Marketing to Engineers (2001)

https://www.bly.com/Pages/documents/STIKFS.html

by herbertl • 2 years ago

245 186 2 years ago

drbig• 2 years ago

Sensible. And as much as I too do not like the whole "marketing", and especially video ads that try way, way too hard to "be clever", the truth is that if I don't know about a material, component, device etc. I cannot possibly even consider it.

Or in other words: we still need some way to discover stuff. Having less fluff and more specs is the way I prefer.

karmarepellent4• 2 years ago

I agree with you in general, but to quote another point made in the article:

Engineers are not turned off by jargon—in fact, they like it.

If a video or marketing-focused website tries to be clever, but without "fluff", and maybe alluding to some technical quirks or general behaviour of the product, I think I would like it. Extra points for being capable of not taking things too seriously, e.g. when some aspect of your product seems to be a weird design choice that is sure to get some flak from the engineering crowd.

pzo• 2 years ago

The hardest sell for engineers is having a button "please call us to know details". Article seems showing good points and found it quite accurate.

PS. I like also the style of author. Each point starts with short title then longer sentence with description and lastly few sentences with elaboration regarding that point but not too long.

edu• 2 years ago

Totally agree on your P.S. This is the Inverted Pyramid[1] writing stle, commonly used in journalism, and it helps get the points clear even when the reader might just skim the content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

karmarepellent4• 2 years ago

Sorry for drifting a little off-topic, but I think this is also true for recruitment. When I get messaged from recruiters, most try to get into a call or video conference right of the bat to discuss an open position that would "fit my resume". Then I have to ask what the actual position is about and if there's a job ad with more (technical) detail. I'm perfectly capable of evaluating if a position is likely to appeal to me when I see a document describing it.

There is also the added benefit of saving a lot of time on both sides, because I do not even want to get into a lengthy conversation about a position I have zero interest in.

Again, sorry for hijacking your reply to talk about something entirely different!

atoav3• 2 years ago

Sales people like to talk and hate to write.

I got regular calls from my cellphone provider about offers until one day I had enough and told them if they call me once more I will cancel my contract with them and go out of my way not to do any business with them again. If they want to show me an offer they can just send me an email. They didn't.

Generally my advice is to never agree to anything via phone. Tell them to send you the details. They always try to use the heat of the moment to make you do things that might not be in your interest. If it is really a good offer it will still be good hours later when you read the actual details.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

There is also the added benefit of saving a lot of time on both sides

My realization: it doesn't save them any time, as talking to you is seen as one of their goal.

The type of personality in that line of work usually thrive in live calls more than in factual chat, so there's absolutely no downside for them most of the time.

teekert• 2 years ago

Very ChatGPT-y :)

yowayb7• 2 years ago

I felt like the article itself was a good example of speaking to engineers! I also think, at least in the software world, the websites of popular software like VS Code and Docker are great examples of marketing to engineers.

pbd• 2 years ago

if the advert is not in monospace, I am not buying.

jraph• 2 years ago

It needs to be reachable from a combination of netcat and the openssl cli.

bravetraveler3• 2 years ago

If I can't order with POST, I'm out

inopinatus• 2 years ago

This is how informational RFCs get written.

bravetraveler3• 2 years ago

RFC 1-800-..., is protocol Blorp right for you?

or Blorp and the applications for $customer_ailment

creesch6• 2 years ago

Woah, this must be an old website. I was going to grumble about the text width being the entire page, but then had a look at the code. They are still using the `face` attribute for fonts. This website must be well over two decades old at this point.

Talk about advice for the ages...

Also, just quickly threw it in jsfiddle for a bit better readability. https://jsfiddle.net/hkwsy473/

bugtodiffer• 2 years ago

I didn't even notice. I think I wish all websites would just use the full screen instead of leaving blank space (for ads)

creesch6• 2 years ago

While I am sure some websites leave that space for ads. There is decades worth of research regarding readability. The amount of characters on a line influences readability a ton.

Certainly, on 16:9 ratio displays, text taking up the entire page width is just not ideal for most people. Most research points at roughly 70 characters per line being the ideal. Which means that even on a contemporary 4:3 display with a 1024x768 resolution, there will be some space on either side.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Looks better than modern crap.

bux93• 2 years ago

The first capture on archive.org's waybackmachine is from 2001.

Looks great on mobile though.

creesch6• 2 years ago

Yup, the portrait display of mobile phones means that text taking up the whole width of the screen (assuming normal font sizes) often lands neatly around the 70 characters mark.

vanschelven• 2 years ago

2001, apparently

ramchip• 2 years ago

Some definitions for "nixie": https://directmailproduction.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/nixies...

Nixies are records in a mailing list that should not be there. Nixies also refer to mail that gets returned to sender when mail is sent to undeliverable addresses or deliverable addresses but unknown or incorrect names.
Nixie: Individual, family, or business has moved but no forwarding address has been provided, possibly for privacy reasons.

atoav3• 2 years ago

If it is for engineers they probably mean a nixie tube which is a (old) cold cathode display device: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube

lukas099• 2 years ago

In the article it's actually used as an example of direct-marketing jargon.

immibis• 2 years ago

So SMTP is a series of Nixie tubes. Neat.

