Nerds are people who are incredibly easy to market products to - it just needs to appeal to the rational mindset more than the emotional mindset.
Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door. We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads.
Promoting technical documentation as marketing is a bit odd though. Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.
I suspect the average nerd would cave at any sort of targeted advertising rational or emotional. Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging ^^ and uncomfortable that I don't believe most nerds do that.
The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion. The best defence is having unusual preferences ... which is no defence at all if someone takes the time to figure out what they are.
Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate.
^^ EDIT Consider the should-be-famous story of Newton and the South Sea Bubble. Mathematical genius, Master of the Mint, totally in his element. Successfully identified the bubble forming. Caved to what was essentially social pressure anyway and bought back into the bubble after a few months. Being right in defiance of social pressure is excruciating.
> Making decisions based on useful statistics is so challenging
You only have to evoke the illusion of making a decision based on statistics. Many "nerds" go crazy for benchmarks in marketing (and e.g. presenting them as a graph rather than a simple statement like "20% faster"), even though they are usually only meaningful if you really dig deeply into them.
> Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers
Really? "Status markers"?
I suppose I respond to "status markers" subliminally, like anyone else does. I recognise brands that have been advertised, and I rate them higher than unknown brands.
But I despise advertising, especially the shotgun advertising that encroaches/takes-over on public space; and UBE. Turning buses and taxis into advertising billboards has degraded public space. And a lot of shotgun advertising involves externalising costs - UBE in particular costs an awful lot in terms of the inbox-owner's time.
I'm conflicted about this. I'm OK with brand promotion, which began in times when many products were adulterated (e.g. flour mixed with brick-dust), and a brand tied product quality to brand reputation. But brand marketing seems to have gone hand-in-hand with price competition, so that "top" brands nowadays are often correlated with cheap components, built-in obsolescence, and crap service.
If we're considering a tech product (think SaaS), then a website that has obviously been manicured by someone from Marketing is a serious turn-off. Especially if the marketing dude has removed all useful information.
>The point of advertising is to sell a persuasive message. Nobody is immune to persuasion.
I think that there is some form of automatic anti-persuasion feeling going on too. You feel more negative about something when you feel that it is being pushed 'too hard'.
Big budget marketing drives most of the mainstream preferences though, so I'd argue that resistance to marketing is the main thing separating nerds from mainstream.
> Anyone on the planet will respond to advertising if an advertiser figures out how they identify high and low status markers. It doesn't matter how rational they thought they were before that, on aggregate.
Isn't there also some component of effective demand to this? If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something. If you don't care about being seen as uncool and don't like smartphones, you're not going to get one. Etc. In the extreme, a hermit monk would just reply to a sales pitch with "still tethered to your possessions, I see".
> If you're completely satisfied with your material needs, a marketer is going to have a very tough time selling you on something.
I'd argue that the way it works is that they create desire on the one hand and sell their products as solutions to things that they aren't on the other. To explain the latter, for example, selling beer or handbags to fill a need for self-esteem or something.
If you think about it, a lot of people have most of what they need and are persuaded by these created desires anyway.
Then you also have to consider that people are trying to get you to buy their butter rather than the other butter. That's the third part.
In summary, being satisfied is not a defense since they can make you unsatisfied.
Look at all these retro-gaming consoles, nerdy-joke t-shirts, weird dev boards and SBCs, DIY 3D printers, and similar stuff. I don't think nerds buy then out of pure rationality.
It's a mistake to think that nerds have a suppressed or lacking emotional sphere. It's just wired differently that the neurotypical one, but it's very much there.
Mechanical keyboards - people are spending thousands on keyboards.
Nerds are just like any other human, and the worst thing one can do is to fool himself thinking they're imune to advertising or any sort of influence - it makes you a sitting duck.
You'll be eating advertising completely unaware of it, from a weird sense of "superiority" and because of an adblocker.
The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be.
> The sooner you're aware you are influenced the more protected you will be.
So then you are aware and not affected, doesn't that mean you are aware you are no longer affected since you are aware of the effects of marketing? My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on.
Like, I am aware that I am not significantly affected by marketing. I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product.
Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money.
But like sure, I feel an emotional tingle from ads, but I recognize it for what it is and just shuts it down. It isn't hard to do for me, rather it is hard to actually feel like the products would be meaningful. I think that many who recognize that ads doesn't affects them significantly works similarly.
