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In Reply to: RE: Marketing, marketing ... posted by knewton on July 25, 2014 at 05:34:38
"Marketing, on the other hand, in often deals with non-concrete problems, dealing with issues of buyer psychology."
Correct. Marketing deals with buyer psychology. The idea is to scam the buyer into buying something he doesn't need, buying something that's more than what he needs, while scamming him to pay as much as possible. I figured this out by the time I was 10 years old and learned that my grandfather's advertising agency had created the slogan, "A diamond is forever" to allow a cartel to sell nearly worthless rocks as high priced "engagement rings". A complete and utter scam.
There is a small portion of the marketing function that is actually useful. In practice this provides an lame excuse for the existence of a "profession" that is 90% lies and exaggeration.
Like you I have worked in both the engineering and marketing departments of a large electronics company, including a stint as a product manager where I wrote marketing brochures, so I know the territory well.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
As I indicated, engineers too often tend toward arrogance, even self-righteousness, I'm sorry to say. In my experience, engineers (God bless us) are no more honest or virtuous than any other persons. The nature of our profession simply leaves us little place to hide in the making of factual misrepresentations or errors. I suggest, that it actually takes more self-discipline to be an ethical marketer, than it does to be an ethical engineer.Engineering, by it's scientific nature, doesn't easily lend itself to misrepresentation of the facts. Honest factual mistakes, let alone intentional misrepresentations can get an engineer fired. Marketing, by it's far more subjective, non-concrete nature, affords greater opportunity for consequence free misrepresentation of facts, whether intentional or unintentional. The marketer often knows that they can likely get away with misrepresentations, and may even feel quite strong organizational pressure to do so. The marketer can often find themselves forced to walk a tight rope of professional conduct if they are to succeed. Sadly, being too straight with the facts can get a marketer fired.
I am curious to read what your instructions would be to the marketing personnel of an software company, just for example, who are given the task of marketing a technically flawed core software product developed by the firm's engineering department?
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Ken Newton
Edits: 07/25/14 07/25/14 07/25/14 07/25/14 07/25/14
"I am curious to read what your instructions would be to the marketing personnel of an software company, just for example, who are given the task of marketing a technically flawed core software product developed by the firm's engineering department?"
If I were given the job of marketing a technically flawed product I would refuse to do it in a dishonest way. If an honest presentation of the product was such that the product could not possibly earn its keep then I would recommend to cancel the product. If this meant that I needed to find another job, so be it. I would like to hope that I would have managed my personal affairs in such a way that I would be relatively immune to corruption, which is what it would be were I to proceed with creating a dishonest marketing program. But then, I might have had a sick child with enormous medical bills and desperately needed a job...
I've been in a position where my team designed a product that was designed for commercial use, with explicit tradeoffs between cost, performance and reliability that were appropriate for normal commercial operations such as office use, but in appropriate for safety critical systems. In one product design meeting we even joked that the design was good enough for commercial use but not good enough for use in an air traffic control system or nuclear power plant. At the time, the company had an a public policy that it's products were not to be used for safety critical systems. A few years later during a business downturn I learned that this product was being bid as part of an air traffic control system. My first reaction was to go directly to my CEO and blow the whistle, but instead I asked who the sales manager was and learned that this was a potential multi-billion dollar sale. Since it seemed likely that blowing the whistle would have no effect on the project, I formulated an alternate plan. I asked for a meeting with the technical lead of the prime contractor. He thought the purpose was for us to help him understand our products better, but my main purpose was for me to evaluate him to see if he was technically competent to understand the limitations of our design. He passed the test and we were able to reconfigure the proposed system to avoid all the problems that I knew of. I'm not sure what I would have done had he proven incompetent, probably gone to the CEO of my company and explained my position, while being prepared to find a new job.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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