Simon_ORourke• 2 years ago

In full respect, this guy validated his first point about lack of trust in his opening remark "I am a chemical engineer". If he'd have said something about being an expert marketer I'd have stopped reading there and then.

monooso• 2 years ago

Here's the full sentence, in case you really did stop reading after the fifth word:

I am a chemical engineer and have been writing copy designed to sell products and services to engineers for 10 years.

000ooo000• 2 years ago

Engineers have a low opinion of advertising—and of people whose job it is to create advertising

Yep. I have a low opinion of anyone who tries to manipulate others using deceit and trickery. Marketers just happen to have made a career out of it.

The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.

karmarepellent4• 2 years ago

Well there is marketing and then there is marketing. Given the fact most of us would be out of a job without advertising of some kind, I cannot condemn it the way you do.

However I despise deceitful marketing as well. I am also not a big fan of the way my company markets itself. It is neither deceitful nor misleading, but just ... irrelevant to people working in the space and thus hard to align with.

But I also know companies (that we have worked with) who spend their marketing budget on hosting small-ish conferences and choose to post content from their (technical) blog in their LinkedIn. For me personally, that way of marketing themselves just inspires more confidence than ... overconfident salespeople.

sabbaticaldev• 2 years ago

Given the fact most of us would be out of a job without advertising of some kind, I cannot condemn it the way you do.

the same way cars brought the end of many professions. If there were no advertising we would all still have jobs and they would be much better too

weezin• 2 years ago

Idk the ad for the new windows terminal was pretty well received by developers[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE

neilv2• 2 years ago

The slick ad for chocolate-flavored paste was pretty well received by the people who eat paste.

karles2• 2 years ago

Anyone who tries to manipulate anyone in any matter is a fool.

Sales is necessary to every organisation however. There is no "built it and they will come".

Marketing in my mind should be about providing easy access to the right information so that human beings can make informed decisions. Sometimes you have to "push" that information or your message to the people you want to reach. Not everyone will magically find your wisdom.

auggierose4• 2 years ago

So in what category were those commercials for smoking? Clearly these campaigns were based on disinformation, manipulation, and they were highly successful.

yowayb7• 2 years ago

haha I didn't realize he was a consultant. I found myself nodding the whole time!

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Business consultants make the worst/best marketers, you get used to bullshitting 24/7 about shit you don't know fuck about.

cm20124• 2 years ago

I've managed tens of millions of dollars running direct respond ads and would never lie or mislead in ad copy. I've also never seen a lie in ads run by people I know.

YurgenJurgensen• 2 years ago

So in all of those tens of millions of dollars you never once advertised a product or service that had any flaws? Seems pretty unlikely.

aantix2• 2 years ago

Ever thought about starting your own company?

I'm a software engineer of 24 years. Maybe there's some synergy here.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn (in my profile).

syndicatedjelly• 2 years ago

The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.

Why is this bad? What is the preferable way one should advertise their services, if they choose to be an independent consultant? Should they sit quietly in a dark room and wait for people to find them, like some sort of monk in a cave?

closewith• 2 years ago

The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.

Is that more ironic than you commenting on what is ultimately just an ad for a VC accelerator?

atoav3• 2 years ago

As an engineer thinking about products that really got me. This seems a little bit outdated, but it is largely correct. If you sell a thing that I know (e.g. let's say a new Operational Amplifier or transistor) just give me the specs. A fluffy "ten times less noise" sentence is cool and all, but which firstborn was sacrificed to get there? Maybe the THD is really bad now. If you really managed to cover new ground just show all the graphs and how it is better than previous generations of parts.

With other more subjective devices show me why I would want it. And that isn't flashy looks. My equipment could look like a people from the Back to the Future franchise, if it has the right specs, the ergonomics are right and it covers the features I want covered I am all ears. Also: your Smart CloudBased thing is considered an anti-feature unless you open sourced your backend and I can self-host it.

Laremere• 2 years ago

5. Engineers are not turned off by jargon—in fact, they like it.

I think the point is right, but the reasoning is off. Jargon (at least in engineering) isn't a secret language for the benefit of confusing outsiders, but more words that have more specific meaning than more common words. Eg, "Use our API to run your container images" tells me a lot more than "Use our product to run your software". Software could've been compiled binaries, virtual machine images, raw code, excel macros, whatever. This ties into other points about how engineers evaluate products.

hyperman1• 2 years ago

I think there are 2 mechanisms for jargon, and he misses them both;

1) Easy filtering caused by precise communication. A non-jargon term is missing nuance. The audience can't tell if they should be interested (probably not). This is your API vs Software.

2) courting the customer by speaking their language. If a marketeer indicates some level of knowledge, the engineer is more willing to spend time: The chance to gain something usefull is higher. If a marketeer sells an API, I might ask if he also has a library, because I know he understands the question.

dghf• 2 years ago

He explicitly mentions the second of those, in exactly those words:

Why is jargon effective? Because it shows the reader that you speak his language.

sjamaan• 2 years ago

courting the customer by speaking their language

Ugh, that's like trying to use urban slang in your ads to appeal to youths - probably not going to go down very well unless you're very, very on point.

kalaksi• 2 years ago

Right, their reasoning in 5 and 6 sounded like the point is to just appear like an engineer. It may be enough for the ad guy, but I don't think it's strictly what the engineer wants. IMO, it relates to the previously made point that engineers want clear and accurate technical communication.

krisoft• 2 years ago

Also important to mention that engineers don't like jargon for jargon sake. If you use the right words wrong people will sniff you out.

