i dont mean to burst everyones bubble, but i really dont like misunderstandings.
The ones here that are doing the marketing, please give me an honest answer to this:
What are you marketing ?
What are you marketing it as?
Nem is nothing but an awesome idea so far, at a pre-alpha stage.
How are you marketing something that has no features so far, no code published, no client and no launch?
i'm honestly curious to hear what people are saying to others in regard to a product that has not launched yet,
this is not a trolling attempt, so please lets all have a serious discussion.
In basically ALL businesses marketing is huge. Many companies will spend more money on marketing than product development. Let me say that again, it is more profitable to market a product than it is to actually develop a product. That seems silly, right? Wouldn't the best product win? No, the product that wins is the product that is the best in the eyes of the public, not that actual best product. The way to win the public is marketing.
So....... NEM doesn't have a product right now? Why then do marketing? Let us look at a few examples. There is CounterParty, Ethereum, NXT, and Bitshares. These are all next generation platforms and are possible competitors to NEM. Three of them have real products and have been developed by people who have real high tech skills. These are NXT, CounterParty, and Bitshares. Actually, each of these products is very slick, even more so than bitcoin. But....... none of them are actually worth much. Why? Because the people that made them are developers who don't know shit about anything else. They are really smart people that just because they know one thing, think that they can make it. They are sadly mistaken. Being able to write code, doesn't make a product good. Ethereum on the other hand doesn't even have a working product. It is really just an idea that aims high and a ton of marketing. It has professionals on board. Not just professional coders, but professionals from every aspect and end of a business. Yes, they are running it like a business, not some dudes writing code on their home computer at night and typing messages on a forum. Writing code on your computer at night and typing messages on a forum just isn't enough to make it in today's world. A product needs a lot more support than that.
So Ethereum has no real working product yet, just an ideal and intense marketing by pros. Can it be considered successful? More successful than NXT, Bitshares, and CounterParty? They are at least up and running with nice products. If Ethereum were to have its fundraiser tomorrow, sheep from all over the crypto community would line up to throw money at them. The Ethereum non-product is already worth way more than NXT, Bitshares, and CounterParty real products combined, and when it does come to market on day 1, it will have a market share that reflects this. 100% for sure.
If NEM wants to be a real force. It has a choice. It can choose to be like Ethereum and bring on some pros, or at least some semi-pros into the team for marketing, finance, legal, creative, admin, strategist and so on. Simply writing a good code won't do it.
I really would hope that NEM would find people for the development team that could be advisers for each of these areas, and do it now. Again, I would argue that in a market like crypto that is filled with pump and dump that professional or at least semi-professional marketers would be important. A semi-pro can give NEM a huge advantage over helping boost NEM over other products that are being developed by great programmers that know little of marketing (I am talking about you NXT, Bitshares, and CounterParty).
NEM doesn't even have a logo yet. I know the development team wants to have a product first, but really that isn't how successful stories work. Ethereum is being made by pros. They had a slick webpage, logo, t-shirts, and smooth public speakers long before it has ever released a product. The guys at Ethereum know exactly what they are doing. It is counter-intuitive. It doesn't seem like a slick logo and webpage are worth more than a slick product, but yes, they really are. Again, it is not the best product that wins, but the product that is best in the eyes of the public. The distinction shouldn't be that big of a deal, but it is indeed a huge deal.
Making money is not about having a good product. Making money is about making people "think" you have a good product. Con-men have known this for ages and are quite successful because of it. All big companies know this (these are in someways con-men too). It seems like very few people in this forum really internalize this. The fact that people even have to ask, "why market?" shows just how clueless people are. I have no doubt that Okaynow is a very intelligent person and this is not a rant against Okaynow and in certain areas of discourse would school people with his/her knowledge. This is more of a statement in general that very few people on these forums no shit about actually developing a successful product.
It's sad, but most of what you said may in fact be true. Incidentally, this is also a story of how the world got it all wrong.
Most companies and people choose to invest more money into marketing because of two things: 1) it is very hard to create a product that brings value and is 10x better than the next competitor and obviously a better choice; 2) because the majority of people are incapable of doing 1) and they understand how easily manipulated the masses can be. So when money is your only or even primary
raison d'être, it is actually most effective to barely focus on the product and spend all your energy on devising better ways to manipulate people(like say Coca Cola does).
