> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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!
A good example, especially if you are interested in any facet of video imaging, is [0] and here is why: 1) it provides standards references, 2) it provides usable first approximations you can execute right away to verify them, 3) its examples are well-selected. Since my company supports about the most conservative industry on Earth, we have to convince layers of bureaucrats we know what we are doing and the concepts therein helped us do it. We will not necessarily buy the company's products, but they certainly gave us some ability to attach numbers to what was a bit hand-wavy. In return the company is now 'of interest'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So in what category were those commercials for smoking? Clearly these campaigns were based on disinformation, manipulation, and they were highly successful.
If you were aware, you would never smoke. Same for interest. Why would you be interested in a black lung. Furthermore, desire. Not sure what a cowboy riding on a horse has to do with smoking.
So, none of those commercials teach you what smoking is actually about. It is about getting you addicted so you become an ATM for big tabacco.
It seems that your argument is, that some marketing is somewhat malicious - and I agree.
But to say that all marketing is ill-intended and manipulative seems way to extreme.
"Providing good documentation" could be considered a marketing move, if that was what would set a product apart, and make it interesting to buyers.
Making bad ad-copy and intrusive advertising in general is not something I find very interesting personally. That doesn't mean, that it doesn't work, or isn't morally wrong (you mention smoking).
Selling and promoting your product is necessary for most companies. And it can be done in a tasteful, informative and non-intrusive manner.
> Anyone who tries to manipulate anyone in any matter is a fool.
and provided a counter example. Of course, commercials don't have to be malicious, and can be informative and a net positive. But commercials rarely are honest sources of information.
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.
Every conceivable thing on earth has some flaw or trade off. Good advertising communicates information about the product while illustrating the next best alternative's trade offs.
I dislike being sold to, but I enjoy getting info for products that are relevant to me.
So, capitalism is built on the idea of mutually beneficial trades. It's supposed to be a cooperative game, and in cooperative games you should always provide as much information to your counterpart as possible. Capitalism breaks down when too much guard labor is necessary: if I don't know what flaws you are keeping hidden, then I have to spend extra effort on every transaction, and will buy fewer things that I want.
What I see lots of advertisers doing is treating it as a competitive game. They're slightly right, as they are competing against the other advertisers for the same customers. However, if all advertisers could just agree to be brutally honest, everyone would be better off. That's the purpose of governmental regulation, and governments routinely strike companies for deceptive advertising.
To be blunt, any advertising that does not make a good-faith effort to give me all the relevant information--the good and the bad--is deceptive. Perhaps you won't get in legal trouble (though you should), and perhaps it's socially acceptable because "everyone else does it" (not everyone, just the vast majority), but that does not make it right. It just means society still has progress to make.
> 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?
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.
Exactly as the sibling said, you would have nothing to program for because nobody would no you exist. You don't randomly search for Reggy, the product I made. But now you know about it because I just told you. All advertising is, is telling people you exist. You can do that by posting your spec manuals, making memes, making a landing page or a website, whatever you want.
> All advertising is, is telling people you exist.
If that is all advertising was, I don't believe this conversation would be happening. People (ITT) dislike advertising because of the other parts (tracking, subtle manipulation, etc). There's a side to it that has obvious benefit: Knowing you reach your target market with truthful and engaging content is something ad targeting, seo, etc, enable. The problem is they also enable deceit, manipulation, spam, etc. When I see the impact that has on people I know, I start to wonder if maybe it is worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Programming also enables hackers, viruses, etc. Advertising enables good things like knowing there is a cure for your rare cancer (even if you search, there has to be information, which is advertising). It also enables the bad stuff you mentioned.
It is literally impossible to do anything without ads. You go to the store and it says peaches on a can of peaches. That’s an ad.
FYI I know about "reggy" and would never visit it because it was "advertised" by a random guy wanting to use a place for technical discussions to sell their product which is lame.
I would be very surprised if you, or anyone on this message board, had a use case for it. It was a niche example that I knew you wouldn’t know. But you made my point that advertising is about awareness first.
Maybe we wouldn’t even exist, nobody would use this mostly-for-webdevs website, because we’d all be busy programming machines in factories that make things.
OP mentioned that people have jobs because of advertising. sabbaticaldev mentioned that this wouldn't be true for more than a few hours because humans need jobs, advertising existing or not.
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.
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).
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!)
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...
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"
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. ; )
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
Yes, that's a fair point, it's part of their job to spend time in calls.
Ironically this gives me even less confidence that I would be interested in what they offer. Maybe the mere fact that they conveyed the offer and spent an hour in a phone call is all they wanted actually?
Maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic on the matter though.
