Le Marketing (surrender your freedom for a greater good)

There are times in life when one must surrender its own needs and desires for a greater good. For calculatorians this time has been given the name of Marketing Calculators . And just as a good soldier must follow orders even against their own interest, calculatorians must follow the guidance of the Marketing Team when the time comes.

In all seriousness, though, marketing calculators are a special breed of calculators. Marketing calculators have different goals than regular calculators and therefore the regular rules and guidelines don’t really apply here.

In marketing calculators customJS is mostly use for improving the user experience and fun-factor of the calculator. Occasionally it might even reduce the capabilities of the calculator since the main aim of it is not to solve a problem but to engage and entertain the user.

There are countless examples of these calculators but have curated some of the (subjectively [1]) best marketing calculators of all time:

  1. Chilled Drink Calculator
  2. Christmas Tree Calculator
  3. Exoplanet Discovery Calculator

This calculators exemplify the main features you want to get from customJS. The Chill Drink Calculator hides most of the technical variables behind user-selectable options that are easy to understand by laypeople. The Christmas Tree Calculator does that and adds interactive graphics that help the user preview the results. The Exoplanet Discovery Calculator is a perfect example of breaking almost every single rule about creating calculators heavily including html code, showing multiple non-fundamental fields to the user and also giving them advance controls.

tl;dr

Marketing calculators should be entertaining and simple to use. They should include customJS and EVERYTHING is overridden by whatever the Farhan, Reina or Natalia say at the time of building the calculator.

[1]Possibly unrelated fact: all these examples were created by the author of this document