mdcrowcroft

Do you have any stats to prove that?

Not saying you're wrong, I'd just love to know what percent of sales are B2B.

Is it known what proportion of mac sales are B2B?

I wonder with all the talk of layoffs, cost-cutting, and chasing short-term cashflow if we're seeing most businesses say to themselves 'let's just get one more year out of the laptops we have'. A lot of companies have a 2-3 year turnover on laptops and pushing things out a bit for most people wouldn't be an issue.

In the short term that kind of change would have a severe impact on sales, but will smooth out a bit over the long term.

This is a really beautiful way to explain this kind of thing in software.

When I got to this bit "I work on multi-team task management software", it really made me think though. So much thoughtful design talent exists, and we're all just making B2B SaaS Productivity Software. Maybe I'm projecting my own insecurities though.

The 'intended audience' the book is written for is for the C-suite/business execs where marketing as a part of business has lost a lot of credibility which is why is serves as a good research based foundation to marketing.

You're right there's definitely jargon and if you're coming in cold the book is quite dense. Maybe this would be a better step two or three in someone's learning.

The reason I will always recommend this book to anyone interested in marketing is that there's a lot of junk thought leadership surrounding marketing that is thoroughly debunked.

I think one big difference between learning marketing vs learning software engineering is the lack of a feedback loop when you start out.

If you want to learn marketing properly, it's worth thinking of marketing tactics and marketing strategy as two different things. - Marketing tactics are things like, running ads, writing content for SEO. Comparable to writing code day to day. - Marketing strategy is the high level application of research and marketing science. Comparable to system design.

If you jump straight into tactics, growth hacking, posting on social media etc, you might learn how do some things, but you won't know why things work, and you won't know why generic tactics you read about on line maybe aren't working in your scenario. This is in the same way that you can learn to code online, but if you're only ever copy pasting from tutorials and stack overflow, you're going to get messed up with N+1 queries.

I would suggest getting a base level of understanding the core marketing science that exists. For this I would suggest reading anything from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. In particular the book How Brands Grow, it's a bit dry, but very approachable.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/019...