We had a vendor who was trying to sell us some cryptography solution. They were loosely talking about quantum cryptography in their presentation. Some of our security minded engineers stopped them talking and questioned what they are exactly selling. Is it quantum encryption where the secrets are encoded in the quantum state of the transmitted photons? Or is it quantum-resistant cryptography where the crypto primitives are selected such that they should be resistant to attacks employing quantum computers? Turns out they could not answer. Seemingly they were just using the word because it sounded cool.

So talking jargon without having the technical depth can seriously backfire. In our case it made the whole meeting have an adversarial tone going forward and I haven't heard about that vendor since.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

It is quantum cryptography: the smallest possible discrete piece of cryptography. Please buy my xor gate.

rout39574• 2 years ago

We call that "Precision in language" in my team.

Some of our neighboring teams call it "A bunch of pedantic bullshit".

We agree to disagree.

ozim2• 2 years ago

I would say the way one communicates with others makes it “pedantic bullshit”.

If someone corrects me on each small thing and feels smug about it - I call pedantic bullshit.

If someone takes time to ask what I mean and explains why they would use other term so we align that’s precision language.

mihaaly2• 2 years ago

Most of the reasoning seems off, probably because the writing is based on those subset of engineers who eventually bought the product after being approached. For one reason or the other. : )

Probably the "doesn't like advertising" is spot on, but that is so for all human beings, except marketing lifeforms (some would argue that there is little or no overlaping between the two).

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

There is a form called whitepaper that is a kind of neutrally worded technical spec with a hint of advertising. I haven't seen many, but the ones that I saw I liked!

cwbrandsma• 2 years ago

Containers is a good example of how things can go wrong as well, especially when you aren't familiar with them, and you are looking into related technologies, like kubernetes, and suddenly you fine out you have 10 layers of terminology to understand before you can even get started.

There is a joke about functional programming: in order to understand functional programming you must first understand functional programming, and once you understand functional programming you lose the ability to explain functional programming.

inSenCite• 2 years ago

Great article but I find the increasing instances of identifying someone as an 'Engineer' stereotype bizarre and alienating.

What is that? a degree? job? title? is there only 1 type of person who becomes an engineer? and if it can't be a degree because there are 5 million different types of 'engineers' and it is definitely not a homogeneous group.

libertine• 2 years ago

You're onto something, and I can say that I still haven't found a way to define this group of people.

I'm a marketer, with some technical background, and as a consumer, I fit into the bucket OP talks. And clearly, I'm not an engineer. The only thing is that I'm more self-aware of emotional purchases disguised as logical ones, and I recognize that no one is immune to being influenced, but that came with the trade.

I guess that maybe more software engineers fit into this bucket, or more software engineers care to voice their stance making them a "loud minority" because they witnessed what the internet became and they care about it.

But certainly isn't exclusive to them.

I tend to think it is more related to people who experienced several instances of a communication channel without advertising, which ended up having their user experience ruined by advertising.

For example, in Television for many decades advertising was part of the medium. No program airs without ad breaks, product placement, etc. In a way, for many of us, it was always there and is part of the medium. Heck as a kid TV Christmas ads were a form of entertainment.

While on the internet, it is true that advertising has also been present for decades - but throughout the years you had many communities, products, and platforms that at some point didn't have ads, and many lived long enough to have ads ruined the experience -> I think this is where antibodies started to arise, and the feeling was validated by others who shared their bad experiences and concerns because, you know, its the internet :)

This is a complete anecdote based on personal experience - but I agree with you, there are more out there, and it isn't just engineers.

I'd say they're curious people (pioneers/early adopters) who value their experience but were defrauded several times by having companies trade their trust for many variations of ads. This can be anyone, it isn't limited to tech-savvy people, nerds, engineers, gamers...

Like people who started to search "reddit product name" +5 years ago (before Google picked up on it) in their decision-making process when buying something. How do you define that?

stagger87• 2 years ago

I suspect you're overthinking it. Consider the difference between someone wanting to know the technical specifications of an iPhone and the electrical engineer wanting to know the technical specifications of a resistor they want to use to build the iPhone. The marketing efforts for the iPhone and resistor should be different. Replace "electrical engineer" with anything you want and it still can work, for instance, how about a marketing person that wants to know the specifications of some cardboard materials when designing the product box for the iPhone. No longer engineering but the marketing for the cardboard will probably look more like the resistor than the iPhone.

It's really the product and it's intended use case that's driving the audience, which the link is just generalizing to "engineer".

nicbou• 2 years ago

I would like the opposite article. I'm an engineer type selling to average consumers.

For example, I learned that literally telling people what to buy is sometimes better than a neutral comparison of all options. They don't want the absolute best product. They just want to feel like they made a good purchase.

