I was asked a question recently that made me think hard about my skills and experiences: “How is this ‘developer’ marketing different from other sorts of marketing?”

The short and easy answer is they are largely the same. You identify a need, create a product or service that fulfills that need, analyze and test, find a path to market and promote. The 4 P’s (Product, Pricing, Promotion, Placement) are definitely in effect.

The software developer market does have some idiosyncrasies, e.g. lots of valuable things are supposed to be free, but the key to consistent, non-random success is avoiding the kool-aid jar, i.e. committing to analytical rigor.

Then a few days ago I read this article by Steve Saenz in the Times: “The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life”

It’s about large brands making marketing investments in service creation to activate brand loyalty. It occurred to me that this was a tactic pioneered in the developer marketing world. If you’re trying to reach an audience that has a histamine reaction to the content-free, fear/greed pitches that characterize so much b2b marketing, the best way to reach them is to create a useful service. Something that solves a problem. Ideally it should be something they need on a daily basis, something that makes them more effective and enhances their career with training and business contacts.

And maybe most important, lets them shine in their own and their fellow’s eyes.

All the various developer communities I’ve helped launch or design (Microsoft Developers Network, BEA Dev2Dev, Swik.net) share some of these benefits. At the core they are brand loyalty campaigns packaged inside useful services.

According to the article this is what the Nike is doing in the fitness realm: “[through the site], he has made friends with other runners around the world who post running routes, meet up in the real world and encourage one another on the site.”

What’s changed out in the larger world is that educated, discerning, affluent consumers have gotten as fed up with empty pitches as devs are. Maybe they always were fed up, and DVR’s, spam filters and pop-up blockers are just handy enablers for the rest of us. It’s just that devs got there first (like they did for other phenomena now commonplace: email, online chat and forums, and the internet itself).