Overview

Whatever you do, you'll need to know a lot about marketing. In a small organization it is difficult for any member, engineer or other, to overlook the significance of marketing activities or to badly misunderstand their nature. But as companies grow larger, more and more employees lose sight of marketing and have little or no customer contact. Attitudes become warped; work suffers.

A small but glaring example of this came to light in a large company a few years ago. This manufacturer employs more than two hundred thousand people scattered across the United States. Thousands of different products are made at more than a hundred locations. A customer in a southern city, desiring to order a certain replacement part, not unnaturally called the first place that came to mind the company's nearby plant. Of course that particular plant made some completely unrelated line of equipment.

The unfortunate person who took the call informed the customer, apparently in no uncertain terms, that this plant did not make the replacement part, that this was not the place to order it, and promptly hung up. Clearly, this employee did not think in terms of the company's purpose to serve its customers, but had a viewpoint that was limited to the local plant's production problems, or perhaps even more narrowly to the employee's own job. ^[1]

It is impossible for the person who is really practicing engineering to misunderstand the company's marketing effort or to be out of sympathy with it. We saw...