I also found that engineer types can become really good marketing people if they treat sales as understanding requirements, and highlighting how the product fulfills them. I didn't get better at manipulation; I got better at understanding what people want.

fire_lake• 2 years ago

Not an expert, just my experience:

Engineers gets excited by the details of a solution and try to sell on those. But end users typically want the problem to be solved with minimal fuss and effort. Details are off putting because they require effort to understand! Focus on how you will make things simpler.

yowayb7• 2 years ago

Am an expert, and I think this speaks to the crux of how bad software sells: you can hide the shortcomings by leaving out details, and a lot of customers are fine (and sometimes happy!) with that. On the other hand, a truly excellent product lets you keep the marketing simple too; so simple in fact, I would argue that the most popular software products out there don't require much marketing at all since they're fully word of mouth now, or even de facto mandated like git and various shells.

motoxpro4• 2 years ago

Think of yourself in your daily life. You don’t compare features between snap, TikTok, Facebook and instagram. You go on one that feels good, that your friends are on, where there is interesting content. THOSE are the features. Not “we have disappearing videos and the other guy doesn’t”

kstenerud6• 2 years ago

You can't compare social media companies because they work based on critical mass - where your friends are is the only measure that counts.

You can compare TVs, refrigerators, cars, ebook readers, shoes, couches, holiday getaways, vegetables, text editors, etc.

plaidfuji• 2 years ago

I must be squarely in this guy’s target audience because I read this and think, “well yeah, anyone who is fooled by regular ad copy is just gullible”. If I’m buying a product I want the best product. If you have the best product, you won’t need to hide it behind layers of content-free art, copy and “call for details” links.

trabant00• 2 years ago

One thing I know for sure about marketing to engineers: they are only human and vulnerable to the same tricks. They have particularities of course, but every consumer group has them.

For example I've seen this play out multiple times during my career: old tech has some problems. New tech products come in to solve those problems. They buy awareness at conferences, they invite influencers (yes, those exist for engineers) to use their product, they give incentives to the first wave of customers, they undercut the existing competition by initially taking a loss, they offer excellent support in the beginning (and only then), all the classical schemes from any market targeted at any buyer group.

By the time the new product establishes itself the fact the it isn't actually better - it just makes other compromises and thus introduces new problems - starts to become apparent. But guess what. The new shiny turd is already in production, may even be the new industry standard. And even if you are a marketing immune stellar engineer who saw through all the smoke and mirrors you have no choice but to use it. So the marketing worked.

And all of the above might be pointless theorizing because let's face it, engineers rarely hold the decision of what to buy.

kentonv• 2 years ago

Common marketing wisdom is that you need to focus on "solutions" -- what problems does your product solve?

As an engineer, though, this isn't what I want to know. I want to know what your product does, and then I will decide how to use that to solve my problems, which may or may not be the ones you anticipated.

Moreover, if you only tell me what problems you solve, I can't tell how well you solve them. I need to see what the product does to evaluate that.

CM30• 2 years ago

I suspect this could probably be broadened to "how to market industry specific software to people in that industry", since I don't think it's just engineers that figure out the worth of a product this way.

A doctor, lawyer, graphics designer or scientist probably also has industry specific jargon they expect to see, a certain type of visual presentation that matches how they expect data to be presented, a need for actual specifics about the product and its features, etc.

It's likely less engineer specific, and more the difference between marketing general purpose consumer goods and art (where emotions are the key differentiating factor) and industry specific tools (where a checklist of features is likely seen as more useful).

louwrentius• 2 years ago

The other day I was shopping for a redundant fiber internet link for our company.

Vendor A had a sales person that started a 20 minute presentation without asking us any questions. Most of what they told us wasn’t relevant to our needs or not informational.

Vendor B had a sales person that just asked what we needed and we had a detailed technical discussion about how they implemented redundancy.

You’ll never guess which vendor we chose.

JohnCClarke• 2 years ago

Your leadership was impressed by the powerpoint and so it was Vendor A.

throwway1203853• 2 years ago

And they negotiated an Enterprise rate that was 20% higher than the small team rate!

wslh• 2 years ago

Putting on my "engineer hat" [1] for a moment: the title of this article is misleading, and there's no introduction to clarify the mistake, which makes me trust the author less as a copywriter. The article discusses copywriting, which is only a small subset of marketing, not equivalent to it. The rest of the article covers points that are quite obvious to the HN audience: we don't buy a notebook or mobile phone because of good copy; we look at the specifications, often knowing them even before the products are released.

[1] https://www.debonogroup.com/services/core-programs/six-think...

napoleoncomplex• 2 years ago

Very much agreed on a lot of the points there, and on that note, how new frameworks market to developers is probably a great lesson in that. Pieter Levels (of nomadlist.com and similar fame) recently talked about it on a podcast, how he basically sticks to PHP and jQuery, and how often he sees developers jumping on a new framework, not realizing it's likely a marketing tactic that's pulling them in.

Time-stamped to that part of the podcast, roughly 2 minutes of relevant answer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2613

The part that feels most like the advice above: "And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it, and then a lot of people are like, “Wow, use this.” And I started noticing this, because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, “What are you using?” I would say, “Just PHP, jQuery. Why does it matter?”

And people would start attacking me like, “Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?”

throwway1203853• 2 years ago

Worse yet is when the influencer is being paid to peddle the bundling of a handful of technologies that have existed for years and that you're already using, and everyone who doesn't understand that you're already doing that won't listen when you tell them.

anal_reactor2• 2 years ago

The engineer’s purchase decision is more logical than emotional

I truly wish this were true, but looking at my own purchases, it's not.

FearOfTheDuck• 2 years ago

But don't other people (not only engineers) also slowly realize that all these emotion-appealing ads are deceiving? Don't they want to be informed, and not brainwashed and exploited?

