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.