I can't say I like this characterisation!
A marketing message devoid of any useful details is really one that's devoid of any real indication as to whether it will work in your business' context. And let's be honest, the magic silver bullet that works flawlessly out of the box doesn't exist. It's never that simple.
If I need a product that does SAML2 or OIDC auth and $vendorA clearly advertises their support on their product page, but $vendorB has no detail available and wants me to talk to someone in sales and set-up a "demo and chat" where it might well emerge that there's no support for a feature I absolutely need (or the sales rep will have no idea what I'm talking about), I can tell you straight off the bat which vendor I'll see more favourably.
If I go searching for a product, and its marketing material can not answer my questions, I do expect that company (or whoever distributes it) to betray my expectations in a way that will hurt me a lot. Honestly, this feeling has a quite strong empirical foundation, so I'm not a bit ashamed of it and don't imagine it will ever change.
Switching POV now: I don't expect the details to be all front-and-center, but I do expect to be able to find them with some digging.
When the boilerplate response is "let's hop on a call and chat about your problem" I drop the product and move on. I know from experience that this will be a giant time waster, because the person who "hops on the call" will know absolutely nothing.
You parent comment basically says the very same thing, that you (a IT professional / nerd) are looking for different marketing messages (actual product details) than other users.
Others, who would prefer an "intuitive" product that "works out of the box" and is "so simple" that even the middle aged house wive can easily trade stocks on XYZ (which like 50% of the ads I receive via Alphabet Ads).
One asserts that nerds want to know the details for ego reasons.
The other asserts that he (presumbly as a self-proclaimed "nerd" in this situation) wants to know the details because otherwise he has no idea if the product is even useful.
If the product being sold is actually that simple e.g. "trade stocks with a few clicks" thats fine. But for anything that requires customisation, integration or any kind of technical support thats not true. You need to know the details to know if it will work.
This very much matches the stereotypical enterprise sales disaster i.e. buzzwords and flashy things sold to c-suite that are then suffered by those who actually use them and find that it doesn't do what they need
EDIT: also in this context where the article title specifically mentions "technical documentation" we are clearly not looking at the super simple type of product.
Car mechanic buying bolts needs to know thread and sizes of bolts, he does not care about "our bolts are best bolts in the world", if he would spend an hour with sales rep that feeds him marketing and in the end it turns out they don't sell what that mechanic needs, it will make him angry.
IT people or "nerds" know what they need and they have specifications to meet. Making it an "ego" thing is silly :).
A max strength before shearing/failure is just another req. for the task the mechanic wants to know, it doesn't make them objectively worse unless they were used in a situation where they needed to be stronger.
That seems pretty antagonistic for no reason.
> You parent comment basically says the very same thing
How so? The original comment said that a lack of information hurts nerds' feelings because having information is a matter of pride for them (so for emotional reasons, not rational ones). Your parent said they need information to make a well-informed decision, not for emotional reasons. How is that the same thing?
Taking the SAML/SSO example of the grandparent post, the odds are that the only time the poster will hear of the product is when they're asked to do the integration to make logins work. It is unlikely that they will know or even care about what shiny features the product has, since they're not the expected user base. If there's simple documentation on integration methods freely available online, it's easy enough to read it in half an hour or so and figure out how feasible the setup is likely to be in your environment. Going down the demo/chat route is likely to take a good 1-2 hours minimum, and the likelihood is that much of that is wasted sitting through presentations for the product side. That's great for the actual customers, but not useful for the technical staff the customers brought along to make it work. If you're lucky, you might get to actually speak to technical staff that can explain the SAML/OIDC setup steps in call 1; often, you might well have to set up a second call to actually discuss the technical requirements if not more. With many such integrations, the time quickly adds up...
It has nothing to do with ego or hurt feelings. I agree it might be emotional, but it’s more akin to a self defense mechanism.
No details ~= person telling you what you can read on the tin. Why are you subjecting yourself to listening to bullshit from a professional bullshit artist?
