Thursday, May 29, 2014

Engineers in marketing

When you look at a glass containing water do you see a glass half full, or a glass half empty?

Depending on the answer, the person is seen as optimistic if they see the glass half full, or pessimistic if they describe the glass as half full. But ask an engineer and they will speculate as to why the glass is twice the volume it needs to be to contain that volume of water. Engineers ask why? A pretty useful    capability in marketing. A physicist might be able to explain the theory of how things work, but an engineer asks why. Incidentally an accountant might ask what does it cost? Oh, and an arts graduate might ask, " do you want fries with that?"

Being questioning and inquisitive is always a useful characteristic in marketing to challenge, to research facts, analyse data and plan. In fact very much like an engineering project. As marketers engineers are pretty good at resisting the telephone sales pitches from people pitching media space and avoid buying ad hoc and unplanned space. IT  skills come in pretty handy too with the advance of digital marketing.





Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Marketing ideas for engineers

Robert Stephenson
Soon after graduating, if not before, some smart engineers figure out there are better paid jobs in business and finance than in engineering.

Ever since I  joined the Institute of Electrical Engineers [IEE]  which has since morphed into the IET, from time to time in the letters pages of the Institute's publications there has been a debate on the status of engineers. Generally the the story  is that on the 'Continent' engineers are widely respected as professionals, akin to lawyers and doctors and the term 'Engineer' proceeds their name, where as in the UK  such letters appear after the name and nobody knows what they mean. But worse, friends and relatives look to their engineering friends and relations to fix the telly when it goes wrong, sort out the washing machine or toaster. What nobody in these occasional righteous bouts of concern and feeling disrespected ever mentions is ... money.

After graduating, my employer a major British electrical manufacturer circulated my details throughout the organisation and offers of interviews flooded in. Most were in engineering departments, but one interestingly enough was from the Accounts Department at Head Office in London's West End - a change from the northern, midland and south coast towns where all the factory engineering and R&D went on. As a student apprentice I  had plenty of experience in factories, R&D even in HR, but none of my work stints had taken me into finance. As I  waited for the Financial Officer to call me in for my interview a secretary from another department asked me to wait afterwards as her boss wanted a chat. The interview seemed to go pretty well and an offer seemed likely to follow. As I left the interview the mysterious secretary was waiting to conduct me to her boss who turned out to be the Marketing Director. He wasn't a large man, in fact quite short and he wore a bow tie. He occupied a vast office with views to Trafalgar Square and other London landmarks. The interview was short and to the point. "How much did those book keepers offer you in salary he asked?" I named the figure which I guess he already knew anyway. "I'll pay you so many thousand pounds a year more he responded." And so I left engineering and joined the Marketing Department.

In the early years of industrialisation engineers had to market themselves - railway engineers like Stephenson, or the more lavishly styled Isambard Kingdom Brunel, or Thomas Edison the electrical engineer. Try Googling 'the most famous engineers' and names like Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing and James Watt - even Archimedes crop up. And guess what  - they are all long dead. Maybe that's why engineers don't cut it sticking to engineering.

This blog was really started for people like me, trained as engineers, retrained in marketing and needing quick briefing from time to time on marketing ideas.

Foot note: a photo I took today outside Euston Station in London. 'Robert Stephenson.' He was a famous engineer.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Are people talking about your brand?

Before the rise of social media we talked about 'top of the mind awareness'.

So what's all that about then? Put simply if you ask a potential buyer in your market sector what named brands or suppliers come to mind when talking about the product category in question, does your brand crop up? When then prompted with a question such as have you heard of these brands, there may then be recognition, but some names are met with a blank. If your product is say a major and infrequent capital purchase, it is important to have 'top of the mind awareness' during the interim so that your brand is on the evaluation list when replacement time comes round.

Keeping awareness of your brand on their radar is helped if people are talking about your brand. Using a number of different marketing channels helps too and may be this is the best use of social media for b-2-b right now. Some years ago we developed a series of categories to try to evaluate which channels were most successful in generating enquiries. Whether asking for this information at the opening of an incoming telephone conversation, or on an online enquiry form the 'where did you hear about us' question is  getting in the way of the caller's real purpose - to talk about buying your products. Some businesses I  have called to enquire about for example, spare parts, refused to answer unless I gave them my post code; some wanted far more data. In such circumstances you need to be very wary of the accuracy or truth of the information gathered. All too easy
to tick the first box on a list and move on.

What enquiry source demonstrates is that the web site is the major channel for initial contact, although this doesn't mean your web site was the starting point. This may have originated from advertising, reading an article about your product or picking up a leaflet at an exhibition. We should distinguish between the marketing communications channel and the enquiry response channel. For clients with an effective marketing communications plan we find that the leading category is that people making the enquiry already know about the company or indeed are customers.

So keep talking, maintain brand awareness and don't put all your marketing budget into one basket.


Thursday, May 08, 2014

Are you looking forwards or backwards?


It is a simple enough question. Do you have a route map for your business that points the way forward, or do you rely on accounts which tell you where you have been?

If you are driving a car you will probably have a sat nav. these day which shows the route ahead, but you still need to look through the windscreen to see where you are going and to avoid hazards. If you have the directors of the company on board, the finance director will be the one looking out of the back window and telling you where you have been!  

Immersed in the day-to-day operation of running a business there is not so much time to look around and see what the route ahead offers, or even where it is going at all. In most cases members have joined along the way and didn’t know where the car came from and what the initial direction was. To go forward we need to decide where it is we are going and then have a route map to describe the way there. 

It is the same with a business. Unless we know what the objectives are, then planning to achieve them is a non-starter. That means writing a business plan. Marketing should be a major contributor to this. In fact the degree of marketing input determines the style and thrust of the company. Marketing is critical to business success. It is not just the preserve of the marketing director, it needs to be a company-wide philosophy. There must be a shared vision of what the company is about, what it does, what it stands for, who it serves in the market. This must be communicated to staff at all levels and communicated to the public, so the message must also be easy to comprehend.  Although the ‘Business Plan’ must of necessity address financial projections, it also needs to state the goals as a clear set of aims that people can actually work on implementing. To simply make a statement such as ‘our objective is to return 18% return on net assets employed’ makes it hard for most employees to interpret in a meaningful way that they can contribute towards. The general actions expected must also be set out. 

With the business direction agreed and the vision shared we can then start drawing up a ‘Marketing Plan’. It seems like common sense to start with defining the business objectives, but it is surprising how often I have come across companies that start in the middle by deciding to do a bit of advertising. When asked why and where this fits into a plan, it usually emerges there is no plan, the business goals are only vaguely known. Generally most people soon see the sense in spending time with planning first. Then the implementation fits into a scheme of things rather than happens at random. Planning is also far more efficient in deploying what are usually scarce resources to achieve goals by doing the job right first time, rather than piecemeal stabs that end up dissipating funds and confusing everyone.