Why are marketers so disconnected from reality?
I'm struggling with collaborating with business people with no dev background, especially marketers.
Not that I want to judge them nor do I try to outsmart them, but some almost live on completely another planet, away from actuality and how things work in real life.
I appreciate pushing boundaries and fully respect creative ideas but maybe it shouldn't be taken to an extent that you lose touch with customers or how that solution can be realistically implemented in real life.
How do you work with marketers who have not never built anything in their life, yet they are the first ones to give business advice?
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Ouch... I assume you are frustrated with something and just venting but if you have a problem with every business person and marketer out there, is it just them?
I don't know what you have faced but the problem is generally around the lack of a common language.
But I need to note that, the customers are the marketers' job. If you really think there is a problem there, you should raise that issue with them, with data (so, not just your opinions) and they should listen. And...
This is not their job. This is (what I can gather from what you wrote) your job. Unfortunately, even if I (and I guess, you too) don't like that, the creative work is what raises marketers' profiles. So it is the hard currency of their country. Understand that and you will be in a better situation.
These are very harsh words. Do you think software engineers who are designing software (but not actually implementing the code) are "people who have not never built anything in their life"? No? Then please don't say that about my people too.
hmm I'm not sure it's that simple. I think there is a great maxim out there - "you're either building the product or selling it, everything in between is extra" and unfortunately Marketing falls in this category. You need someone who knows how to sell it, and you need someone to build it, and if you have a marketer it is a plus but it isn't always a NEED - and we see this prioritization reflected in how SaaS businesses operate internally. No hate to marketers, but at least a big corporations I don't know what they spend most of their day doing...meanwhile I know the devs/salespeople are providing real value.
Marketing isn't going away, but it hasn't the clout as other roles.
Woof... I personally buy into the management legend Drucker's viewpoint:
In many organizations, marketing is perceived as a cost centre and sales is perceived as the resource gathering/mobilization function ("the rainmakers"). I don't particularly subscribe to that idea. In my opinion, marketing is one of the most important functions in any organization (and I say this with confidence because I worked in agency-side, client-side and both in Private and Third Sectors).
If you don't know what someone is doing in an org, does it mean that they don't provide value? Can't it be because you don't know or understand what they do?
I agree that we don't have the clout as other functions. And that is because it is extremely hard to quantify marketing. And unfortunately, most of the time my people do not understand how to measure their inputs -- mainly because nobody cared about teaching them that. Production (whatever soft- or hardware) is somewhat quantifiable, sales are very quantifiable.
Another dimension to that is marketing is not always understood by leadership and most of the time considered as a "soft discipline". Unfortunately, that leads to unqualified people being employed. But this is a management problem, not the marketing's problem.
Modern marketers are a weird mix of data driven strategists and creatives. Good ones can talk tech and numbers, while keeping an eye on what the customer wants. A lot of tech orgs would be dead in the water without their marketing team, especially as tech gets more and more crowded.
I've worked in marketing for 15 years. That includes three different VC-backed tech startups and a bootstrapped SaaS product. Of those companies, one went to zero, one sold for $125M, one is actively being shopped, and one I'm working on now.
In my 2nd VC tech company, I was the first Account Manager before transitioning to marketing. My job was literally to sit between engineering and the client and act as a go between so the engineers could work.
Without knowing the details of your situation, here's some common reasons engineers feel like marketers are disconnected from how engineers see reality:
Marketing by its nature is inexact. Emotions, colors, design and language are all squishy, and that's the world we live in. We work to persuade and build relationships. Trying too hard to parse language in the way engineers parse numbers can be counterproductive because words mean different things to different people.
Marketing changes constantly, especially at the tactical level. Facebook barely existed when I started my career, and now its the first thing I have to think about almost every day. What worked on Facebook 6 months ago doesn't work at all now. Multiply that by every major social channel, add in GDPR and the death of cookies...well, you get the idea.
Engineers don't respect the above facts about marketing, and marketers usually have very little technical knowledge, at least early in their careers. Most didn't get the opp I did to learn directly from the engineering team during the difficult early days of building a new product, and engineers almost never embed with a marketing team to see what the day to day is like.
In one company I worked at, engineering refused to say what a product did. We were building a massively powerful MarTech product and the leader in the category had a well defined pitch that clearly explained what the product did. Marketing tried to develop a pitch like that, and the engineering team was never able to get on board. They kept saying, "but we can do way more than that!" They never understood that a single, clear pitch is how you get in the door, and THEN you show them everything you can do.
This all rings true to me as a developer who has been one for a long time, and only recently (past 2 years) gotten my head around marketing to a certain degree.
I find the biggest issue is that to be most effective for either side of the equation (developer vs marketer) requires commitments that both sides can find it hard to commit to.
Your average developer needs more structure and solid product vision -- anything less than that and they can grow frustrated.
A marketer, on the other hand, needs flexibility in order to find product market fit. Excessive rigidity hamstrings their efforts.
I can't think of a simple solution to the problem besides having very solid communication across the lines. In the OPs case it sounds like that could be missing. You guys probably need someone who can explain both sides to both parties.