1. Getting you on a call (anyone, not just recruiter) is a way to drive the interaction to a conclusion, one way or the other.
2. Getting you on a call gives them the opportunity to read you.
3. Getting you on a call gives them the opportunity (if they are of the type), to make you feel a social obligation to reciprocate (information, time, etc)
I'd add sheer information gathering: even if the call leads to nowhere, they get a sense of how it's going in your company, salary data matched to a role, and a reality check on what they anticipated vs your actual situation.
I think it can be intesting to talk to a recruiter even if they have nothing decent to offer, provided one also enjoys just talking to other people. I just don't think it's an optimal path for anyone actually interested in a position, doing one's homework and applying to a company one's actually interested in can have better results.
Sales people are trying to discern what pain you are facing, your level of urgency for solving that pain, the consequences if you don't solve it, your budget, and your authority to make a purchasing decision.
SDRs/BDRs are often compensated by a "meetings set" goal. They may linger on the phone with you if they think you will agree to a meeting with an account exec. But outside of this initial marketing outreach, effective sales people don't want to waste their time with you. Much more so than engineers, they are measured and paid on objective results and specific productivity metrics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"The most obvious application of the mere-exposure effect is in advertising, but research on its effectiveness at enhancing consumer attitudes toward particular companies and products has been mixed."
"A subsequent review of the research concluded that exposure leads to ambivalence because it brings about a large number of associations, which tend to be both favorable and unfavorable."
This would make sense, since it's the unfamiliarity itself that elicits a negative response. Once that unfamiliarity is gone, you'd react normally (positive or negative). We're all familiar with Facebook, Google, Ford, Tide, dogs, hamsters, veal, brussels sprouts... But that doesn't mean that we necessarily have a positive view of them.
So the "Mere Exposure Effect" remains unproven for positive response in an advertising context.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I will. In the same way a raincoat will hopefully prevent most of the water from reaching me, so too I hope blocking ads with software will prevent them from reaching my eyes
> 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
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Engineer mantra: Less is more.
Marketing mantra: More or die.
Buy strings.
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> 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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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 !
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, no. I am not about to resize my browser window every single time when I switch tabs.
Line width is not something a designer came up with and just decided to force on to people. It is well-supported by research and actually proven to make text more pleasant to read.
Also, don't you think it is a bit silly that you are effectively just arguing that we all should go back to plain text with no formatting?
>I am not about to resize my browser window every single time when I switch tabs.
That's sincerely and squarely your problem to deal with.
>Line width is not something a designer came up with and just decided to force on to people. It is well-supported by research and actually proven to make text more pleasant to read.
Doesn't change my point that user preferences should be left to the user to decide.
>don't you think it is a bit silly that you are effectively just arguing that we all should go back to plain text with no formatting?
No. That is actually the ideal internet. Browsers are user agents, users should be rendering web pages as they see fit.
Practicality dictates the correct answer is somewhere in the middle, but authority resting with the users is a good thing.
> That's sincerely and squarely your problem to deal with.
User testing suggests you're very strongly in the minority here. Surely web pages being too thin is actually your problem to deal with? Can't you just configure your user agent to render the page as you prefer?
> No. That is actually the ideal internet. Browsers are user agents, users should be rendering web pages as they see fit.
Alright, fair if that is your base stance I can understand your reasoning.
If we are talking about the territory of practicality, I am fairly confident to state that most people (general audience) will have their browser window either in full screen or at the same size. So, when catering to "the masses". When dealing with longer form text, dictating the line width, given the studied benefits, to me seems like a sensible practical thing to do. Which benefits most people, except for purists like you.
Which is a long-winded way of me saying that maybe it is more your problem than it is my problem ;)
Why would you do it for every tab switch? You do it once to fit your preferred width and all websites adjust. You would probably have a shortcut for that in your window manager.
There was a great time at some point in the past where everyone went all in on responsive design and most websites behaved well, what we have nowadays is a regression in usability (at least for power users).
Some websites have one column of text. Some websites have a menu on the left as well. Some websites have menus on the left and on the right.
So no, I would not need to adjust it once as websites still have different variables that would have an effect on the line width for text.
Even with good responsive design you will run into that. Iff you are saying that with good responsive design elements move out of the way of text then you aren't really a power user in my book. Because that means you are settling for a mobile design on desktop.
In addition to all of this, I simply don't want to maintain a floating browser window as that can be a distraction. I rather have the website I am looking at and trying to focus on take up my entire screen.
While I agree with the research, let me be the judge of what works (for me..), span the text across the full width, so I can resize the window as I see fit.
It's a shame that one needs to use scrips to modify websites used daily (e.g. I do that with Github to span the full width).
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.
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.