MauranKilom• 2 years ago

Do they? I think it's mainly about how much energy you are willing to invest into making rational decisions over emotional/"gut" ones. I mean, in the end, it probably doesn't matter which kind of shaving cream you buy, so it's easiest to go with the one that (due to e.g. ad-created familiarity bias, or just "niceness" of visual presentation) you have the best feeling about.

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

Engineers look down on advertising and advertising people, for the most part.

Worse, we know how to filter it out and actively do so. We know all the tricks. Most successful advertising platforms are built by skilled engineers.

Engineers want to know the features and specifications, not just the benefits.

Replace engineer with people here. If you are selling something and you can't articulate what it is that you are selling, you are wasting your time. If what you are selling is very complicated (and many products aimed at engineers are), people are going to have questions that need answering. A lot of those questions start with the word 'How'. Avoiding to talk about the complex parts of your offering comes across as evasive and untrustworthy. Or worse, as clueless and incompetent.

A lot of successful marketing actually starts with these how questions. People will find their way to your website or your sales people if you have good answers to such questions. Maybe they'll checkout your product and give it a try. Maybe they'll sign up even. That starts with you providing something they need that they were looking for anyway.

iamacyborg• 2 years ago

Worse, we know how to filter it out and actively do so. We know all the tricks. Most successful advertising platforms are built by skilled engineers.

I don’t think there’s any evidence to this whatsoever. Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop, being a software engineer does not give you magical brain powers and frankly it’s just textbook Dunning-Kruger.

AnonCoward42• 2 years ago

I don’t think there’s any evidence to this whatsoever. Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop, being a software engineer does not give you magical brain powers and frankly it’s just textbook Dunning-Kruger.

I am not OP, but my interpretation was, that he knows how to remove injected ads. Not that he is invulnerable to ads. I might be wrong tho.

For myself I can definitely say that I am susceptible to advertisement, but I fulfill mostly the engineer cliché - for better or for worse.

Some examples are:

- technical details from manufacturers themselves (which are by definition advertisement)

- someone presenting a use case and solving it with a specific tool. If that use case sounds interesting to me I might actually try that tool. I cannot know if it is "real" advertisement or a genuine user in this case.

- looking for reputation on Reddit; again I cannot know if it is genuine users or advertisement - at least most of the time I can't

edit: formatting

orwin• 2 years ago

I think you're both correct. Engineers are still susceptible to ads, but are more often than not able to remove them.

Also, you have engineers/developpers like me who actively boycott products when the ad was too intrusive/take me for an idiot (sexualized ads do that for me). I've never bought a Ubisoft game since 2013 or a for the first reason (and avoid Razer), and the second one makes my toiletry shopping interesting.

containedgravel5• 2 years ago

Humans are susceptible to advertising full stop

In the same way we're still "affected" by rain because we have to use an umbrella or a raincoat, sure. Compensating for a known effect can come near or exactly the desired outcome.

sellmesoap• 2 years ago

Many of us view the internet with the help of ublock:origin https://ublockorigin.com/

and Sponsor Block

https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/wiki/Android

Added onto our web browsers.

It frees up a lot of computer and mental resources to use tools that save you time and screen realestate.

The down side is if we all do it then the money must flow from somewhere other then your favorite advertizer.

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

If you are selling something and you can't articulate what it is that you are selling, you are wasting your time

That's not how advertising works, though. Ads want to communicate how the product will make you feel or be. Cars are freedom!

yodon• 2 years ago

That is an example of knowing what your are selling

kstenerud6• 2 years ago

Except that many engineering types don't work that way. Cars are freedom? In what way? What - specifically - can they do for my freedom? And what - specifically - makes this car better? How can I know that it will do all the car things I want it to?

I've bought many cars in my life, and only once have I bought one without spending months beforehand digging through specs to find the best set of possible cars for my use case: a 1970 Opel GT came up on Craigslist, and I had fun fixing it up and then drove it across America. Actually, I already knew all about them, so I'm not sure if this qualifies as no-research...

I still remember one car purchasing occasion where I demurred because they were asking too much and I was trying to decide if another cheaper option would serve my needs. Then the sales guy said "Well, maybe it's just too much car for you." I said "You know what? You're probably right. Thanks for your advice!" and never went there again.

dangoodmanUT• 2 years ago

definitely don't know all the tricks, just some common ones

maccard• 2 years ago

A fool think’s himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

It’s dangerous to assume that you are above being advertised to, and naive to think that you are immune it

yowayb7• 2 years ago

I would love to see a remake of The Network (1976) about modern marketing with this quote in it.

kstenerud6• 2 years ago

I really wonder how valid this "truism" is. It sounds more like a word trap, wherein anything other than "I'm susceptible" is the wrong answer.

It's a lot like those silly word games in the early 2000s where saying anything other than "I'm secretly gay" was simply taken as further proof of latent homosexuality.

wavemode• 2 years ago

A nit: don't confuse the terms advertising and marketing. The goal of marketing is that the product's website clearly explains how it will benefit you. The goal of advertising is that you visit the website in the first place.

So, clearly the advertising -did- work on you.

whiterknight• 2 years ago

If you don’t think marketing works on you, then that means it’s working even better.

havefunbesafe2• 2 years ago

I'd argue well-designed documentation clearly linked from a website is a type of marketing.