A marketer is a professional story teller. You get tired of hearing stories without substance, regardless of being a nerd. It’s more likely correlated with being cynical (or an expert in the field).
Of course you can present your product in such an attractive way that I hope you will be the winner when I compare you against alternatives, but beware that I will judge it on different grounds. So indeed, communicate details if you want to have a chance to be picked as the buying choice.
If they won't give me the details, it is reasonable to assume they are selling healing crystals until given reason to believe otherwise.
In my experience, products that lack details in marketing are usually geared to C-level execs for decision making, with their underlings being the ones who are then supposed to call a dozen vendors for demos.
Well, and if you don't know, or even stronger, don't want to know those things then it'd be much easier to sell you whatever the marketer is trying to sell you.
* details are so technical that they're hard to explain without "just look at the code type explanations". I've run into this roadblock trying to explain the Spark Catalyst optimizer.
* Not truly understanding all the details, so you can't explain the tech. Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
* the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
The inner workings of a proprietary query engine are a good example of all three. It may be great tech, but hard to explain and part of it are the secret sauce that they don't want to expose. Not exposing something doesn't necessarily mean they're hiding something / being dishonest.
That may seem like a valid reason to the seller, but as a user it's a red flag to take your business elsewhere
> Sometimes the documentation writer can't provide a "plain English" overview of the technology.
So lead your marketing material with the code and explanations or tutorials, or whatever. (But I'm repeating the article now...)
> the details are the proprietary IP / secret sauce of the company
This one isn't reasonable. It's the detail of how to use and how it can be used that are important, not how it works. If you can't tell those, how do people use your product? Do you make your customers sign an NDA before they buy it? (Yeah, some products do require an NDA before you buy them, you can expect those ones to be very hard to sell.)
Also, we're jaded. We've seen tons of bullshit. If you're omitting the details, I immediately assume that the reason is that seeing those details would make me less willing to buy/use your product.
So yes, I agree completely: nerds just need different marketing, but they are very, very susceptible to marketing. And the susceptibility is just as much based in emotional responses and deviations from pure rationality as it is with non-nerd people. Nerds just tend to fool themselves by thinking "I am so rational, I'm not susceptible to emotional appeals!" and then just getting susceptible to emotional appeals that masquerade as rationality while non-nerds tend to fool themselves by not reflecting on the entire process at all.
I don't think being hurt (or annoyed) by condescension is a trait specific to nerds, either.
Perfect to a nerd is different. It needs to require them somehow. "Anyone can do it" is not going to win over a nerd. "You can do" it might. If you're selling AI cancer detection to a hospital, "out of the box" is great. If you're selling to radiologists, they'll probably be more skeptical of solutions that don't involve them. Products (or even just stories) that empower & require them might.
I agree with the blog, but it's a little naive. It euphemizes, or dances around the relationship between "marketing" and razzle dazzle. If someone is hours deep into your documentation, that's not really advertising. That's a real service they're consuming, and forming opinions based on how it tastes. Marketing is more about the impression they get in minutes, not hours.
Ideally, there's a healthy interplay between marketing, the impression that you're intentionally projecting, and doing. But, they're still kind of independant.
Anyway, nerds aren't that hard to market to. They're just like anyone else. Flatter them. Make them feel important, listened to, consequential. Appeal to their ego, their better nature, their fears, etc. Also deliver. Good documentation, as judged by those using it, is delivering. Making it seem like it it will be pleasant to use, is marketing. Making it look a certain way, but not delivering, is bullshitting.
No, marketing is about getting someone to contact sales to buy your product. (There is a fuzzy line between sales and marketing) I have personally spent days in the past evaluating two different products, which did put me hours into reading documentation trying to figure out how to make them work.
When Toyota sponsors a motorsport team, that's not about getting someone to buy tomorrow. Neither are most TV commercials, brochures, etc. Neither is rebranding, etc.
