"Repacking/renaming concepts just to sound like something new..." maybe because it's marketing and that's what y'all do?

As a Marketer, I appreciated this comment. :)

Well if you don't know what marketing is, I guess that any concept out of ignorance suits it, right?

The same as someone saying that a web developer just copy and pastes code, or that a graphic designer just make squiggles in illustrator, and the list goes on.

I recommend you start by here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

I don't think they're saying that's all there is to marketing, rather that it is absolutely a marketing tactic.

Your analogies don't quite work, because they lack the self-referential component.

Not the previous poster but: I've tried picking up things a cut above random pop books about marketing and haven't found any depth there. If you have any links to somewhere I can actually do a deep dive on marketing, I'd appreciate it.

To this day I still think Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler it's the best book to give you as close to foundational knowledge you can get, and you can go from there to get depth further into the disciplines that compose it - like advertising, distribution, etc.

Some people criticize Kotler because he "only studied marketing", didn't practice it. I don't see anything wrong with that, specially after being adopted as a standard for decades.

If you want "theory" lookup Bernays and read his books about propaganda. Something more practical is anything David Oglivy has written. For copywriting check out "The Adweek Copywriting Handbook" by Sugarman. Unfortunately, I can't recommend any design specific books as I'm a media buyer and trash at design.

I'd go one step farther from "read anything David Ogilvy has written" to "read everything David Ogilvy has written" starting with Ogilvy on Advertising. It's fun and light and valuable even if some of the ads do feel wonderfully retro (they were not retro, however, they were incredibly disruptive innovations that worked so well they redefined how we think about business communication, and this is where they started). The man did invent the notion of modern quantitatively driven marketing, after all. Yes, some of the things he talks about pertain to an earlier era, but all of them remain relevant today and there is value in thinking about how to translate concepts he discussed for print advertising to online contexts.

"Marketing" is a broad term; it's like saying 'what's a good book on software engineering?' What are you wanting to learn about marketing? There are interesting books that give you lots of tactics for early-stage startups (Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, for example); books that tell how to think about Brand Strategy (for example, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller); books that delve into psychology (Influence by Robert Cialdini); and many other things. Marketing encompasses high-level strategy, brand, research, market sizing, messaging, positioning, product marketing, social media, content marketing, PR and earned media, grassroots marketing, and the list goes on. Within each of these topics there are many different approaches and philosophies. High-level pop books will be fairly light on how each of these work.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore is a classic for tech companies. It's not about the discipline of marketing, but more of a representation of what marketing looks like in practice. (And, perhaps to the astonishment of many, in practice it does not always look like a pyramid scheme.)

Flywheels aren't a new concept. I first encountered them in Brad Stone's excellent book about Amazon, The Everything Store, which I believe was published in 2014. Stone explained how Bezos and crew discovered their flywheel in 2001:

> Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believe powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers they needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel… and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated… after five years, they finally understood their business."

Like I said in the first sentence, I wasn't criticizing the content, neither I'm saying flywheel is a new concept.

Some call it flywheels, others call it engines, others call it funnel.

David Ogilvy didn't name it in 1963, with the Confessions of an Advertising Man, but the concept was there:

>Why did I write it? First, to attract new clients to my advertising agency. Second, to condition the market for a public offering of our shares. Third, to make myself better known in the business world. It achieved all three of these purposes.

My point is that some disciplines look into have closed concepts, marketing discipline doesn't.

Engines might be an appropriate analogy to flywheels, but a funnel is a different thing entirely, as is your quote from David Ogilvy.

A funnel typically represents the customers' journey, with some amount of dropoff at each step along the way, e.g. discover the site --> sign up --> become active --> convert to paid. And although each step of a funnel leads to the next one, the last step of the funnel doesn't loop back around to feed into the first step, which means the funnel isn't a closed loop that feeds into itself.

A flywheel, on the other hand, is always a closed loop. And most commonly the steps on the flywheel are business strategies, advantages, and activities, rather than steps along a user journey, e.g. provide a wider selection of goods from sellers --> make buyers happier --> get more buyers --> attract more sellers --> repeat.