RaftPeople• 2 years ago

My 2 cents:

I'm impacted by advertising+marketing, and I have no problem with products being presented in a good light.

The key is no BS. Let me easily see real value, not pretend value.

VeejayRampay• 2 years ago

what engineers like above everything else is correcting people, weaponizing that is the way to selling to them

anal_reactor2• 2 years ago

Engineers love being told how smart they are.

containedgravel5• 2 years ago

I doubt liking compliments is unique to engineering

trustno2• 2 years ago

(2001)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010126204100/https://www.bly.c...

MathMonkeyMan• 2 years ago

Six Things I Know For Sure About Marketing To People Who Know What The Hell They're Doing

Macha• 2 years ago

One of the more frustrating experiences with commercial vendors as an engineer evaluating solutions is that, at some point in every B2B vendor's life, they pivot their web page from selling their product to selling "solutions" targeted at execs, which apparently means removing all detail on what the product does. Usually this is also accompanied by moving the dev docs from the top header to a link on some page under a subsection of resources, below the link to contact a sales advisor.

yowayb7• 2 years ago

This made me laugh! I'd say it's a good indication to steer clear :)

ctrlGsysop• 2 years ago

Engineers nodding to this fall right into our marketing funnel. First thing we do is show you that we know how highly intelligent you are. Then we find the actual decision maker.

containedgravel5• 2 years ago

Wouldn't people evaluating your product usually be the people to decide whether to use it? How often do people just hand out their manager's numbers to random sales people?

gk12• 2 years ago

A good sales person will find your manager. “Hi, I see containedgravel and two others from your team are already testing [product] for [use case] in order to [benefit]. If you have 30 mins this week I can show you how to add governance, how to model and reduce your costs, and introduce you to our solutions engineers to help with a smooth rollout.”

And the first thing the manager will do is turn to their engineers and ask, “So, what do you think of [product]?” And that will determine whether the manager takes the call or not. Which is why winning over the engineer is critical.

javier_e06• 2 years ago

Engineer mantra: Less is more. Marketing mantra: More or die.

Buy strings.

"W: “DESTROY NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF KNOWN HOUSEHOLD PESTS WITH PRE-SLICED, RUSTPROOF, EASY-TO-HANDLE, LOW CALORIE SIMPSON’S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES, FREE FROM ARTIFICIAL COLORING, AS USED IN HOSPITALS!” - Monty Python The String Sketch.

MalcolmDwyer• 2 years ago

It's everything! It's waterproof! -- No it isn't. -- It's water resistant! -- No it isn't. -- It's... water absorbent! Absorb water today with Simpson's Individual Flood Preventers!

drewcoo2• 2 years ago

This is missing:

    1a. Listicles Suck

indymike2• 2 years ago

For about a decade of my life I was looked down upon by engineers because I made advertising that targeted engineers :-) I agree with a lot of what is in this article, there's one thing missing:

Highlight differences. Especially those that are quality of life improvement for the engineering organization.

AWS was weird (literally - it was very unique) and slower than dedicated servers when it came out. But there was a difference, and AWS let me know: No need to talk to people to provision, and once you activate an instance it will be available in minutes. That alone was enough to switch from on prem or managed colo resources.

acedTrex• 2 years ago

people extol the benefits of cloud for fast scaling, powerful managed services etc and those things are absolutely true. But in my mind, the real "value add" in many industries was not the services. It was the API...

mejutoco• 2 years ago

These are nice. Still IMO the real value was moving from the CAPEX column to the OPEX column.

indymike2• 2 years ago

I just remember being in a meeting about colo and on prom where people argued about why the colo was better... I provisioned a working instance of our web site (a big job board) with load balancer and fresh databases via the API... and the arguments stopped when I showed the team. "While you were arguing, I deployed our entire infrastructure into AWS. Try it out at http://somewierdawsurl.something"

barryrandall• 2 years ago

The first database server I bought required 3 months of negotiations and approvals, multiple vendor meetings, ~100 sheets of paper, 4 hours of capital asset tracking paperwork, and annual meetings with auditors to show them where the expensive metal box was.

My last database server just had to comply with a tagging policy.

That's what prompted me to switch (for work, anyway).

mgdev2• 2 years ago

This is one of the reasons why I disagree with point three of the article.

The emotion that AWS helped overcome was frustration that individual developers faced when trying to build something new. Suddenly, hardware was in their control from their keyboards.

That was a magical experience, and it definitely filled me with emotion the first time I uploaded an object to S3.

(I loved it so much, I later worked for that team!)

mihaaly2• 2 years ago

Difficult to look down upon people who are positioning themselves above others (know what you need better than yourself, power of influencing into what they sell, revenue/benefit ratio, deceiving undetected, etc.), but this way when we look up all that we see are a bunch of asses. ; )

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

There might be a difference between engineers, admins and all the people who want to get work done and are tired of technical gatekeepers.

ayewo• 2 years ago

Another thing AWS did that was really out there back then was to allow on-the-go, only pay for what you use workloads. EC2 instances were billed per hour instead of per month.

isuckatcoding• 2 years ago

Would be nice to pair this with some actual real life example ads

jt2190• 2 years ago

I feel like this piece itself plays to an Engineering audience (“ooh you’re soooo rational not like those others”). A bunch of this stuff is directionally true, but I’ll add that engineers often fall prey to “bullshit baffles brains” in marketing, so you can, say, emphasize individual performance metrics which in aggregate don’t make much difference but the Engineer will use to compare against competitors.

