Marketing is brain programming

by Michael Bernstein on January 03, 2017

Programmers use code to program computers, marketers use words to program brains.

What appeals to me about helping technical founders become awesome at marketing and sales is that being awesome at marketing and sales is a lot like being awesome at programming. Marketing and sales are not magic. They are systems. You can apply logic and “hacker-like” thinking to them, and you’ll be successful.

The way I explain it is this: if programmers use code to program computers, then marketers use words to program brains. The metaphor extends to the feedback cycles, style of collecting and analyzing data, and more. Additionally, we have at least as much to learn about the dissimilarities between the disciplines and how their practitioners approach problems as we do from the similarities, but simply juxtaposing the two ideas has been a valuable enough catalyst for conversation that I wanted to codify it in writing.*

*Because now that I’m a marketer, that’s how I ship.