Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did.
I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time.
Things I learned,
1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price.
2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-).
3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky.
Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.
I'd add that Marketing is about value creation ultimately. You have to start with the right mindset, i.e. that you product has no value per se, and that marketing is everything you are going to do around your product/service to create the perception of its value. Your customers don't know how time you spent on it, they don't care how complex it is, they don't even want to know how it works (at least not until they are interested to buy it). You have to somehow create the need (that may be either a true need, or a perceived need) and your product/service has to be a presented as perfect fit (whether true or not) for it. Sometimes products/services create new needs as well so you need additional engagement to focus on the need itself if it's not obvious.
Edit: To clarify: Red Bull is, for me, THE epitome of marketing. They sell a tremendously unhealthy product (bacon-smell car) as something that is healthy, basically by connecting themselves with extreme sports. Red Bull IS extreme sports and lifestyle. How insane if you think about it.
I don't know, probably not. But Coke's marketing is more towards lifestyle in general. Red Bull is explicitly associated with "being active", "sports", even "high endurance" and "extreme situations". But in these situations, you won't need a Red Bull. Red Bull establishes a fake image that, to some degree, is the exact opposite of the actual product.
I think what he means is this: When I'm tired from snowboarding, skateboarding, or really any of the extreme sports they sponsor; Do I feel like grabbing a Red Bull, or do I want water (and 5 minutes to catch my breath)?
Just one thing I wanted to add. If anyone has a startup idea "Marketing as a Service", HN is probably a good place to start your service since we see this as a regular need: people making applications they have no clue how to market. There's probably a ton of unmet needs in this field.
That's not really what I meant. Ad agencies only do a very tiny part of what I call Marketing. If you think that's only it, you are reducing Marketing to a very small chunk of what it actually is.
Marketing done wrong is advertising an already conceived product.
Marketing done right is strategic. It's about segmenting a market, targeting the right niche, and looking for the right positioning within the niche. It's about guiding the product towards both stated and unstated needs. It should happen before, during and after development. And yes it should also involve generating demand.
Starting marketing after the fact is like building quality into an already created product. Quality is designed in.
Another Sun story. I was at the annual Sun employee conference way back in 2002. As engineers, we were raving about Java/Swing & the JDK. After a while, one of the audience members couldn't take it anymore & spoke up loudly - "WTF is Java ? It has never made a dime. We sell boxes. That's what makes money. We should be talking about that!"
He was a marketing guy for the Sparc workstations that was Sun's bread & butter. Atleast for a brief window of time, the Java server-side experience was actually better on a Sparc than anywhere else.
Perhaps you can clue me in: What was Sun's plan with Java? For a company that sold hardware, making a runtime that works everywhere, and has cross-platformness as a core feature seems sort of counterproductive. Did Sparc offer some sort of competitive advantage, hardware wise (like hardware assisted GC) or something?
Edit: In Microsoft's case with the CLR, I can see the cross-platform goals being mainly technical, but MS sells software and developer tools. So it makes sense for them to get everyone using their platform. Did Sun have an aggressive plan to control the ecosystem and sell tooling and whatnot around it?
As an original member of the Java group I can tell you they didn't really have a plan. Prior to it going viral the plan was to flush it and move on, everyone had made plans for a new job come Jun 30th, 1995 (the end of the Sun Fiscal quarter and the point at which the funding was ending for the "LiveOak" group.
Once it was being seen as the "death" of Microsoft, taking away the desktop monopoly and moving it into the browser. Well then it became a hammer to beat upon the enemy, and beat they did.
That it was effective against Microsoft ensured it would get funding and support, it also prevented some really useful things from coming to market from Sun at least (like a native compiler, ala gcj, in which to build Java 'binaries')
"For a company that sold hardware, making a runtime that works everywhere, and has cross-platformness as a core feature seems sort of counterproductive."
This might possibly be connected to the fact Sun no longer exists as an independent corporation.
> ... no longer exists as an independent corporation
You can safely say just "no longer exists". Oracle made sure it erased any trace of Sun trademark from anywhere it could. Now it is Oracle Java, Oracle VirtualBox,... I always wondered why they chose to totally eradicate this trademark instead of keeping it. Does anyone know?
Relatedly, I was at sun in 2002 and went to one of the town halls that Johnathan Schwartz was doing in menlo park. Someone asked how we would make money from {thing} and he was told by Mr. Shwartz that engineers shouldn't worry about how to make money from things, they should focus on the code.