You are very correct, marketing can often start years before a sale (and sometimes people never buy at all)
By the same argument you could say that everything is marketing, including designing and making the product. This is true, I guess. You might borrow a mac for a week from a buddy before buying it. Still, making a laptop is generally not described as marketing.
Nerds respond to being told they are more rational or otherwise superior/cool/etc. That is emotional appeal and conference organizers and such play on it. You can see it whenever you look for it - calling attendees smartest people there are and such..
Not that it would make nerds different then other groups. Others like ego stroking too, just differently.
I wouldn't describe this as an ego injury just as I wouldn't describe someone selling a tiger-repellent rock to me as an ego injury.
For a business owner both third party and in-house solutions are more or less opaque, you just need to decide who you trust more and compare the bills.
I think you've hurt some egos!
Also, "nerds" often arrogantly feel like they're superior (e.g. smarter, more knowledgeable, better able to figure things out than anybody), so marketing that feeds their egos in that way will likely be more successful. However, the precise way these feelings manifest themselves is different than a lot of other groups, so more broadly targeted marketing may fail.
I'm not sure it's about some pride or hurting the ego.
If we accept that a lot of nerds are on the spectrum, and quite a few are full blown aspies - focus on details instead of the big picture is the core feature of this particular non-neurotypical demographic.
Obligatory citation (probably worthless, pls feel free to rip to shreds): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976176948...
Have you responded/posted an RFP before? These things often end up in very very pointed questionnaires of 200-300 questions that take a couple of weeks to prepare a response, and often sizeable teams to generate those responses.
Is it marketing or autism? Seems very common in B2B/enterprise.
It would have the added benefit of making sure product aggregators always have correct and up-to-date information. I don't understand why pretty much every company gate-keeps their catalogs so much. I worked on a project where we had to pay big money every month to a third party for such a dataset, because apparently companies hate selling large amounts of products to customers who want to automate the purchasing process with their ERP systems.
Surely they can do all of that without making engineers spend valuable time thumbing through paper, PDF or excruciatingly slow web catalogs to write down SKUs. To be fair, some engineering suppliers have started to see the utter retardation of that system, and have actually started to offer things like CAD files. But most industries still act as if they hate selling things to customers.
> mislead competition about what's happening (who is also probably scraping anyway.)
That's probably the biggest factor. Or prevent customers from comparing prices on equivalent products with competitors. But that's still stupid since everyone does it anyway, they just have to do it manually, scrape or pay third parties for the data. Not to mention that competitors often go as far as buying entire units to pull apart.
I'm not an MBA, so there's probably some obscure but really important nuance that I'm missing, but my naive understanding is that cash flow is kind of a big deal. The sooner you can turn the investment in a project, product or service into cash the better, so you want to do everything you can to make the conversion process as smooth as possible. I've been on the other side of the equation too, working for suppliers of pretty awesome products that didn't sell very well because nobody thought about this. Things like why would anyone want to buy SaaS that takes months to on-board because nothing is automated, when others just let you spin up an instance and get started in minutes? Not to mention that the only way people could find out about the product is if they happened to be cold called by a salesman.
And it's true, show me the specs and why it's a better value than the other guy, and I might be interested.
Yet in every sector, the businesses that market themselves do the best and grow the most.
It's almost as if people of all stripes are unaware of their subconscious influences.
If the claim was "Nerds don't respond to advertising," I'd have disagreed but potentially found the arguments to be reasonable.
But to say nerds are impervious to marketing as a whole says more about the author's understanding of what marketing is than it does about nerds.
No, a large part of getting people to buy a product is to first make a valuable product. Consider these two examples to see the point:
Example: You made a shitty product and try to market it by telling people exactly what it does. Nobody buys it, was the marketing bad?
Example2: You made an excellent product and try to market it by telling people exactly what it does. Lots of people buy it, was the marketing good?
The problem in the first example isn't bad marketing, instead to get more people to buy their product they should fix it.
Product, Price, Placement, Promotion.
I think you're mistaking "marketing" as only referring to "Promotion".
