It's not an Us vs Them
Why is engineering and marketing put at such odds with one another? In Doc's latest very smart, but stereotyping-heavy, article, "Markets without Marketing" this dichotomy rears its ugly head again.
Unlike Hugh, I do agree with Doc when he surmises that the spin-doctor-sales-type- marketing-hack between the engineers and the customers should disappear. But like Hugh, I also disagree with him. Are all marketers hacks? And are all engineers good communicators when it comes to the technology they are working on?
I don't know...I've seen the following cases:
Case #1 - Brilliant engineer builds cool application that locates where you are and records it in central location so that everyone can see where you've been. Totally awesome app, but for some reason, nobody is using it. Could it be the privacy issues? Could it be the interface? Does the desktop client eat up virtual memory on some machines? Is it only really a gimmick? Is there a member of the community who is making other members uncomfortable?
Brilliant engineer may not even ask these questions because s/he is too busy hacking and hasn't the first clue how to open up those lines of communication. Product is shelved.
Case #2 - Community open source product is, in the future, going to change the way the web works. Very enthusiastic members of the community act as evangelists for said product. Only problem is that everyone understands the product in very very geeky terms.
"The code base is very sound" "The widgets will integrate easily into any template and work seamlessly with the modules." "Anyone who knows PHP can customize it."
:|
Meanwhile, the community of developers working on it continuously put efforts into development of the modules, templates and widgets, while even those who continuously call for better UI and more clear messaging ('cause it ain't always spin - some people are just better communicators) get frustrated because they aren't taken seriously. Project stays firmly in the realm of geekdom whilst big, dumb proprietary companies with big, fat marketing materials continue to spread their gross systems.
Case #3 - Powerful web company fires entire marketing team, puts their heads down and hacks to create cool stuff. This creates a barrier between the company and the community. Big powerful web company believes they have the smartest people around (hires anyone that "really matters"), so why listen to outside developers? Codes in a bubble. Railroads community projects. Locks people in deeper and deeper. Becomes the next anti-trust suit. Creates badwill.
Okay. So I am quite transparent in some of my examples. :)
But seriously, I think it is high time we stop painting marketing with the same 'idiot' brush. Not saying that I'm not an idiot, but really, there should be a person who makes certain there is sufficient attention being paid to community, and sometimes that will be engineers and sometimes it will be product managers and sometimes marketeers, etc.
We meet with loads of companies who either have no time or no understanding of how to talk to their community. Really smart people who are super nice, but have a really tough time finding their own direction because they are disconnected from their community. So we go in and help them open up all of the channels of communication, then keep track of what is happening, drag them out and start to 'teach them' how to do this. We would never dream of doing it for them.
But we also need to be intimately involved in the product. It's true that if any marketer has to say, "ask the engineer over there" that marketer has failed (although there are some uber-geeky exceptions).
We also know a tonne of great entrepreneurs/engineers who have no need for marketing because they need no help on that end. We'd love to help our clients get to that point. The point where they don't need to have us guide them any longer.
No, we don't need marketing as it has been understood for a long time. But rather than tossing it out altogether, the role of marketing has to change...and engineers and product managers and customer service and marketing has to be a seamless process...a team...with every single one of them touching both the customer and the product.
It's not an us versus them situation.
10 Comments:
"unlike hugh"?
explain, please ;-)
'cause you said that you usually agree with him and this time you don't. :)
However, I meant to agree with you further down. Oops. 'Cause I do. :)
That looks like it could be Om Malik with the red gloves on in that photo you posted with your blog posting :)
Is #2 Drupal?
Insightful post Tara, I think the strongest companies will have both strong engineering and marketing professionals who can work together to develop and communicate back to the community.
But as much as an evangelist is about marketing a company, maybe the evangelist should also be about getting community feedback and feeding it back to the developers to better direct how a product evolves based on what the community might want or even more importantly need. Otherwise super smart developers risk developing in a vacuum.
You gotta see today's dilbert strip!
http://www.comics.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2006261740727.gif
Soooo.... is #3 Google? Am I allowed to ask that in public?
Just remember: "Don't be evil" isn't the same as "Be Nice"
This is a great post. Marketing and end users. They are the same thing.
CTOs, CIOs and CEOs have to figure out a better way to connect end users (aka marketing) with their geeks.
Getting rid of the rigid Waterfall development process is one the best ways to do that.
I wrote a post about it, complete with Comics: Waterfall Drives IT Engineer Over the Edge
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Are you suggesting that the innate complexity of these tech products doesn't allow for a marketing ethos to be present within the product development phase? Because that's where marketing people should be. The fact that they apparently are not in many tech industries is a condemnation of the leadership of those companies and not of marketing per se. The users of the products are just as susceptible to well argued marketing as anyone else.
I'm not suggesting that at all.
I have always advocated for a marketing professional to be intimately involved in product development and product development to be intimately involved in marketing.
That is precisely what it is NOT us vs. them means.
I think the biggest problem in the Marketing perception is that there are people who take marketing seriously, and those that have become empowered salesmen. When you mix Sales and Geeks is when problems arise. It's often the sales types that will ask a geek for mock-ups of features your package doesn't offer (for marketing materials), or put a spin on the product that is misleading or intentionally incorrect. It's these type that have given marketing it's bad name. and it's these types that stand out in people's heads when the idiot brush gets pulled out.
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