Engineering needs to remain flexible in the early stages of the product and to anticipate product change. And on that same token, marketing needs to understand that constant pivots will have a significant impact on engineering time, resources and oftentimes morale.
Without knowing any other specifics it's hard to give any more input than that. Unfortunately this is a very common problem that many companies can never seem to completely resolve.
Hi, a marketer here ;)
I'm totally agree with you, in marketing niche you a lot of people who cannot do anything, and they have to pretend they know about, and it's just a disaster.
However, there are good marketers too, sometimes we fail and sometimes we win, as common people we are.
Seems like both sides are frustrated with each other. Sorry, but I can't understand either view. People accusing people because they have a different view on how things work?
I've known great marketers who had an inherent understanding of how a product is created and how to translate the passion we devs have to the masses. I've known many fellow developers who also had a marketers mindset. But I've also seen many marketers that somehow hyped their way up and seen developers who did the same that were terrible team players and communicators.
So, I'm sorry but I can't agree with your horrible generalization :) I don't know what you went through but it's more about people being different rather than everyone in a certain profession being collectively disconnected.
"I appreciate pushing boundaries and fully respect creative ideas but maybe it shouldn't be taken to an extent that you lose touch with customers or how that solution can be realistically implemented in real life."
As a developer I actually believe the exact opposite. We tend to get really excited about what we can make and forget that "why" we're making something. Knowing that isn't marketings job but it lays with the leadership and developers should also have an idea about why they are building something.
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From my experience, among professions, marketers have the lowest level of delivery success for many reasons. The final result of all marketing efforts is conversion. I assume branding is not what most indie hackers are looking for. Conversion depends on many factors, and many of them are out of the marketers' control, e.g. product market fit, UI/UX quality, content quality, pricing, site quality, etc. A good marketer should be able to evaluate how well other factors would like up with their effort to generate the result. But I think many marketers are just technicians, i.e. they can't see the whole picture and mainly execute their marketing strategy based on their more narrowed understanding of the business/users/market.
So it is important to find a marketer who can see the big picture and can listen to your concern/insight/business & user knowledge. Just my 2 cents.
Marketing is bs. What you need is a designer.
So design is not a part of marketing, you say?
Not at all. All I’m saying is that traditional ‘marketing’ does not work, if you want to become a product first company. Steve Jobs believed that. The users don’t know what they want, until you show them. The task of design in all this is to make the functionality accessible to mere humans in a way that pleases the senses. That is the root of innovation, a religious obsession with the product.
This is a very serious thing to say. And I think and believe, on the contrary, the "traditional marketing" works so well, you can't imagine. The problem is what you think "traditional marketing" is not "traditional marketing".
Sending a couple of tweets, writing a blog post and running a Facebook ad is not marketing more than putting a couple of dots and a few lines on a blank canvas is design.
I will not make assumptions about someone I don't know believes what. But from what I understand, yes, Jobs had a great product focus. But also he understood business. Which can be seen in his "waiting for the next big thing" at the end of the 90s.
I don't think aesthetics is part of the design. Most of us think that it is.
And "a religious obsession with the product" is not a part of marketing, you say?
In the "traditional marketing" there is a thing called the "marketing mix". One of the components of that "mix" is "Product". Not the production of it but its design, how it works and who it is for are all under marketing.
But apparently, you think not and this means we have a fundamental difference between our worldviews. I am thinking this discussion might not be fruitful for either of us.
Yes, it wouldn’t be fruitful exactly 😂 good luck!
They can't really create an asset. So they look to develop a skill that can earn money. Most, and even the successful ones, will have narrow skills, but try to market broad skills. Proceed with caution. We found the real value is in their ability to manage low cost labor, who will execute at a reasonable ROI.
I think it's important to make a distinction because in my experience not every marketer is the same. And you highlight one of the most important aspects actually, i.e., those who have never built anything in their life, who just give common-sense advice from their keyboards.
Just look at Twitter which is these days starting to look like LinkedIn where those fortune cookie tweets dominate feeds.
Taking a look at a marketer's past experience and before bringing them onboard having a hands-on discussion can help. Even if she/he didn't build anything from scratch, did he actually work on growing a product? What actual experience did she/he have? Ask for specific examples.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
This is somewhat true. Since everyone "knows marketing" after reading a couple of blog posts here and there (that here and there mostly being Hubspot and Buffer blogs), the barriers to entry are extremely low. And this is true not for marketers but also for tech people, founders, etc.
But that is the thing. "Knowing marketing" through a bunch of blog posts is no different than "knowing coding" (note, not "software development") by lifting code from stack overflow (the art known as cargo cult programming). And if I were to judge software developers by their least proficient members, I could say very harsh words too.
That is the thing: you don't need to be a marketing genius to be a solid, successful marketer. Same with software developers. I am sure it would help if you are a genius but it is not necessary for success.
I am sure anyone can say this about business, software development, indie hacking, or whatever. Survivorship bias and retrospection are very powerful tools. But let's not be rude about each other's professions.