable” when someone is pulling that info. You still need to convince them that what you are offering matches their need. They need to be convinced you are better than the other 4 other things they found that might also match their need.
Can’t resist quoting David’s Sling[1] (not a masterpiece of philosophy by any means, but makes some good points):
> We don't want to destroy advertising. We want to destroy manipulative advertising. We want to eliminate the kind of advertising that persuades the listener to buy in spite of the best information, rather than because of it. We want people to filter the informational content from commercial advertising—and all too often, when an advertisement is run through an informational filter, nothing is left.
The adversarial approach is the problem. This is akin to the difference between a jury trial or televised debate and an academic argument: neither permits outright lies, ideally, but in the latter intentional cherry-picking is (or should be) disqualifying whereas the former just dumps two opposing cherry-pickers in a bag and lets them fight it out. (Not coincidentally, an academic argument doesn’t require an audience.)
I’m not entirely sure that advertising, like law, can be different, because it may simply be impossible to do better when the participants don’t trust each other to act in good faith. But it’s also no wonder that the result seems revolting when a large portion of your identity is centred around seeing things as they are and not as you wish they were. In any case, defending manipulation and cherry-picking requires an argument (such as this one) stronger than “you still need to inform buyers about your product”.
(If you’re talking about convincing rather than informing, you’re already assuming the conclusion.)
“In an ideal world” that info would be collected, organized and accessible to all, alongside usage/performance/satisfaction data.
Gp is right, marketing is horribly inefficient and everything about it’s current configuration is toxic because it seeks to influence by stealing attention, stealing time, stealing memory, spreading selective (dis)info and manipulating you into buying things.
We’re just unfortunately pretty far from that ideal world.
I think people look at marketing and see all the bad examples.
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
> In a world without marketing, there would be 1000 identical versions of the same product and I would have no idea where to begin
This is still very much the case. Marketing is a signal of exactly one thing: marketing budget. At least with the anonymous clones, I can be somewhat certain that when my friend says “yah I got a pair of running shorts from [insert random company here] and they’ve been pretty good so far”, their decision was made on the basis of their direct experience because that’s all they can go on.
Sure, it’s still the case but my point that it’s not anywhere nearly as bad as it is on Amazon.
I can at least navigate a world of differing advertising budgets. I can’t even begin to navigate an Amazon listing of copy-cat products or even worse, an AliExpress search result.
I had part of my comment responding to this point, but I wasn’t sure how to best phrase it so I cut it off.
I don’t believe for this to happen enough at any frequency to be a valid reason. People usually knows their pain point, and go to great length trying to address that (normally spending a lot of time due to, well, spam-ish marketing). And to be frank, most products are not game-changing things that magically solve a problem no thing previously could have solved. People are already using tools and solutions for their problems, and if they are looking for a better thing, they already know which tweak it needs. They just can’t differentiate the solutions between a sea of junk marketing.
Another way to phrase it: marketing identifies with words and examples a problem that you haven't been able to isolate for one of a dozen reasons from inattention to time crunch to insufficient expertise in the problem domain--so they can sell you the solution.
Sometimes, anyway, on the last part. There is marketing (as anyone who's ever studied advertising) that doesn't even try to sell you anything because there's value in the knock-on growth of awareness and an expanding or top-of-mind market (the canonical example being Campbell Soup's "Soup Is Good Food" advertising campaign).
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.
They are not - much of the time, they use similar technique, they are just enhanced by the game environment.
It's not all pure endorphin though. For example, the game shows you that you can add up to three gems to get better rewards from some activity. When you go and buy those three gems and add them, the UI changes, showing you can actually add up to 10!
Or, all of the prices in the store are very carefully calculated so you have to buy more of the in-game currency than you actually need - an item you are likely to want may cost 20 gems, but you can only buy bundles of 17 or 39 gems, for example.
Sure, the endorphin rush is what makes you want the items to begin with, and there are aspects unique to the game design that encourage that. But there are a lot of other aspects of the game that are designed to confuse and convince players to spend more than they'd like.
You're totally right in your analysis. I'm not disagreeing with you at all about what these genuinely abominable games do, just the attribution of it. "Marketing" is a term of art; it means something.
With respect, you are hiding the ball. Those two terms are not synonymous. Some users can experience an endorphin flood from achievement, not merely excitement through play, which is probably more analogous to "fun". What these designers have learned to do, however, is establish through the game's ephemera (art, sound, animation, number-go-up etc.) a direct connection between endorphins as achievement and spending money. You spend money, you get the hit. It's a straight line.
And that, yes, I will call "downright evil", because it is exploitative abuse of the human firmware for mere profit. Developers of slot machines are excoriated for the same thing; there's no reason that virtual ones are any better.