One of the many reasons our stock price went from $80 to $2 methinks...
I would disagree with that characterization. At the time it was released Sun was losing the battle for "Web" mindshare to SGI and was on the verge of becoming irrelevant as the 'wave' of the Web hit its crusty servers. There was certainly a lot of 'drag' as they say in terms of buying servers from the maker of Java. Especially as it became the defacto business logic implementation tool. So while I don't think licensing revenues paid the development bills (I may be wrong there) I know it kept Sun in the game during the dot.com explosion.
A few notes... Marketing for large enterprises is a different challenge than promoting a product on your own, so insights from working at SUN might not translate into street level marketing.
1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing!
2) Marketing is about perception - Partially true... Branding is about perception, marketing is about much more than just perception.
3)Marketing is Ubiquitous - This time you got it right!!! Marketing is influencing every possible touchpoint with consumers.
I feel like this comment might sum up the difference between high traction B2C and slow and steady B2B. At no point do you mention the closing or cashing the check. Your approach is perfectly valid for most B2C stuff, but as a B2B guy, this looks completely foreign. Definitely a learning experience for me at least. As a B2B, this approach would IMHO fall on its face miserably, but I can totally see how this would be effective when more users == more value and sales-guy-on-a-phone is not scalable. That said, for B2B people, I would be highly skeptical that this approach would work. When your market is small, you had better have closers on the line to ring the bell.
To be fair, at the time Sun had exactly 4 products, the Sun 3/50, the Sun 3/75, the Sun 3/160, and the Sun 3/280. But you are absolutely correct that Enterprise marketing is different than start up marketing. I was fortunate to be at Sun through the transition.
We'll have to disagree on your characterization of Marketing as Sales, I see them as two very different types of communications. That said, I know people who flip back and forth between the two, and people who are really stuck in one side or the other.
Marketing is about matching up the right message to the right market through the right media...
Sales is a marketing tactic. The salesman is the media, the sales pitch is the message, and the prospect is the market...
The pitch and process might be different, but thats because its a different form of marketing than print or tv or internet,etc...
But... your sales team should be under the umbrella of your marketing department... otherwise you will have the classic conflict of bad leads vs. bad salesman, a classic environment where people can easily shirk responsibility and shift blame instead of recognizing that they are all part of the same process.
It's still a decomposing dead animal, preservation just slows down the process. If you don't believe me, leave a pack of bacon in your fridge for two months then take a big sniff.
Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell. This is also why I'm excited about Soylent, and I haven't seen them play up the sustainable/ethical angle as yet.
Yes bacon is "a dead animal", but the typical bacon smell is not related to that. Bacon smells of cured meat, and there if you fry some cured vegatarian/vegan products you get a simmilar smell. (Deep fryed, thin sliced, King Oyster Mushrooms with smoked Salt).
Looks like you didn't bother actually reading my comment before responding to it. It was only two very short paragraphs, the second of which began:
"Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell."
And dry cured meat is not relevant to my initial statement that to me, bacon smells like dead animal. Actually, jerky doesn't have that smell. I miss jerky, but I like cows more.
You and I are also decomposing, I wouldn't say we smell like decomposing animal. The rate of decomposition changes the dominant smell, so it's not really valid to say that bacon smells like decomposing dead animal, because it smells much more like other things.
Unless you're a zombie, you are not decomposing, you're aging[1]. I'm afraid there's a rather sharp binary distinction between alive and dead. I suppose one could argue that the pigs confined within a factory farm never really get to live.
1) bacon's smell has nothing to do with bacon itself - it's the preservatives that are used just the same for vegetables (sometimes)
So you're just responding to a bad eating experience from long ago. I have the same - with fish. I can't stand being in the same room with it, I can't eat it without throwing up. I also know it's safe because for the first 3 years of my life I ate almost nothing but fish, and then I guess I ate a bad batch, and given my parent's habits I'm guessing I was forced to finish that. That's what's causing my aversion.
I like to say that it's animals (and plants) forced to swim in their own faeces all their life, even in human faeces near coastal cities where nearly all fishing happens. I know several other people who have an aversion to certain foods (different from allergy because aversion is psychological, allergy is physical). But I'm under no illusion that fish is actually unhealthy. On the contrary, I fully realize it's healthy (and yes, I make sure to eat/drink/season things with fish oil on a regular basis)
I would say that there's a lot of reasons you should reconsider vegetarianism though.
