Love Your Inner Marketer
By Dan R. Greening
On the Internet, marketing can be mechanized. It also can be measurable, in realtime, interactive, personal, and international statistics. Communication is extremely efficient. These unique features give rise to new forms of marketing: affiliate marketing, viral marketing, one-click buying, and so on. Future columns will explore these marketing forms in detail, as well as Internet marketing software products. In this month's column, we will show how you, as an engineer, can do simple marketing functions to make your product more successful.
Marketers and developers often mix like oil and water. Marketers live in the world of perception, while developers live in the world of verifiable truth. If you're a developer like me, you make jokes about marketers: They're always trying to "spin" things, while we argue, "If it doesn't work, just say so." But we need marketers desperately. Without them, that great product will just die on the vine.
What do marketers do? They choose a market, identify product features and pricing that can satisfy both customers and buyers, analyze competitive offerings, work with developers to build superior products, inform prospects about the availability of those products, gather feedback from customers to improve the product, and fold that feedback into feature requirements for the next release.
Sound easy? It isn't. Let me be a nerd for a moment: Statisticians like me view each of these marketing tasks as a big, complex, continuous, multivariate optimization problem, where many of the variables are unknown.