>So then you are aware and not affected, doesn't that mean you are aware you are no longer affected since you are aware of the effects of marketing?
Saying you're imune to marketing it's like saying you're imune to pricing, or buying things at a particular store. I'll dare to say that whenever there's an exchange of value most likely there is marketing involved, even if it was not thought that way. For example content marketing, some is designed to be content marketing, other content happens to be content marketing.. which has been done for centuries.
Simply recognizing the fact that you are influenced, and that you influence others, is already a win.
>I can be sure of that since I barely buy anything, and when I do I just sort by cheapest and look at specs until I find something acceptable. When buying stuff at the supermarket I just look at ingredients and compare, it doesn't take long to do since you just do that once per product
Here alone you're saying that price is something you value (which is one of the classical 4 P's of the Marketing mix - Product, Price, Placement, Promotion). The ingredients are also chosen deliberately, especially nowadays with brands that know some people value foods without added sugars, or that are processed, etc.
So basically you mentioned 2 marketing variables that influence your decision. You might think that, "oh no, it just happens to be that those products were on the shelves/website!", except everything about those products are deliberate decisions: the marketplace, price, packaging, ingredients, even the font size for the ingredients, the list goes on, nothing is left to random chance.
>Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway. They want people who are easy to manipulate emotionally into thinking their lives would be better with more nonsense products. I am not like that, I don't think that nonsense products can improve my life, so I don't see a reason to spend more money.
Don't look at it like that, a better frame would be that you are indifferent to some companies and treasured by other companies. Wastage of advertising is factored in it's costs, the less wastage of contacts the better of course, but it's part of the game - just like people that were shouting in markets selling fish, where people that hate fish would eventually pass by. TV ads are a great example of wastage that was worth it.
I'm sure there are products or services you use that you enjoy greatly, either for it's practical value or simply because how they make you feel, and somewhere along the line something brought such products/services to your attention, a friend, a coworker, a piece of content, a character in a movie, even maybe an ad you saw when you were a child.
This doesn't have to be a bad thing. Thankfully you find the products that suit you, that's good marketing on their part - even if they were lucky to come across you they had to do something right for you exchange your money for their product, like a simple 5 cent price drop to be first on the list of those who sort by "Cheapest".
With that said, of course there are scumbags, scammers, manipulators, that use this to take advantage of people, just like people lie to try to get something out of each other.
Creating a product listing takes an hour and the product manager can do it, it hardly qualifies as marketing. If you argue that counts as marketing then sure, but I'd argue that creating a product listing is a part of creating the product, a product isn't ready until consumers can access it.
Also, you can't buy a product without engaging in some form of product listing. If that disqualifies you from being affected by marketing then it is impossible by definition to be unaffected by it, so this whole discussion is nonsense. Hence it is a bad definition, when people say "you are affected by marketing" they don't mean "you care about the price when you buy a product". Instead it implies that you make irrational decisions based on marketing material you have seen, because otherwise it is just a null statement since it is true by definition.
>Creating a product listing takes an hour and the product manager can do it, it hardly qualifies as marketing. If you argue that counts as marketing then sure, but I'd argue that creating a product listing is a part of creating the product, a product isn't ready until consumers can access it.
It doesn't matter who does it, it's still marketing. Per definition.
Unless a listing for you is a list of technical product specs. Dimensions, weight, number of screws, power consumption, then that's barely a listing, it's just a list of technical specs. When you're creating your listing on Amazon you have dedicated fields for product specs though.
I surely wouldn't enjoy launching a Nails or Screws brand to sell on Amazon.
>Also, you can't buy a product without engaging in some form of product listing. If that disqualifies you from being affected by marketing then it is impossible by definition to be unaffected by it, so this whole discussion is nonsense.
That's my point. It's not nonsense it's simply how things are organized. Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Product Development, R&D, Accounting, etc etc.
Who deals with customers post purchase? Customer Support. Who develops new products? Product Development/R&D Who deals with direct sales? Sales. Who deals with communication? Marketing. Is it linear, and always like this in every company? Of course not, still the disciplines are there and fit into each bucket. A single founder does everything on it's own, he is wearing all the hats.
>Instead it implies that you make irrational decisions based on marketing material you have seen, because otherwise it is just a null statement since it is true by definition.
