The majority of engineers believe that good engineering speaks for itself. Here, Mike Newby, Associate Director of Science, Engineering and Industrial Communications at Definition, explains where that misapprehension comes from, and sets out how manufacturers can make marketing work.
If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?
If you’re an engineer, you might be thinking that “sound” implies perception. Without an ear to hear it, sound is just waves of pressure. Or maybe that’s taking the question too seriously.
Here’s an easier one: if an inventor creates a machine that solves all the world’s problems, but never tells anyone and never uses it, does it matter?
One more, to really drive the point home: I have a girlfriend, but she lives in Canada and no one’s ever seen her. Does she exist?
Engineer or not, hopefully you can see that the answer to these last two questions is clearly no. Or at least, probably not. Maybe you’ve landed on “who cares” as your answer. Either way, you’re right!
And yet, in research we’ve just published, we found that 85% of engineers believe that good engineering speaks for itself. More shockingly, a quarter would go so far as to say that marketing and communications for manufacturing and other industrial sectors are “a complete waste of time”.
This is self-evidently wrong to me. My mysterious Canadian girlfriend’s invention won’t save the world without anyone ever hearing about it or knowing for sure that it exists.
But it’s a common view and one that’s held by more than just engineers. I recently saw a post on LinkedIn from investor Naval Ravikant, where he was quoted as saying “You’re doing sales because you failed at marketing. You’re doing marketing because you failed at product.”
This is the kind of punchy, controversial quote that goes viral. It’s firm and opinionated, maybe even a little convincing. But it is completely, head-slappingly wrong.
Good engineering does not speak for itself. I know it’s early in the feature for me to reveal the answer to the principal question. But I want to get on and show you how self-defeating this point of view really is, where it comes from, and what you can do about it. With the goal that your comms team works in conjunction with your engineering department, rather than against it.
Firstly, 35% of the same engineers who told us that comms is unnecessary, also told us their competitors got more, and more favourable, media coverage than their own companies – despite having an inferior product. If good engineering spoke for itself, this would not be possible.
In qualitative interviews, one engineer told us that marketing is useful when selling to consumers, but irrelevant in a B2B or engineer-to-engineer context. In the same breath, however, he told us that he would always choose a brand he trusted rather than a cheaper, untested alternative, for fear that the asset “might not turn up on time, or at all, or may not be what was specified”.
The foundation of trust is, of course, good engineering and great delivery. But how do you expect anyone other than your existing customers to know to trust you? How did your first customer know to trust you?
Is your growth strategy truly reliant on word-of-mouth referrals, engineer to engineer, from one company to another, from one of your target sectors to all of the others?
Of course not. That would be a ludicrously slow way to get the word out there.
So why is this perception – that engineering rules and marketing drools – so prevalent? Is it just a sheer lack of professional respect?
Before we conducted our research, I’m ashamed to say that was my assumption. My dad is an engineer, and he wasn’t that impressed with my choice to study journalism at university – and he’s much happier now that I’m studying engineering part-time, it’s always been clear to me that he didn’t think much of comms. Your colleagues in your marketing team may well think the same way, or they did until they read our report. Because we could not have been more wrong.
Only 12% of the engineers we surveyed said their marketing teams produced content that was consistently accurate. And more than half (57%) of the engineers we surveyed said they had seen marketing or PR activity that they felt had misrepresented their technology or overstated its capabilities.
In our qualitative interviews, one engineer summed up his experience with marketers like this: “The engineering department produces a specification of what the piece of kit can do and then the marketing people will take that and turn it into something that hasn’t actually been offered.”
Engineers came to their conclusions from experience. Really, really bad experience.
And, the data suggests, depressingly common experience. But we do know that it’s not true in every single case. There are many manufactures and industrial companies that have really cracked it when it comes to marketing and communications. To consistently deliver technically literate, accurate and compelling comms about any form of engineering must mean that these companies have engineering and marketing departments that work together well.
We naturally wanted to find out what those companies are doing that makes such a stark difference. So we spoke to some successful marketers working in manufacturing and a few other technical industries.
What we found were marketing teams that were held up by the tenacity of individuals. Marketing professionals who had – under their own steam – worked hard to learn the technical detail, to build credibility with engineers. These people are essentially doing two jobs, marketing and communications, and an unofficial engineering apprenticeship.
And it makes sense that this approach would work, as 88% of engineers told us they would be more willing to engage with comms and marketing materials if they knew they had been written by an engineer.
The problem with this solution, however, is very engineering-coded: it is a single point of failure. Entire firms are relying on individual marketing professionals who have the drive and desire – and the time – to upskill on the job. This enormous upfront investment on the part of high-performing and tenacious employees is also completely unscalable.
You might be thinking, well, why don’t we just get qualified engineers to do our comms and marketing? And that is a very good idea, but despite what characters like Naval Ravikant would have you believe, comms and marketing is a highly skilled job in its own right. Sure, the barrier for entry to a career in comms is much lower than that of engineering, but what it takes to be really excellent at the job is just as demanding.
You have to ask yourself, how many of your engineers would want to switch to communications, and how many would be suited to it? This approach, internally, is just as unscalable.
So, what steps can you take to solve this problem?
Firstly, external suppliers can really make a difference. A PR agency that has already done the work of recruiting and converting engineers into the dark arts of marketing and communications, could be plugged into a manufacturer’s operations and have an immediate impact. Speaking peer-to-peer to both engineers and marketing professionals, and acting as a conduit between them. There are a few such specialist agencies out there (Definition being one of them).
Secondly, AI also has the potential to help. Company-owned learning platforms are now extremely cheap and easy to build. A centrally-planned programme for marketing colleagues, teaching them the company’s core technical elements, makes learning on the job much easier.
Finally, I would suggest some level of internal education programme for the engineering team. Explain the nuances of marketing and comms and make sure everyone knows that it’s a skilled job and a critical strategic function, rather than just a support division full of people who “failed at product”. And how using it well will make sure their superior product finally outpaces their competitors’ coverage.
The full report, Good Engineering Does Not Speak for Itself, is available to download for free if you’d like to dig into the insights.
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