2) humans can't survive without eating the components of meat. There is no doubt about it, all human species are omnivores : while we can live for long periods without meat, it's risky, and going entirely without meat leads to death (even replacing meat with fish is risky). In the modern world it's actually possible to get a meat-replacing diet, using many components. Most vegetarians don't do it this way - they ignore the problem. Result : at first, slimming, which is what they're generally going for, and after a while (generally months or years) : sudden shutdown of a bodily function, or sudden death after a medical incident or blood loss (because it depletes stores of critical molecules they can't replace). Vegetarianism not healthy, it just slows the rate of depletion of critical proteins to a rate that won't cause issues for years (in an adult. Try it on a baby and they WILL die. E.g. http://naturalhygienesociety.org/diet-veganbaby.html )
A lot of vegeratians seem to think an attack against vegan/vegetarian diets is an attack against them. And because they've developed this psychological aversion, that there is something evil about a person trying to "convert" them. No matter the science behind it.
there's an argument that while vegetarianism certainly isn't an ideal diet, it's better than McDonald's. And that's probably true.
> we've established : 1) bacon's smell has nothing to do with bacon itself
That has been asserted, not established. I assert that if one is a regular meat-eater, they no longer notice the corpse smell.
> 2) humans can't survive without eating the components of meat... going entirely without meat leads to death
Oh lordy, where do I even begin with this broscience. Allow me to introduce some actual Science.
In 2003, 42% of Indian households were vegetarian and ate no fish, meat or eggs[1]. There are many cultures around the world who abstain from meat for religious reasons, eg Buddhists and Hindus. I'm afraid this directly contradicts the outlandish claim that a vegetarian diet leads inevitably to ill-health and death.
1) What you describe is clearly psychological aversion. Please don't call it anything else. You notice it, others don't and it makes you sick. That's called aversion and has zero cause outside of your own mind. It means you got sick after eating pork a long time ago. Nothing more. Nothing bad about it, most people have at least one aversion. Explaining it through "corpse smell" is stupid though.
2) a lot of Indian households are indeed "vegetarian", in the sense that they can't afford any meat (not even poultry). They replace it by eating animal fat on bread. Pig fat mostly. Europeans do the same thing, and today you can get it as a delicacy. It's a very original taste, but let me tell you. If you dislike the smell of bacon, this is unlikely to agree with you.
3) "There are many cultures around the world who abstain from meat for religious reasons, eg Buddhists and Hindus". Hindus abstain from eating cow meat (though not milk). I'm not aware of Buddhist attitudes, but the first line on wikipedia directly contradicts what you're saying [1]. Clearly it's only monks (which have been eating meat for -at least- 14 years as part of the general population). There are zero cultures around the world that abstain from meat alltogether. For obvious reasons : if you do, people die, without fishoil and pig fat ("food supplements", guess what they're made of ?).
4) how do you talk yourself out of the -many- cases of food deficiency caused by vegetarianism and/or veganism ? Not just the ones today, but the many documented attempts, for seafaring and other travels of vegetarian diets that resulted in death on a large scale. Large enough to alter outcomes of battles, kill entire crews and so on.
5) Also the tons of instances of babies dying from food deficiency where it was blamed -by medical professionals- directly on the diet of their parents ? I hope you're not planning on having kids - ever (although a kid will be fine with a vegetarian father, it's the mother that causes problems early on. Afterwards, not feeding the kid meat or fish is bad). Hell I checked in the supermarket here and the apple + banana baby feed mentions that infants can't survive on fruit alone, and you really should also provide meat and fish products, ideally both.
This topic has nearly reached maximum depth, and you clearly aren't interested in a rational discourse at any rate. So I will leave you with two thoughts:
1. Everything you have said about Hindu and Buddhist vegetarianism is poorly researched and inaccurate.
2. If you are going to make extraordinary claims like "vegetarianism inevitably leads to illness and death", you'd better provide some compelling scientific sources rather than "zomg this vegan baby like totally died once lol XD".
Upon reflection I think you have just been trolling me. Poor show, HN is a place for serious conversation, not reddit style childishness. Jog along.
You make it sound like I'm making an even remotely controversial claim. Billions (in fact, all 7 of them, easily) eat meat and most live healthy lives eating it. All cultures, all ethnicities, all genders, all everything. You're the one claiming this is somehow bad, and you're acting like I'm making this grand contradictory claim, when it's you that is making the ridiculous far-fetched claim.
I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time.
Things I learned,
1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price.
2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-).
3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky.
Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.