Marketers and Makers

There is a trend in this world to look­ing at the peo­ple who mar­ket well as the lead­ers. How­ever, often toil­ing away in obscu­rity are the peo­ple who make things and don’t nec­es­sar­ily know how to mar­ket them. Both sides are needed and we might want to start shin­ing a light on the mak­ers as they are as impor­tant as the marketers.

A tale of two Wall Streets

As many TNL.net read­ers know, I’ve been walk­ing across two dif­fer­ent worlds for most of the last decade: on the one hand, I’ve been work­ing on try­ing to get peo­ple in the finan­cial world to act more like star­tups, and on the other I’ve been help­ing star­tups under­stand some of the dif­fer­ence between wall street and the finan­cial world.

How­ever, it wasn’t until the 2008 cri­sis that I fully under­stood where I was wrong about my mes­sage: peo­ple out­side of the finan­cial world look at it as a sin­gle indus­try but there are a lot of dif­fer­ent com­po­nents to it and I would group them into two wide cat­e­gories: spec­u­la­tive Wall Street and plumb­ing Wall Street.

The spec­u­la­tive Wall Street is the one every­one is cur­rently mad at. Their job is to build tools that mostly make more money out of exist­ing money and the world they live in is sel­dom over­lap­ping with main street. It is a world of deriv­a­tives, stocks, and merg­ers and acqui­si­tion. It is a world where for­tunes can be made in a very short time and value can be destroyed almost as instantly; a world where appear­ances and proper mar­ket­ing are an impor­tant part of a product’s success.

Plumb­ing Wall Street, on the other hand, is touch­ing everyone’s life sev­eral times a day. It’s a world no one really thinks of or hears about and its main goal is to ensure that money and credit still roll around prop­erly. Plumb­ing Wall Street is who peo­ple face out to when they take money out of an ATM, pay with a credit card, write a check, or received their pay­check via direct deposit. Plumb­ing Wall Street is a world where the focus is on sta­bil­ity and reli­a­bil­ity. It’s not a very glam­orous world as no one really believes in the value of a strong infra­struc­ture until it breaks.

A tale of two devel­op­ment worlds

The funny thing is that the spec­u­la­tive Wall Street vs. plumb­ing Wall Street divide also exists in other areas. In the devel­op­ment world, the fric­tions that exist between devel­op­ers and sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors are very sim­i­lar to the fric­tions that exist between the two wall streets.

On one hand, you have a group that is try­ing to push the enve­lope, stretch­ing their prod­uct to its limit and some­times break­ing things along the way. On the other, you have a group of peo­ple who see change as the enemy as it increases insta­bil­ity, mak­ing their jobs that much more complex.

The devel­op­ers push new ideas (or work as idea mar­keters in that con­cept) and the sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors push back while they try to fig­ure out how to lower the risk those new ideas can pose to the sta­bil­ity of the exist­ing systems.

A tale of two marketers

The amus­ing thing in the rela­tion­ship devel­op­ers have with sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors is not dis­sim­i­lar to the rela­tion­ship social media mar­keters have with devel­op­ers. In the case of social media peo­ple, they try to push the edge and are often pushed back by devel­op­ers, who in this case, put on the hat of mak­ers as they are the ones imple­ment­ing what­ever prod­uct or solu­tion is pushed by the mar­keters. The devel­oper as mar­keter of soft­ware ideas is dis­placed, in those cases, by the mar­keter of prod­uct ideas, or ways to make money that may break the software.

In those cases, one can see some of the con­flicts that can arise as mar­keters may push for ways to make money that are incom­pat­i­ble with the social norms of the times. The mak­ers gen­er­ally work as a buffer in those cases, push­ing for some­thing closer to the nor­ma­tive mod­els (eg. the fight within google over use of track­ing cook­ies; or the fight within face­book over pri­vacy; or the cur­rent fight over net neutrality).

A tale of two governments

In a sim­i­lar way, there are two gov­ern­ments in most democ­ra­cies: on the one hand, you have the mar­keters of ideas, who try to sell their view of how the coun­try ought to be run to the elec­torate. We know those peo­ple as politi­cians but their role is mainly to be chief mar­keters of ideas, prop­erly pack­ag­ing the mes­sages around how the coun­try is run­ning or should be run. And with every elec­tion, cit­i­zens get to choose which set of ideas makes more sense to them.

The mar­keters, in this case, set the agenda, and pro­vide a direc­tion for the rest of the gov­ern­ment to follow.

Mean­while, the bureau­crats are a group of peo­ple who gen­er­ally are in work­ing in gov­ern­ment no mat­ter which party is run­ning the coun­try. Their job is to keep the coun­try run­ning as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble, no mat­ter who’s in charge. They make laws and poli­cies that are then sold by the politi­cians. Once again, we’re deal­ing here with the mak­ers who keep things run­ning, no mat­ter what the polit­i­cal winds are. (on a side note, the rela­tion­ship between bureau­crats and politi­cians was made into a very funny BBC series called “Yes, Min­is­ter”, that I would encour­age any­one to watch).

A tale of two businesses

Time and time again, you see the same kind of push/pull. What hap­pens in those case is that the mak­ers are pro­tect­ing the com­mons while the mar­keters are try­ing to push for busi­ness mod­els that can pro­tect the share­hold­ers. This type of fric­tion exists in every indus­try and the net result is that progress is made as a result of the fric­tion, with each camp coop­er­at­ing to give some ground and move things forward.

Mar­keters push the edge, and force us to recon­sider our pre­vi­ous assump­tion. Mak­ers build great things and ensure that it doesn’t have a neg­a­tive impact. Both are equally essen­tial to progress but, for the most part, we tend to ignore the makers.

Appre­ci­at­ing the makers

Our soci­ety is very focused on prais­ing the mar­keters. As a result, lit­tle room is made to allow some level of appre­ci­a­tion to the mak­ers. For exam­ple, as you’re read­ing this, con­sider the soft­ware pro­gram you’re read­ing it in. Then con­sider how this post went from the server on which it is located to you. It’s a jaw drop­ping achieve­ment when you put your mind to it. Hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of peo­ple have worked to build out the inter­net, soft­ware, and hard­ware infra­struc­tures that got this sim­ple note to you. Do you know the name of any of time?

So if you know some­one who makes some­thing, instead of just mar­ket­ing it, why don’t you go thank them today for their contribution.