Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets (Collins Business Essentials) by Moore Geoffrey A

Author:Moore, Geoffrey A. [Moore, Geoffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Overcoming Fear of +1 Marketing

+1 marketing violates a fundamental assumption at the heart of the engineering world, that the value of anything is a function of its objective utility. The notion of a purely subjective value—of just liking something because it has a nice shape or a pretty color—is not really understood by engineers. They know it happens, they know it happens to them, they know it can affect purchase decisions, they even know it affects their own purchase decisions—but it just does not make sense. Therefore they try to distance themselves from it. And they do this by assigning it to marketing.

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.

And that is when engineering is being nice. Now, this has been the source of much high-tech humor and joshing back and forth between the two groups, but in fact it represents a life-threatening disability when it comes to Main Street success. Because on Main Street continued high-profit margins can only come from end users sponsoring our product over the low-cost clone, and the only thing that will get them to do that is to deliver them subjective experiences of the product that fulfill their needs. That means engineering must learn to authentically empower marketing.

The problem is, engineers will not turn over the reins to any institution until they can understand its underlying mechanisms, how and why it works. They can’t. It would be like walking out on air. And that is what is so paralyzing about Main Street’s imperatives, why Main Street denial is so prevalent throughout high tech.

To go forward from here 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 whole product or whole product +1 we can provide that delivers that value—all this is the new meaning of marketing.

The goal here is to permit R&D to let go of controlling the company’s invention process—not everywhere in the life cycle, to be sure, but when on Main Street.

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