Do you think gambling addicts are having fun? Because when I stepped into the casino at 2pm, nobody looked like they were having fun, and the slots certainly weren't fun, despite all the flashy lights and sounds and manipulation around payouts.
I know sugar is bad for me, but I ingest it anyway. Why? Because I like the taste. The same for coffee and alcohol. The same goes for every other self-destructive behavior I indulge in.
I like the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked because I knew I'd like it a lot, and would not want to quit. Smokers I know like smoking.
If we look at something like a Netflix sales pipeline we have:
Marketing that arranges interviews with stars of their new shows on new channels and on youtube and gives TikTokker preview screenings and merchandise and proposes pieces to the New Yorker and the NYTimes on how deep the script is etc..
Advertising makes sure that when you search "that new show staring XX from the NYTimes" they find the right thing
Sales takes the visitor to the website and tries to turn them into a customer.
It's the C-suite, mostly the CEO and maybe the CFO and the revenue team that decides "we will offer subscriptions".
So it's sales, not marketing the convinces people to part with their money, and it's the company management that decides on subscriptions.
(And I'd note that I prefer a subscription model for Netflix to one-off payments.)
No, it's not. It's sales, and a bad and (in the long run) self-defeating mode of sales at that. Sales and marketing are different disciplines, with different strategies and different success criteria.
> > And convincing people to sign up for a subscription when that is objectively terrible for the consumer is marketing.
> I see. So my Netflix subscription is terrible for me?
The parent's sentence is a "X when Y is marketing", and you are dropping the when clause completely. In fact, Netflix is probably one of the objectively best examples of subscriptions helping in some areas.
Since you ended with a question, let me do the same: Out of all the subscription packages, be it Manscaped monthly men's trimming tools, Hello Fresh, Office 365 subscriptions, Paramount Plus... can you consider one of them being objectively terrible for the consumer, and thus fulfill the when clause of parent's post?
None of those interest me, and so I don't subscribe. None of the things I subscribe to I consider terrible. I can't imagine why you'd choose to subscribe to something that is objectively terrible for you, or, even worse, renew such a subscription.
I think that we, as engineers, need to remember that this is what engineers created. Marketers told them what they wanted in terms of technology and built it, for cash.
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.
I'd disagree with that. Engineers were told what to do or they would lose their jobs by the business people who had their ethical center removed as part of their MBA program.
> In the ideal world, people should be empowered to be able to retrieve what they are looking for when they need it (people pull and filter information, rather than being pushed information).
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.
I think it’s a technological challenge. Getting the information you need, when you need it. It’s semantic search, squared. A whole sequence of challenges:
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.)
> (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.)
This +1. Essentially, what we would need is mind reading abilities to be able to put the information in front of people exactly when they needed it. Said system would also need to perfectly analyse the economics so they can be sure that they can afford the information.
The spread of marketing and sales through the digital world isn't going anywhere while new products and services are being created. It can't be automated perfectly, and while it can't be automated then there will always be ways to rig and game the systems that we engineer.
You can rig the game on vague claims. You cannot rig it on facts. A 600 Watt solar panel is 600 Watts. Only most buying criteria do not have measurables attached to them. And even if they have, tech is terrible at filtering for them. Search Amazon for linen pants and most results you get will be made of cotton.
Searched Amazon for linen pants, 2/20 were cotton, most others were made of "cotton linen". Then googled cotton linen. Turns out its a blended fabric that avoids the disadvantages of both:
https://www.yorkshirefabricshop.com/post/what-are-the-advant...
Most "linen" material is blended. So actually turns out Amazon is inferring what you really want.
The "facts" that people need in their products are actually really difficult to determine. People don't want linen pants, they really want cotton linen. And for the 600w solar panel, what other criteria does it boil down to? I think is the reason there is no decent standard for product categorisation, there is literally too much to quantify and the consumer won't/can't be bothered to navigate such categorisation.
In an ideal world, people would also be introduced to things they are interested in. I don't think people ONLY want to pull info.
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.
Spam is a problem, but that's not the reason why we can't "retrieve" good information. That's just not how humans work. We are lazy. We grab either the thing we know or the thing that seems easiest / lowest risk. Hardly ever do we change our minds, even if a great product is available. We're very emotional and easily influenced by many distracting factors. Research is hard, and information is not easily available (and never will be).
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.
Many of our favorite products received significant funds under the status quo. (and many of those developers are present on HN) Once we change the equation for investors, we will see a different funding situation.
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.
I would still feel derisive about marketing as a field due to that reason. Marketing nowadays seems to focus on overwhelming the audience and hope they makes bad decisions.