No sensible definition of marketing includes engineers fixing bugs or optimizing algorithms. It is true that sometimes good marketing teams also doubles as product managers where they ensures that the product is something consumers wants, but that isn't really a part of their field.
Marketing encapsulates everything a business does because everything impacts the desirability of the product.
That's not the same as saying your marketing department should be in charge of engineering. That's just an organization implementation detail.
The best companies understand that everyone in the company is involved in marketing, and the marketing department gets involved in an advisory capacity at every level. That's not the same as saying they're in charge, and I made no such claim.
And the marketing department doesn't truly control anything. There are many external factors that constrain not only price and product but promotion and placement as well.
But I can't emphasize enough that my comments have nothing to do with which department is involved or company hierarchy or titles or anything like that. I'm talking about the act of marketing.
Everything is marketing.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing.asp
> Product > Product refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market, or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
I'll inform my CEO that we've been going about it all wrong, because someone on the internet believes product development should occur in a vacuum without worrying about things like market research. That's totally reasonable.
Unfortunately it's true. Marketing is now at the center of corporate-driven open source.
Shilling and meetups with free pizza quickly lead to hype and cargo culting.
The devops tools popular on HN are an excellent example.
I agree. Make the details hierarchically drill-down. Have a summary list of features and selling points, and one can click on each one to get incrementally finer detail. Multiple levels may be needed.
If the company is afraid of details, then don't bother trying to sell to nerds. You'll have to trick their clueless bosses instead using vague buzzwords and smiling lying fashionable actors. "If you select our product, you'll look 'in' and cool! Look at our fancy UI animations, the buttons look made of Flubber!"
> So the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd. This feeling of hurt is certainly an emotion, so I wouldn't say nerds are less emotional!
I think you're missing something fundamental here, possibly because of some connotation about "nerds".
When I buy something, I want to know details about what it does and how it works, not because I like knowing a million details, but because I want to do stuff with it. If I buy a laser pen, I'm going to use it to play with my cats, but I also want to use it as a range finder with a diode, so I want to know the beam spread and wavelength. If it doesn't fit the specifications, I don't want to know about the other features, they don't matter at that point.
Having sold high tech products B2B, I can confirm this.
Also "out of the box" can work with nerds if that feature allows them to do what they "really want to do" more easily and faster.
Yes, this is it.
"Nerds" are just another collection of market demographics. They (whoever they may be) are driven by a complex mix of desires and emotions just like everyone else. I don't think advertisers even bother to have a bin that one would label as "nerd". We are FAR beyond such coarse distinctions in the era of surveillance capitalism. Isn't that the point these days? To market at such a fine granularity that it becomes individuals?
Sure, turn on your adblockers, fire up your pi-holes and make intricate ublock-origin filters. You're still being marketed to, and if you're buying stuff, it is working.
So you entirely reject the notion that someone might buy stuff for any reason other than marketing?
That's FAR from the norm, however.
As long as the marketing algorithms still go "hey, I see you bought a fridge. Here are ten more fridges you may be interested in", let me express some skepticism at their supposed intelligence.
Other than some small number of exceptions(). I am not convinced that marketing budgets are fluff.
() Huy Fong Foods (Siracha Hot Sauce) -- that's literally the only product company I can think of that doesn't do marketing, apparently?
--> I don't want it.
Some here say that the difference lies in rational vs emotional appeal, with nerds being presumed to be more "rational." But I think the difference is somewhere else. I don't think nerds are any less emotional.
A lot of traditional marketing relies on a thing where the marketer tries to sell the consumer some feature of a product in a way that does not involve delving into details of the product (this avoidance is seen as good thing -- often the fewer details are specified, the more polished the marketer considers the message to be). To a nerd, that avoidance is a very bad thing, because a nerd prides himself on knowing the details. So the marketing message that avoids details and tries to sell some "powers" that work "out of the box" hurts the ego of the nerd. This feeling of hurt is certainly an emotion, so I wouldn't say nerds are less emotional!