Also, making things sound complex (“I’m telling you this because you’re the only one smart enough to understand”) is a great approach. Your marketing material should look technical to support this.

yowayb7• 2 years ago

As a former Sales Engineer in enterprise software, I agree. "Engineering audience" includes less skilled and more gullible individuals, the degree steadily increasing up the hierarchy. (And since decisions are made higher up, you can see how valuable this article would be to a sales rep...). A common "individual performance metric" is "single pane of glass", which is aggregating multiple systems, often with a dashboard. It often takes more work than they're willing to put in to get it to make a difference.

cainxinth• 2 years ago

I also market to engineers and I have thoughts:

Engineers look down on advertising and advertising people, for the most part.

Most everyone in every industry dislikes advertising.

Engineers do not like a “consumer approach.

What people say they like and what they respond to in ways that marketers want are not always the same thing. Also, people almost invariably underestimate the impact that marketing has on them. They think they can’t be swayed by it, but they can (why else would GEICO spend $2b a year on it?). More broadly, there has been a major shift towards using B2C-style, informal marketing for B2B campaigns. Even in long, complex B2B sales cycles, attention spans are shorter and audiences are engaging with more consumer-style content like short explainer videos, and not just the traditional 5,000 word whitepapers and such.

Engineers are not turned off by jargon—in fact, they like it.

In my experience, that’s not always true. What is true is that they use jargon involuntarily and unconsciously because they are so immersed in their niche they don’t even realize they are doing it. Often, when an outsider like me is brought in and I retell their marketing story without the acronyms and jargon, they are extremely pleased to hear it told more plainly.

Why is jargon effective? Because it shows the reader that you speak his language.

If you’ve done your homework and you truly understand their business and technology, that familiarity will come across in the content even without jargon.

yowayb7• 2 years ago

What people say they like and what they respond to in ways that marketers want are not always the same thing. Also, people almost invariably underestimate the impact that marketing has on them. They think they can’t be swayed by it, but they can (why else would GEICO spend $2b a year on it?). More broadly, there has been a major shift towards using B2C-style, informal marketing for B2B campaigns. Even in long, complex B2B sales cycles, attention spans are shorter and audiences are engaging with more consumer-style content like short explainer videos, and not just the traditional 5,000 word whitepapers and such.

Agree, but would argue this is not marketing to engineers, this is marketing to the business which is interested in things like size and certifications.

kstenerud6• 2 years ago

I actually don't mind advertising copy (which I'll just gloss over), so long as there's an easily accessible "tech specs" section that lays everything important out in clear tables.

Yes, I want to see pictures of the product in action and the situations in which it shines, but that's a distant second to the actual specifications you're guaranteeing.

Those progressive-reveal pages that hijack scrolling to display beautifully vacuous showcases that Apple popularized are everything I HATE in advertising.

The stuff that you found in the printed version of Chip Magazine were about right - probably because they did their homework. The ads on their website? Utter trash.

frant-hartm3• 2 years ago

Engineers look down on advertising and advertising people

I don't think this is entirely true. We certainly look down on marketing fluff and playing on emotions, but I certainly appreciate well-made marketing material full of facts and specs.

gk12• 2 years ago

It’s not universally true but some of the comments here play into this stereotype perfectly.

athenot• 2 years ago

This is generalizable to "know your audience" and "meet people where they are at".

Generic sales people who are good at appealing to the emotional in their target demographic will only go so far when the audience is specialized in a field. That's not to say those people are completely immune to emotional tricks. But if that's the only way the salesperson tries to connect, they will have a hard time getting through.

I'm not a salesperson but I witnessed a coworker who was insanely good at selling our Healthcare SaaS product, and the way he connected with his target audience didn't feel sales-y at all. In fact, he genuinely cared about finding a solution for the people he was selling to. He believed in our customers and knew our product was going to help them in their goals—even with the warts & bugs we had.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

The tone of this article is moderately condescending to engineers.

Engineers want to believe they are not influenced by ad copy—and that they make their decisions based on technical facts that are beyond a copywriter’s understanding. Let them believe it—as long as they respond to our ads and buy our products.

Engineers prefer to buy from ads where it is clear the copywriter understood the product they are selling.

There is a raging debate about whether engineers respond better to a straight technical approach, clever consumer-style ads, or something in between.

You can be creative, as long as the critical facts are present and easy to find.

Engineers are not turned off by jargon—in fact, they like it. ... Why is jargon effective? Because it shows the reader that you speak his language.

Maybe, maybe not. Too much jargon is as much of a turnoff as not enough jargon. It's more about knowing when to turn it on and when to turn it off.

neilv2• 2 years ago

Note that this is regarding communicating to engineers about technical products. Which is not the same thing as communicating to non-engineers about technical products.

At least in IT (if not in TFA author's domain of chemical engineering), a lot of technical product sales has to appeal to non-engineers.

Sometimes appealing to engineering is just plain skipped. Like, the less the purchase is on the radar of customer's engineering people, before the enterprise sale is closed, the better.

