You might be surprised to learn that marketing works on me.

Even blatant marketing like commercials.

I found myself watching live TV. Likely a baseball game (Go Giants!). The ad was short, about 15 seconds.

Possibly this exact ad:

The shot of a guy on the floor struggling with his shoes spoke to me.

That’s me every morning. Or I’m the guy NOT shown who forces his feet into the shoe, ruining whatever that back part by the heal is called.

So, yeah, I got a pair of those shoes.

I’m a developer, so I guess marketing works on us after all. The ad used its product name everywhere. Just four or five seconds in, the shoes were presented as the miracle solution.

Could a developer product get away with this?

Probably not.

UNLESS… !

You know the developer problems so well that you can show them and get instant recognition. And that developer problem is as common and visceral as getting shoes on your feet.

Most marketers can’t get that inside a developer’s head. Most developer problems don’t have such frequent, intense annoyances.

That’s how we end up with shorthand best practices to avoid common mistakes with developers. Stuff like: don’t hype and keep product mentions minimal.

btw, imagine how this shoe advertisement would need to change if most of us were cobblers or shoe scientists at Nike or whatever—that audience might want to know more about the material or trade-offs made to create the slip-on result.

Most of our developer products won’t get a mainstream commercial. Even if they did, it probably wouldn’t be successful.

So, we still need to avoid blatant marketing. However, we should still seek to understand developer problems. They will point us toward marketing that will catch their attention.

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OH! If you’d like frameworks and templates to up your marketing with developers, I’ve partnered with a developer relations expert to create a guided training.

“Slip in” to the waiting list at developer.marketing.