I’ve been reading Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore and I wanted to share with you his take on how engineers view marketers:

Marketing, in the engineering universe, is that place where the laws of utility are suspended. They are of two minds about this. On the one hand, if painting the product red sells more product, by all means paint it red. On the other hand, since there is no rational cause operating here, you cannot trust marketing, as anyone can see for themselves, since sometimes when they paint it red, it does not sell more. So marketing is essentially voodoo. It is for flakes. It is not a real discipline. It is a con job.

Ouch! Not the most flattering description, is it… but there’s a lot of truth to what he says — just read a few Dilbert comic strips and you’ll see!

What’s interesting is that he says there’s a way for engineers to understand marketing’s critical function:

… it helps engineering considerably if it can conceptualize marketing as a systems discipline. In this frame of reference, markets are economic systems, and the role of marketing is to facilitate the transfer of money from the market into the company by ensuring that the company is delivering value out to the market. It is a systems-level exchange that obeys the laws of equilibrium. If either side of the system lacks what the other needs, the exchange does not happen. But when the right pairings meet up, it does. Defining who our right customers might be, and what value they might want, and what … product … we can provide that delivers that value — all this is the new meaning of marketing.

Oddly enough, my wife is teaching a high-tech marketing course this summer to fourth-year business students. It’ll be interesting to see what the marketers think of all this.