Why Marketing Underperforms

A computer science engineer once complained to me about being with “a bunch of marketers” for nearly a week

“God, they’re an insecure lot,” he said.

“What do you mean, George?” I asked.

“They’re so defensive. They get pissed off real fast when you challenge them. We engineers are much more open to challenge. We’ll even do a white paper just to get colleagues to criticize us. That’s how we learn.”

“But George, ” I said, “engineers have something marketers don’t have.”

“What’s that?”

“A common foundation. It’s called mathematics. Marketers don’t have a common foundation.”

“Why does that make marketers defensive?” George asked.

“Without a common foundation everyone set his own rules, so opinion often outweighs fact. Engineering is about facts. It’s easier to defend facts than opinions. What you experienced last week was marketers getting upset when their opinions were challenged by your engineer’s left brain logic.

“This lack of a common foundation shows up in marketing seminars which are like being at the Tower of Babel. Speakers go all over the place with their opinions, giving no indication that what they’re saying rests on a platform of fundamental principles everyone agrees with.”

“That’s crazy. How can you get any efficiency when everyone thinks differently?”

Engineers think in terms of efficiency. George didn’t know that marketing is a grossly inefficient discipline. Sooner or later everyone in marketing hears about department store magnate John Wanamaker lamenting that half of his advertising was wasted, but he couldn’t determine which half. Any engineer would find that level of efficiency intolerable.

Jerry Zaltman wrote in How Customers Think about Nestlé CEO Peter Barbeck-Letmathe telling a group of agribusiness leaders at the Harvard Business School that marketers “treat personal common sense as superior to science-based knowledge and to what the humanities have to tell us.”

Zaltman then quoted another CEO:

“If [marketers] read popular business magazines, they feel on top of things. They disdain anything else. People with these attitudes would not last in any other profession.”

The question is, can the marketing profession develop the will to change in the face of well-documented loss of productivity accompanied by as much as 50% increase in costs since 1990?

Comments

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

By way of introduction, I'm a computer engineer (BSEE with a "computer engineering option") by training and spent 11+ years in the trenches either designing hardware or writing software. But I'm a marketer now.

In all fairness, computer engineering when you are speaking of software is hardly a true science as compared to other disciplines. There are typically a myriad of ways - all which appear superior and quite valid to the one whom proposes it - to arrive at a solution to a problem. A lot of software solutions are quite subjective and many debates and stances are near religious in tone.

I think more common sense in marketing would be a good thing - I certainly don't see that in place often. What most call common sense is really just one marketer's own perception - filtered by their own preconceptions, assumptions, and conditioning.

I think the engineer did pick up on something important - I too have often noticed 'defensiveness' when marketers are talking to customers as well when instead they should be encouraging and absorbing this candid feedback. (And I have come across quite a few defensive engineers as well - it's more a matter of how attached/wedded they are to their particular solution, computer language, development methodolgy, platform, architectural preferences, etc. Only the best are as open-minded to challenges to their viewpoint as this engineer professes.)

I'd love you to expound on this theme in other posts - at the end you leave us wanting more - how would you change marketing - what would you like to see?

[David Wolfe]

Thanks, Evelyn. for your insights. I will address your suggestion in the next several posts.

[vijjy]

i need suggestions about the marketing strategies, so i thank you give some of the tips in the marketing area to succeed
bye
vijjy