I never said it's irrational, you're the one that is implying that. People aren't dumb, and advertising isn't a magic bullet that takes control of minds, yet everyone is still subject to influence.
Maybe it's the case that you simply underestimate the decisions that are made, and how effective they are.
It's really hard to have a discussion about this topic without having a scoped definition of marketing for the purpose of discourse, and defining it such that "everything is marketing" isn't very interesting. Everyone keeps talking past each other as long as someone takes ads and promotional materials for marketing while the next commenter considers pricing and placement to be marketing. The point of the original article is going to be 100% missed and is impossible to engage with if "cookie box on grocery store shelf costs 1.3 units of money" is taken to be marketing in the same sense as what they are talking about. Next you might as well define "respond" to mean "have neurons fire in response to a sensory input."
Unfortunately this same thing happens every time when the topic is discussed on HN.
I think the main problem is that people think that advertising = marketing, while advertising is a marketing tool. Just like you have PR or Sponsorship.
What would you consider pricing and placement to be if not marketing? Selling in Whole Foods is the same as selling in Walmart? It's the same type of consumers that shop around those places? A 1000$ smartphone vs 299$ one are targeted at the same people?
Or price is just an arbitrary number given a cost and a random profit margin?
My point still stands, that "nerds" are influenced in their purchase decisions just like anyone else despite using adblockers.
The "Marketing Mix" was first approached in the 60's, it's not something I made up along the way to try to prove something. It's a whole discipline for some reason.
> What would you consider pricing and placement to be if not marketing?
I'm ok with calling it marketing (I don't particularly care). It's just that I don't believe we can have fruitful discussion without first defining and scoping the terms enough that people don't constantly shift goalposts and talk past each other. This kind of thing just leads to very frustrating "discussion" where no matter what you say, someone is going to interject because they have a different idea of what the discussion is all about.
Now the submission unfortunately doesn't define what it means by marketing, but I don't think it's talking about pricing or the decision where you sell a product. Kinda have to read between the lines, but it's probably talking about promotional content about the product. Definitely not pricing or the location where you choose to make a product available for purchase.
My reading is that "the language and content traditionally used in promotional materials about a product do not appeal to nerds." It's probably off but not too far off. The author just didn't find the right words to say what they mean (or assumed the reader can infer), and instead said "marketing." Even with that interpretation, it wouldn't make for a very fruitful discussion, but at least it'd be a whole lot better than having someone explain why they don't think a typical startup landing page persuades them only to be argued against because "no, actually selling cookies at your local grocery store affects you!" I'm paraphrasing of course but I've seen the same discussion here over and over again. It's predictably silly.
> My point still stands, that "nerds" are influenced in their purchase decisions just like anyone else despite using adblockers.
Sure. I don't think the article is about that and I don't see what's the point of going down the "everything affects everything" line of reasoning in comments. That doesn't really say anything new, useful, actionable, or interesting.
>Now the submission unfortunately doesn't define what it means by marketing, but I don't think it's talking about pricing or the decision where you sell a product. Kinda have to read between the lines, but it's probably talking about promotional content about the product. Definitely not pricing or the location where you choose to make a product available for purchase.
Well I was replying to a user that said he was not significantly affected by marketing, because he does things like sorting products by "cheapest" and reads the product ingredients. I simply said that those decisions are made purposefully and are not random. It's a way to position products.
A product it's cheap because it was designed that way. It won't lose value over time dropping the price tiers until it reaches the price with almost 0% margin, rendering it into a great deal that simply followed some natural event of dropping price while retaining it's value.
About the main article I simply said that we should be aware that "promotional content" is everywhere, and relying on the illusion that "the marketing never catch me, I use adblockers" is just that, an illusion. That probably won't even make them wonder they are actually being promoted to. Flagging content as promotion is the exception, not the rule.
> Well I was replying to a user that said he was not significantly affected by marketing, because he does things like sorting products by "cheapest" and reads the product ingredients. I simply said that those decisions are made purposefully and are not random. It's a way to position products.
If I read Jensson's comment in the context of this article and the comment they were replying to, then I think they are saying that they are not affected much by promotional marketing material. Coming out of the bushes to say that the things they care about (ingredients, price, store) is also marketing (for a sufficiently wide definition of marketing) isn't adding any insight. It feels like deliberately missing the point just to argue for the sake of arguing.
