Now that is a headline. It’s bold. It’s confident. Its not true, but who cares? If you read this far than it did its job, hooking you the reader in through my digital storefront and into my shop to peruse my wares. That is what marketing does and that is why it still matters.
Steve Yegge starts us off right with his 2007 OSCON Keynote entitled ‘How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps’
Marketing is the difference maker for me when evaluating a software project as being a Technical Success instead of a full out Success. It is not enough that people can use your web service because that is only a Technical Success. They have to prefer to use your service over the competition, prefer to use your application over the way they worked before, prefer to buy your new product over your old product because marketing has made it attractive for your customers to do so.
Advertisers and paying customers are more interested in the market leader than the technical leader. Alex Kniess wrote a good piece on Scott Bedbury called ‘ Five ways a junior Employee can be a Change Agent’. Its really a simple Marketing primer that applies to technology just as much as Advertising (his original audience). With brands like Starbucks and Nike under his belt, it is a ridicious understatement to call Scott a subject expert. I like #3 ‘Make everything a pitch’ because marketing is like any learned behavior, it gets better with practice. Also, you want to get your bad pitches out of the way early on on unimportant things.
We must remember that, like Steve mentions in his talk, marketing is a powerful way to create persistant pointers to ideas or concepts or things. With a little effort, you can control where that pointer is directed. If you don’t, your customers will for you.
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