Just Google Image search a picture of a flywheel and a funnel and the difference should become immediately clear to you. And note that you can combine the two concepts. For example, in the flywheel, the arrow between attracting more sellers and getting a wider selection of goods could be represented as a funnel.

Finally, your David Ogilvy quote is neither a funnel nor a flywheel. It's just a list of three distinct benefits, all of which derive from him writing something, but none of which feed into the others (or at least he doesn't describe how they do.)

This is not a fly wheel, this is economies of scale. There are established words for these things. Why do we invent new ones that don't make sense?

Flywheel output less than the input is. Why would we use that word?

Economies of scale is a distinct concept that's different than a flywheel. Yes, EoS plays an intimate role in powering a lot of flywheels. For example, the section of Amazon's flywheel that allows them to offer lower prices as a result of having more sellers works via EoS. However, it wouldn't make any sense to try to describe the entire flywheel concept using the term EoS, because lots of information would be lost, specifically the entire concept of a flywheel: that it feeds back into itself in a loop. Calling a flywheel EoS would be akin to calling a racetrack a curve.

As for whether or not "flywheel" is the best term, I think it's pretty good. Yes, real-life flywheels lose momentum due to friction, unless outside force is exerted. But the same is true with marketing flywheels, which is why all of them will have at least one step that requires the injection of outside energy, e.g. bringing in new customers.

That's still not a flywheel, that's a network effect. Like I said these are set terms from academia for these specific meanings.

Like I'd aid flywheels have always meant energy storage mechanisms that don't reach 100% efficiency.

Same as EoS, network effects can be a component of a flywheel, but aren't necessarily equivalent to the entire flywheel itself. Network effects simply mean that the value of the service increases the more people who use it, whereas a flywheel represents the entire positive feedback loop that may be driven by individual components like network effects, EoS, etc.

Marketers know very well what network effects and economies of scale are, and the concept of a flywheel is distinct from either. You can have a flywheel without EoS or network effects, and you can have EoS or network effects without having a flywheel.

Also, it's somewhat pointless to debate what the "original" meaning of flywheel is. Language evolves and changes, and people from one field borrow terminology from others when creating helpful analogies. Terms like "funnel" and "flywheel" are hardly the first to receive such treatment, and they won't be the last.

I think this is due to "generational" ideas?

Old hat learns a strategy that works calls it X -> next gen explores and find that Y works -> next gen adapts flow X and calls it Z out of ignorance/thought leadership/etc.

But why some disciplines have a solid body of knowledge that's used as a foundation to build new things, yet this discipline is just wild cards after some point?

It's not like there's lack of records of knowledge.

Maybe it's like you said, out of ignorance/thought leadership/etc, I dare to add arrogance.

Same reason the field of behavioral psychology gets new names and explanations for the same concepts every year: It is not an exact science, and there are very few (if any?) first principles that everyone can agree on.

All we have are fuzzy concepts that require interpretation and constant refinement, and of course everyone's interpretation and method of refinement will differ.

The laws of thermodynamics don't need to be rehashed every year by some owner of a verified Twitter account. Marketing lacks that kind of foundation.

Well that's indeed the harsh reality of it, and that doesn't help the labeling and negative perception of the discipline.

It didn't seem to me that the author is trying to coin a new phrase, or methodology, or specialty. They are just taking a known concept (flywheel) and explaining how they applied it at their company.

And that's useful. Knowing about a concept is one thing, and knowing how to apply it to your situation is another. Articles like this help with the latter.

I didn't meant to criticize the content or the author, just the state of the discipline.

I feel this. For whatever reason folks in our discipline have an extreme lack of self-confidence that is only multiplied by everyone only sharing their biggest wins. This seems to have people chasing new shiny objects and secret methods when the reality is that the only thing that "works" is just the fundamentals that we've had a solid handle on for a while. That's super boring to write about though. Not sure what the answer is but it is exahusting.

What does school teach now? Is it still the four P's or did new age terms like inbound marketing replace old nomenclature?

I like the argument, that the main thing thats changed in marketing since the 50's is what everything is called.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/everything-the-tech-world-...