Well I didn't read it like that, neither I think it makes sense to have that interpretation.
It's pretty straight forward, second sentence: My first instinct whenever I see something in an ad or something being marketed is to assume it is a scam and just move on
Then he goes on about his buying habits and said that "Companies hates people like me, they would rather I not see their ads since it is just a dud anyway.", so for me it was pretty clear he was talking about marketing in general, then he went more specifically about ads.
I simply said that pricing, packaging and placement are examples of marketing tools used to position products and services. This has been in text books since the 60's. A product listing is literally being marketed to, per definition.
So I really don't understand how this is missing the point, or how I'm deliberately missing it by pointing some marketing tools used in the Marketing Mix.
Pricing and placement are distribution, not marketing. Distribution strategies matters for marketing, but distribution isn't marketing. Marketing requires all of the 4 p's, if you lack the last one it isn't marketing. Marketing might give feedback on the other 3 p's, but they don't control them.
Example of product launch without marketing: A product manager have an idea of a product that doesn't exist yet. Engineering developers the product. The manager decides the price based on what they need to deliver the product and tacks on some extra. They determine to distribute via the Android and Apple app stores, so launches the products there.
Marketing is what happens after all of those decisions has been made. Marketing might have feedback that they should also release a web version, or that they might be able to increase the price, but that isn't the main function of marketing.
I don't understand the point that you're trying to make, like I never said that marketing owns everything and everyone bows down to marketing. That makes no sense. It's a discipline just like every other.
Most decisions go through many departments, each with their own arguments, each more important than others. Who gets the final call on pricing? Most likely financial dept. and any other price changes will come out of marketing budget.
Plus it differs from organization to organization. FMCGs, auto, media, all of them have different structures and relationships between these departments, each with different weights.
You gave me an example of people launching a product without a marketing department, nothing else. You know what? It's the product manager that will give support to customers, and that doesn't mean they aren't doing customer support.
I can give you a real example:
There was an American company called Hasbro that in the 80's bought the rights to sell some Japanese toy, made in japan, rebranded to Transformers and the marketing guys decided to launch an animated series to try to help with sales by giving a background story to the toys. I think it was an advertising agency that wrote the scripts but I'm not sure. So yeah... Transformers, one of the most popular media franchises, was literally content marketing to sell rebranded japanese toys.
So, no product development, no engineers, etc, an example without any of that.
> Pricing and placement are distribution, not marketing.
Pricing and placement are very much marketing. Even where to place products on shelves is a form of marketing (e.g. whether to place them near the cash register or near other products, etc.) There are analytics done on which products people pick when they are placed next to other products. Even when you think your purchase decisions aren't influenced by marketing, they are.
As for pricing: there are people whose job it is to find the best way to price products in order to "sell" the idea these are budget items or luxury items, etc. It is well known that pricing some things lower than a threshold is a bad strategy because people expect them to be higher priced. There's also the strategy of "anchoring" prices. All of these are examples of marketing, and there are many more.
You are not "supposed" to like anything, but all of the mentioned things have sizable nerd communities right now. The point remains that nerds are highly emotionally susceptible, and it's a mistake to pretend you're not. (My completely irrational hobby right now is retro computers like TheC64).
Rationality is quite the opposite of "suppressed or lacking emotional sphere". It's about being acutely aware of your emotions and how they affect your judgement.
Marketing associate emotions to products. For perfume ads it is a feeling of being attractive. For products marketed to geeks it is a feeling of being smarter and mentally superior to others.
Notice how successful geek marketing talks about the type of person who use the product rather than just about the merits of the products itself.
"The BingWiz languages are used by true 10x geeks who are are tired of group-think and corporate bullshit and don't want to be tied down by mediocrity. Mediocre corporate drones uses FlopFlup because their feeble minds are unable to comprehend the true power of BingWiz."
I've spent gobs of money to buy products, very nerdy products.
It was always to reduce headaches and friction. Better workflows for dev teams. Fewer production outages. Reduce/mitigate security incidents, etc.
I think the only ads I get is either product placement or sponsored search results, I don't read any spam or unsolicited ads/emails/messages.
However, I do not recall any purchasing decision that was not driven by some need/headache to solve and involved some peer-review/references by others to make sure I don't have blindspots.
