DevExpress Newsletter 4: Message from the CTO

Here's the Message from the CTO from the fourth DevExpress Newsletter:

We're developers, right? We are gods in the machine, our world is black and white, binary ones and zeros are our meat and drink. As such, we see through marketing blurb in a trice. Us click on AdSense links or read ads in MSDN Magazine? Never! Ergo, it's not worth spending money on, right?

Actually it is. Any company that wants to grow (by definition, that's all of them) has to spend time, resources, and money on getting the word out to entice new customers to purchase. There's always attrition, so you must find new customers. There's cold calling (yuk) or there's advertising and marketing. The alternative — sitting back and hoping you get noticed or talked about — is way riskier.

We, of course, want to bring you (and excite you with) new products and functionality, and to do that we have to get new customers. To do that, we advertise, we purchase AdSense, we go to big events like TechEd and support local user groups when we can, we fiddle with SEO strategies, we produce this newsletter. In short, we try to get our brand noticed.

Marketing, no matter what we may think of it personally, is vital for a company's survival.

Provocative? I know many customers disparage our marketing in the sense that they believe we should be plowing back that money into R&D instead ("the products will sell themselves" usually with a following clause, "if only you had X, so mobilize the team and start writing it"). Also, marketing is not just magazine ads or web banners or conferences or sponsorship. It's also our evangelism efforts, for another example (blogging, twittering, answering phones and talking to customers, and so on). So, what do you think?

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