Marketing for Engineers: Engineering Customer Satisfaction

When asking people to mention a word that they associate with marketing, they will most certainly mention advertising or selling. The scope of the marketing team in an engineering project is often limited to promoting and selling the product or service that the engineers create. The reach of marketing is, however, broader than communicating with potential and existing customers.

Just like any other social concept, marketing can mean different things. Blogger Heidi Cohen has collected 72 marketing definitions from professional and academic sources. I have downloaded these definitions and visualised them in a word cloud. The more often a word is used in these definitions, the larger the text. This diagram thus shows that marketing is about products and services and customers. The cloud shows that advertising is only a small part of marketing.

These definitions position marketing as a process to sell products and services to customers. Engineering is, however, often about more than selling stuff. Many disciplines of engineering seek to improve society overall. The American Marketing Association provides a more formal and broader definition of marketing:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

American Marketing Association (2013).

This definition consists of three major parts:

• A process
• that has value
• for beneficiaries.

The following three sections of this article discuss these three aspects of this definition concerning the work of engineers.

Most introductory text books about marketing start with the marketing mix. This is a tool to structure marketing activities that helps managers considers all relevant aspects of their project. One of the most common versions of the marketing mix is the so-called 4Ps of marketing:

• Product (creating)
• Promotion (communicating)
• Place (distribution)
• Price (exchange)

The terms in brackets show how the AMA definition of marketing relates to the marketing mix. These four aspects of marketing are a simplification of the process of marketing, but they provide a good stating point to understand the foundations.

Product

The product is the most obvious aspect of marketing for engineers. Designing and creating new products and services is the core job of an engineer. Although technology is important, marketing helps engineers to create better products.

Marketing helps engineers to create products that meet the needs of customers. Engineering focuses on the technical aspects of a product such as a car or a computer. Marketing tries to understand how customers extract value from these objects.

The first law of consumer behaviour is that customers buy stuff for what it means to them, not what it does. Consequently, this law implies that creating new products not only requires knowledge of engineering; it also requires engineers to understand psychology.

From an economic perspective, value is the difference between costs and benefits. Traditional models of economics limit this equation to monetary value. In contrast, the marketing perspective includes aspects beyond financial costs and benefits.

The benefits of a product are first that which the product does for the customer. A car has the obvious benefit of moving people and things from A to B. The service benefit is about the ease of using the product, after-sales support and so on. Lastly, the personal benefit relates to how the product makes people feel about owning or using it.

The cost equation of a product or service is not only the monetary cost of purchase and operation, but also time and psychological energy. The time cost that a consumer incurs relates to the level of convenience they get. The energy cost relates to possible frustrations because of badly designed products.

From this model it follows that engineers can maximise customer value of a product they create by minimising the cost the consumer and by increasing the benefits.

Marketing is traditionally only about customers and commercial relationships between buyers and sellers. Contemporary views of marketing are more inclusive and relate to every relationship where one party provides benefits to another. These new theories are certainly more useful to describe the contemporary complexities of commercial relationships.

The addition of society overall as beneficiary of marketing makes a lot of sense for engineers. Engineering is a method to improve the world in which we live; either through commercial products or public engineering. Whichever way, the purpose of good engineering is to add value to society overall.

Finally, marketing and engineering are perfect partners. Engineers that understand the principles of marketing are therefore able to maximise the value they provide to their customers, clients, partners, and society at large.