Is this unusual in commercial/B2B context? I don't think there was all that much emotion, unless you call pain-relief an emotion. Couldn't care less what it looked like, branding, or anything like that, all I wanted is to solve my immediate challenge and forget about it.
Obviously geeks always think their product choices are driven by rational thinking. This is why marketing to geeks are like "you are more smart and rational if you buy this product".
Marketing is used because it works. Of course your decisions might be purely rational, if such a thing is possible, but in general marketing have an effect.
I fact the article seem to be itself a clever piece of marketing, and the minds of HN is eating it up because it confirms what they want to believe about themselves ("we are too smart to fall for marketing.").
Rational is a big word. I don't believe anything is ever 100% rational. Is making good decisions based on implicit learning (which is entirely subconscious) rational?
to be precise, marketing is just a way to engage with the target audience and potentially start a conversation/relationship.
It's not that hard to reach or even meet "geek" decision makers face to face. Just go to any tech conference. send something insighful to the mailing list with non-intrusive link in the signature. hit them up on linkedin/other interest groups. I'm totally OK with vendors get into bidding wars over SEO keywords so I can find what I need this minute much quicker.
Why would anyone want to have someone shitting into their brains anyway? There is reason ad-blockers and such are so popular.
Geeks just tend confuse marketing and ads, not sure why. maybe most of them never tried to market/sell anything?
Of course, ads do work on everyone, to the extent they manage to capture your attention. When was the last time you bought anything because you saw an ad? All of them are pure cringe. Placed content/paid editorials? Just as cringe.
True to form, I've also duly ignored the article and dived straight into comment, to avoid any marketing potentially influencing me directly.
Advertisers will produce statistics to prove that their kind of marketing "works". But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds.
Also: advertising != marketing. Marketing includes product design, pricing, channel development, and a load of other activities that are basically useful. Like, there's no point in developing a product that has no market; a marketer will warn you if that's what you're trying to do (just before he resigns). An advertiser will tell you that everything's groovy, your campaign is going great, and by the way, here's your invoice for the last quarter.
> Advertisers will produce statistics to prove that their kind of marketing "works". But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds.
Or, say, running an A-B test and measuring whether people in the control group buy more of the product or feel more positively about the brand than the exposed group.
An A/B test won't tell you anything about how people feel about a brand. A/B testing is useful for telling you how badly your UI designers screwed up. It's a way of testing the effectiveness of websites.
It won't tell you anything about the usefulness of plastering the world with billboards, nor of TV advertising.
A-B testing will tell you whether internet advertising works.
Pick an ad. Assign users at random into groups A and B. Show users in group A the ad. Don't show users in group B the ad. Watch and see at what rate users in group A and in group B buy the product. (Or survey the users in the group to ask how they feel about the brand.) If there's a statistically significant difference between the behaviors of people in group A and in group B, then you have statistically significant evidence that the ad works.
Yes, this kind of thing is harder to do with billboards and with TV advertising than with internet ads. This is one of the selling points of internet ads over TV and billboards. If you buy ads from Google or Facebook or whatever, they can run this kind of experiment to measure how effective your advertising actually is. It doesn't involve peering into people's minds, just watching their internet behavior and/or surveying them.
- Buyers clicking on the ad, rather than just stashing the product name, and later buying it offline, or through another channel
- People not using ad-blockers
- The "statistically significant" evidence being statistically significant
The vast majority of ad views have no effect on the viewer at all.
Suppose 100,000 viewers are shown the ad (that's your group A); and 0.01% of viewers click on the ad, and complete a purchase. That's 10 actions - much too small for statistical significance. I have no idea whether these are typical numbers; but if that completion rate is in the ballpark, then I guess you need to show the ad to at least a million people.
But what about everyone else (group B)? That's the rest of the population of the planet. How many of them bought the product because they saw the ad? Zero, because they weren't shown the ad. You have no statistic for group B at all.
It makes more sense if you're comparing ad A with ad B. Which one produces more completions? That would be a more convincing statistic. But it still doesn't tell you that internet advertising "works", in any quantifiable sense. It tells you which style of ad works best, without telling you how much better it works than simply not bothering.
And it doesn't tell you how many people were sufficiently annoyed by the ad to vow never to buy that brand.
