Marketing Matters, Even for Engineers

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Today a section on marketing was added to this website. It may seem strange for marketing to appear on the personal website of an engineer. However, marketing is an essential component of engineering companies. If you build a better mouse trap, the world will not beat a path to your door unless they know about your mouse trap, understand why it is better, and why it would be useful to them. Without a marketing strategy (which is more than just advertising), that better mouse trap will languish in obscurity.

Motivation for this new section came after reading through Mark Joyner's book on Integration Marketing. This book has details an interesting strategy for low cost (and low risk), high reward marketing. It struck me that engineers could benefit from thinking about marketing, especially entrepreneurial types who will invariably end up trying to sell their own products/services. A little thought about who the target market is, and how they are likely to use the product/service at initial design time would go a long way toward making something that people actually want. Too many good ideas are marred by poor user interface design and/or designing for a non-existent market. Thus, this new section provides reviews and links for material by marketing experts that I think are of value.

Incidentally, Mark Joyner's book can currently be obtained for free.

Comments (0) | 21 May 2009