This is one of the reasons that, if I found a startup doing B2B solutions, I'll try to market first to people within the customer company who have good understanding of the problem, even if I know they're not the final approval for the purchase.

throwway1203853• 2 years ago

Sometimes appeal to engineering is skipped because if the engineers knew what the product was really about, they would revolt against it before the sale was closed.

FigurativeVoid• 2 years ago

3. The engineer’s purchase decision is more logical than emotional

I think the author wishes this were true, but it’s not. Engineers have emotional attachments to tools just like everyone else. I often reach for a tool I like over the logical choice, and that’s just fine.

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

Yeah I think the article outlines much of how engineers perceive themselves, rather than how they actually behave. Look at all the VC-funded tech products with fancy landing pages. Webflow, Vercel, Warp, etc. They may list out more technical detail than a typical product, sure, but they're appealing to your emotions just the same.

Just head over to vercel.com; the tagline is "Your complete platform for the web." If you think that's not an attempt to appeal to you on an emotional level, you need to introspect more.

cm20124• 2 years ago

I've done a lot of advertising to engineers. The article is good, but I'll add - they want a self serve flow.

Gated content to sales works surprisingly well for everyone else but heaven help you if you try to get an engineer on a sales calls.

Hasz• 2 years ago

I mean, you've got to know your audience. There is an inherent trade off between specificity (which should hopefully improve your conversion rate) and generality (which should hopefully bring your message to more people).

Personally, when doing technical presales, I prefer to start very broad and keep cutting the domain in half as we go. To use an example from the article, if we're talking semiconductors, we can start broad with the problem ( I want to do x functionality for y price) then discuss solutions in various depths (eg all-in-one ic that's faster to market, or a discrete solution that is cheaper on the BOM), slapping on additional requirements and parameters as we narrow in on a solution.

Usually, defining the solution is a big part of the process, but there is a strong tendency to only talk about the solution, especially from engineers and marketers.

You don't want to alienate prospects by going to deep too quick, but you also don't want to insult them by telling them things they already know (or know more about than you!). It's a fine line.

nuancebydefault• 2 years ago

The engineer is a human being first and an engineer second. He will respond to creativity and cleverness just like everyone else.” Unfortunately, there is much evidence to the contrary.

Fortunately. Now I understand why marketing people sometimes feel looked down upon their profession...

layer8• 2 years ago

The problem with the advocated approach is that you’d have to market your product based on its actual merits, of which there may be few, rather than on some fantasy. ;)

mgdev2• 2 years ago

I disagree with point three. Engineers do make purchases based on emotions, just different ones than typical consumers.

Engineers are driven by emotions like:

- Desire for intellectual respect: Choosing innovative products to appear forward-thinking.

- Risk aversion: Preferring established brands to avoid project failures.

- Professional pride: Selecting high-performing solutions for personal satisfaction.

- Peer validation: Making choices they believe colleagues will approve of.

- Cognitive bias: Favoring solutions that confirm existing beliefs.

What looks like logical decision-making is often an emotion-driven choice justified with technical arguments. This is evident in online discussions where product critiques are framed logically but stem from emotional responses or biases.

Effective marketing to engineers should recognize these emotional drivers while providing the technical depth needed to rationalize decisions. It's not about ignoring emotions, but addressing the specific emotional needs of a technical audience.

leetrout• 2 years ago

These are outstanding observations

IMTDb• 2 years ago

And non-engineer are driven by which emotions ?

The entire article considers engineer to be fundamentally different than « normal people ».

Here is the trick: we aren’t. People like concrete arguments as much as we do. People buy product they like as much as we do. People like to play with stuff before buying as much as we do.

We ain’t special folks.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

I think I can elucidate what the author was going after, in the context of advertising.

Most people want shiny things in nice boxes. The aesthetic and aesthetic experience is extremely important.

In engineering it is the functional characteristics which we are ooing and enamored by.

In my line of work (power engineering) there is -zero- thought put into aesthetics and experience. In my girlfriends line of work (cosmetics development) there is a whole team larger than the technical team that puts an enormous effort into things like bottle design and "vibe".

Perhaps at a base level the same brain chemicals get stirred up, but what the author is saying is that the paths there are different.

kaffekaka• 2 years ago

This is very true. Failing to recognize the role emotions play in ourselves and other people is the source of many conflicts and misunderstandings. What motivates us and drives our actions and responses to things is not something that can be easily observed, especially in ourselves. When people describe their preferences they are often just describing what is in fact the rationalization for their emotionally driven choices.

andrenotgiant• 2 years ago

I think it goes even further.

I'm not sure if it's unique to developers, but many have tools and vendors that they HATE or LOVE with an irrational passion.

HATE - Seems often about tools or vendors that they had no choice in, but had to spend a great deal of time working with.

LOVE - Seems often about tools or vendors that they associate with advancements in their career.

These feelings of LOVE and HATE lead to emotional decisions.

ozim2• 2 years ago

I would expand on risk aversion.

If I am running a service as an engineer I already have huge amounts of stuff that can go wrong. If that stuff is in my control so I can do something about it when it breaks I feel safe and confident.

As soon as I get to depend on a 3rd party who might or might not have resources to fix my issue I feel nervous because I have my own stuff to deal with and now I get 3rd party tool that might bring more problems.

zinglersen• 2 years ago

I'm late to the party but I wonder if this is the same for advanced/professional traders compared to retail investors. Thanks for sparking some thoughts !

Marketing to Engineers (2001)

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