> Buyers clicking on the ad, rather than just stashing the product name, and later buying it offline, or through another channel.
I'm not talking about measuring clicks on the ad. I'm talking about either surveying people or about measuring their post-ad behavior, e.g. whether they buy a product. Yes, this generally misses offline behavior, but it captures a lot more online behavior than whether or not you click the ad. People measure clicks on the ad too, but that's not what I'm describing.
What this requires is accurately tracking a user across the internet, i.e. being able to identify a user who is part of your experiment as the same user later buying a product (or visiting a website, or answering a survey). Which is an imperfect mechanism. But it works well enough to run this kind of experiment.
Ad blockers don't really mess this up. The experiment takes the existence of ad-blockers into account. E.g. if everyone used ad blockers, this kind of experiment wouldn't show positive results (except by random variation).
And you're right, you do need a lot of data to get statistically significant results when people don't buy the product that often (when "conversion rates are low", in the lingo), which is a challenge with measuring "conversions". It's a lot easier to measure those for, say, mobile games than it is for cars. If you're a car manufacturer, then measuring car buying this way isn't going to work.
When you do this in practice, it turns out sometimes the results are significant and sometimes they aren't. Probably because some ads work and some ads don't.
> It tells you which style of ad works best, without telling you how much better it works than simply not bothering.
The style of experiment I described is a "holdback" experiment. It compares showing people the ad vs simply not bothering showing (some subset of) people that ad. People in control group B are treated as though the ad under the experiment never existed in the first place. (Which typically means showing them some other ad in its place, because that's what would be done to users if the ad campaign under the experiment wasn't being run.)
>But what about everyone else (group B)? That's the rest of the population of the planet.
This isn't how A-B tests work. Groups A and B aren't "people who see your website with change A" and "everyone else, including people who never interact with anything you showed them at all". A good experiment design means a good control group that you can measure something about. These experiments aren't stupid. (Well, sometimes they are. You have to set it up well.)
> And it doesn't tell you how many people were sufficiently annoyed by the ad to vow never to buy that brand.
Well sure, but it can tell you if your ad results in people answering survey questions about your brand more negatively, which might help you notice that your ad is annoying and counterproductive.
Anyway, long story short, internet advertising is a whole lot more measurable than you were originally suggesting with "But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds."
Yes, there are limitations. Yes, a lot of statistics about marketing "working" is bullshit. But some of it isn't.
> This is why marketing to geeks are like "you are more smart and rational if you buy this product".
Can you show examples of that kind of marketing? I just don't remember ever seeing such a thing, and I certainly don't think I've bought a product based on such marketing.
I think you’re reaching too far or ignoring the post you’re responding to. When people have a burning issue they mainly just check if something solves the problem.
> Notice how successful geek marketing talks about the type of person who use the product
Is that really successful marketing? I find it extremely cringy and a sign that this is a product to avoid, especially if it's a tool for work and not purely a gadget for entertainment purposes.
Nerds can also be influenced by by one upping your competitor’s specs sheet with gimmicks. Features that look good on paper, but are badly implemented and have limited usefulness in practice.
> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.
For me it goes like this:
* see an article or link description that promises something interesting. If it has a sound rationale and not too many buzzwords I continue.
* quickly skip the homepage/brochure to look for hints of real use-cases or some hard, tangible problem they solved, ignore the rest.
* check the pricing tabs to get a rough idea of the features, figure out if I'm in the target audience and to find out whether the pricing model scales with my needs or with theirs.
* check the documentation, look for quick starts, specific guides, integration with other tooling.
> Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.
I often compare products by their docs after filtering the pricing pages. So if you show up on Google for the thing I need I likely end up in your docs. Good docs are a selling point for me :)
I don't think that's at all true. Moreover the assumption that they are more rational by default actually leads them to be more susceptible.
Slap "google" on an open source tool and it'll get 50x uptake, for instance. It might not be a sports shoe but the same emotional dynamics are in play.
Putting out a website full of statistics, or a tutorial, or a Product Hunt launch, or just a Show HN with a paragraph about how your product is incrementally better than the existing solutions will get thousands of nerds showing up at your door. We might like to think we're better than people who follow ads, but really we just follow different ads.
Promoting technical documentation as marketing is a bit odd though. Generally speaking the reader will need to have seen some sort of external marketing in order to make it to the product website and then on to the docs.