However, this is not how things should be, nor how we want to do them(I hope). In fact, this is the reason we are starting a new economy movement and not a pump and dump coin, the reason we want to change the status quo and fight for a better future by being the change we want to see. This is what sets us apart from maybe any other coin out there. We are here to create value, to change the world, be it even in a small way, and yes, to make some money as a result of all that.So our primary focus should really be on creating a better product and not only making people "think" we have a better product. As far as I can tell we are pretty on track with that. Now this being said, I also think there is such a thing as good marketing.
Marketing has somehow destabilized our economy since we have a free market, a fundamentally uncultivated discerning capacity and a somewhat easily manipulated human nature, hence a great incentive exists in the market to fool people. On the other hand there exists a belief, especially between technical people that beside building things, there's no need for anything else: "if we build it they will come". However this belief may be rooted in the fact that the more technical people tend to generally have a lack of understanding in how human nature works. So, as you might expect, a lot of technically interesting and promising projects die because of such beliefs.
Now the third and most desirable option would be to focus most on creating the best product(thanks to our dev team we are already doing that) and equally focus on bringing that very good product to the people in the most effective manner(without bullshitting them). If we have a real quality product the only thing we'll need is a chance to attract some attention through good and targeted marketing.In addition to what I suggested in the marketing proposal brought before, I think there are 2 things which will bring an immediate and huge amount of attention and cash flow into NEM: 1) Launch and get a place into top 10 -15 on coinmarketcap and 2) do everything necessary to bring NEM on one of the premiere and most popular exchanges.
1Besides that, one of the most important things we could do for NEM in the long term is find one or more persons which should be "the faces" of NEM at conferences, interviews, and do what Vitalik Butering does for Etherium, capturing the imagination of technical people and
intelligentsia by kindling intelligent discussions and intellectual experiments regarding how NEM works, what we can and could do with it, what problems of previous coins we solve, etc. This is the highest point we need to target, which if we do correctly, will overflow and bring news about NEM into all other sub-layers of society.
References
1 I think although counter-intuitive, this may be one of the most effective ways to bring volume into our currency, go into the spotlight and market ourselves at the beginning. Mintpal looks better than most exchanges and sucks less. But more importantly it is the premier exchange for altcoins, has good customer service, has not been compromised or hacked until now, people have traded already thousands of btc/day on it and have btc at disposal there. Blackcoin reached its peak on and probably because of mintpal, same with darkcoin. If we would get on mintpal the result would certainly worth it. It would probably be the easiest way to make btc flow into NEM. From experience I can tell the reputation of the exchange on which the coin is listed is an important predictor of limits in coins volume, meaning people will no way trade 100btc in one trade on bittrex or poloniex but would comfortably do so on mintpal. This is why coins like balckcoin and darkcoin have made it their mission to reach mintapl. The fact is that when almost any coin is created, it generally gets first listed on bittrex and poloniex. After a couple of days, if the coin is interesting enough and it attracts more than 100btc daily volume, the coin is secretly evaluated by mintpal to be added there. Some are added only when they reach 500btc/day volume, some are added only through voting and even paying for voting. Some are never added because it's probably too hard.(NXT is a good example.) The was a time when cryptsy was the premier altcoin exchange, but that time has passed and cryptsy seem to be heading the wrong way.
When a coin grows in price and volume, we generally tend to attribute all the credit to interesting things like innovation, marketing and other stuff, missing the point that the market is a bit more complex and often counter-intuitive in many ways, and the majority of price increase and volume may in fact come from manipulation which is strictly coordinated to accompany innovation and good news(see bitcoin and dogecoin manipulation examples). In the same way, I think we tend to overemphasis the short term effect of innovation, marketing and other stuff over getting listed on a very popular and relatively trustworthy exchange. But looking at the facts and experience, the latter in close coordination with the former may be responsible for the most part. It may even be so due to initiation of some complex chain of events that is utterly invisible at this point. Think 80/20 principle but instead of 20 put 1 or 2 factors.