Controversial question from someone not as informed on the state of current as most here:
Anyone thinking of switching to a browser that doesn't have any script-interpretation ability? (Text-only or html/css only?) What options are currently out there?
>>Light side: Closing the loop between what the customer wants, what their actual problems are, and what engineering and manufacturing can deliver.
>Marketing seems to have given up on that sort of effort years ago.
Marketing hasn't, but companies' hiring and organizational structure decisions have - especially tech companies.
As long as the only marketing personel a company hires are advertising personel, given authority and responsibility for advertising only, the loop can't be closed.
In tech, programmers are the "engineering and manufacturing", but they tend not to want to be told what consumers want by the marketing team (who, if hired and authorized properly, would be doing rigorous independent research and data analysis using data from that research, user data, and bought research, to come by those insights...)
Thoughts after thinking about this comment and thread for a day:
Has the time come for wiki directory of non-commercial (possibly: advertising-free, cookie-free) sites with robust, actually valuable information, and other sites that are doorways to them (think: topical forums, even revived webrings, etc)? Could this feasibly get enough action to be useful?
> Marketing is product definition, awareness, lead gen, conversion, and then the measurement and improvement of same.
Don't forget the first step - research. Which involves either boots on the ground, offline, watching, talking to and interacting with people, or paying someone else to do it.
Advertising - including subsets of advertising like including models or playing on insecurities - is only a small subset of the discipline of "Marketing". Most of Marketing is about finding out what people want and need, how to deliver it, and how to let people know your delivery of their need-fulfillment is available.
Gimmicks are only needed if you can't figure out what people need or can't deliver it.
Bringing this up because Silicon Valley would be building much better products if our venture-funded companies hired marketers - not marketers who work on advertisements, social media, etc, I know we hire plenty of those - But the kind of marketers who rigorously research consumer needs and creatively find ways the technical capacity of companies can be deployed to meet those needs. User testing is only a small subset of market research, and it's sloppy, lazy, and ultimately very shortsighted to limit market research to user testing and data mining.