Not in most circles but sometimes I wonder if an engineer’s input wouldn’t be extremely helpful to the overall marketing process. Same goes for a top sales person who has ripped through his or her sales goals and set new ones. And let’s consider a financial person like the CFO or Controller to contribute to the overall strategic process.
I’m not a big fan of committees creating creative work believing that should be left to creative people, but I am big on having a strategic plan that goes beyond “We want to sell more stuff to more people soon or we’re going out of business!” These sort of management statements don’t contribute anything to the strategy line and greatly diminishes the motivation among those trying to create a winning strategy.
All that said, the best marketers I ever met were knowledge experts in what they were marketing. They weren’t able to create the science behind what they were marketing but they understood it well and were able to clearly communicate the tangible benefits to those on the marketing team.
For 21st century marketing to be successful, I believe a cohesive team management concept will create the most effective and successful marketing. This marketing may or may not include talking animals. Amusing, but not necessarily effective, but we’ll leave that for another day. What is going to work are brand messages that are driven by the customer’s needs and wants. And sometimes that takes an engineer’s mind to understand and communicate.
