Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Should marketers have a good knowledge of the technology they use?

Marketing for many b-2-b enterprises is not just about presenting increasingly sophisticated products, but using communications channels that also are reliant on an underlying technology.

The Industrial Revolution in England not only changed the way things were made. It  had a profound impact on the way people lived and worked and in turn the fortunes of the nation itself. Visit industrial heritage sites or museums to see equipment of the era and you can watch and see how the machines work. You can witness the parts turning, see cotton being spun, shuttles weaving cloth or pumps raising water. Today the technology is largely hidden buried in silicon chips and embedded computer code. Many marketers promote products without an understanding of how they work, using Internet based systems and programs they are equally unqualified to master. They become reliant on the R&D guys on the one hand and the IT people on the other.

When I started my career in marketing, working for a leading manufacturer of electrical goods, the situation was rather different. The marketing department set the agenda. We wrote the new product development specifications, we worked closely with the design engineers, witnessed laboratory prototype testing, progressed tooling development and introduction on to the factory production lines, packaging, logistics and stocking. We wrote the operation manuals, set the prices and briefed graphic designers and advertising agencies. By living through the whole design to production cycle we had intimate knowledge of all aspects of the product and trained our sales team in how the product should be presented. The marketing team were engineers, most had served apprenticeships in all parts of the company before being appointed to a marketing role. We knew how everything worked including all the outsourced graphic design processes that produced the marketing collateral. In short we had control.

Today for many companies the marketing environment has more focus on communications than new product development. They are increasingly reliant on others to engineer the systems they rely on, they don't have experience of working in a development or manufacturing operation. The products ship in from China. In short they are not engineers. They have no apparent interest or curiosity as to how products work, the effort required to make things happen and little interest in what is involved - only how cheap and how quickly can they get things done. Not surprisingly without understanding or control of the processes things go wrong.

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