What Marketers Still Need to Learn From Engineers

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Market Meme

11 min readOct 1, 2015

This post was originally published on the Market Meme blog

The field of marketing is undergoing one of the most profound changes it has ever encountered: it is becoming the most intensely technological functions in modern business. I would also add that as a group, marketers, have been exceptionally bad at coping with the changes technology has brought.

A bit on #martech.

While marketers have been using computers and data in some capacity for decades, the field of marketing has traditionally been a relatively low-tech affair. The best marketers were creative geniuses, using their gut and instincts to instill need into consumers, they took a finished product and figured out how to create demand.

I applaud these creative folks and it’s incredible to reflect on the impact that marketing, when still more of an art than a science, had on modernity. While ruling Madison Avenue in its glamorous 20th century heyday, it did nothing less than help invent modern pop culture. Marketing also played an integral role in popularizing technology at large, driving the popularity of everything from TVs to the personal computer, to the smartphone, to cloud computing.

But recently, the technology that marketers are helping popularize is turning the field of marketing on its head, adding additional ambiguity to what marketing is, and opening the field up to new types of marketers and heaps of change: making it difficult for traditional marketers to learn the skills needed to stay relevant, and for that matter, to even define what marketing is.

Not sure if you are a growth hacker or marketer?

The latest debate in marketing is around the whole idea of growth hacking. If you aren’t familiar with the controversy, here are just a couple of the many examples:

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good debate (just ask any of the engineers I have worked with). But to me, I think there is something else happening here.

The problem can really be seen through this paradox: Steve Jobs, probably the greatest marketer of our age, hated the word “marketing.” Here is a quote that Apple’s ex head of marketing attributes to Jobs:

Marketing is when you have to sell to somebody. If you aren’t providing value, if you’re not educating them about the product, if you’re not helping them get the most out of the product, you’re selling. And you shouldn’t be in that mode.

While Jobs is one of the most prominent examples of folks being dissatisfied with marketing, he’s by no means alone. Some of the smartest marketers out there are trying to defect from the “marketing” profession, instead preferring to call themselves “data scientists,” “growth hackers,” “marketing technologists” and the like.

At a recent conference for growth marketing I attended , I was able to hear first hand from many well-known growth hackers such as Andy Johns, Brian Balfour, Sean Ellis and others about the reason that Silicon Valley marketers found themselves needing to rebrand. The basic idea was that startup founders grew sick of marketers after the Dot-com Bubble burst. At that time, companies flush with cash wanted to hire the best marketers that money could buy, so they went to the usual suspects: consulting firms like McKinsey & Co. and huge consumer brands. So these marketers came with their suits and attitudes and tried to apply the tactics that they had learned at Fortune 500 organizations to young, online tech companies. Needless to say, it was a disaster.

So when the tech market started to recover, and the innovators and engineers got back to business, they were so turned off by “marketers” that the engineers decided that they would just figure it out themselves.

Meanwhile, some folks, thinking like good marketers, reflected on the bad rap that marketing had received, and said: “Look, we are not like those marketers everybody hates. We’re like you: We do growth! We get startups. We’re lean. We’re geeks. And D&D is awesome!”

And the rest is history. They kinda settled on the term “growth hacker” and here we are today.

I like these folks. They found a problem in a market, and created a product that fit. Not only that, but the product was also good, and one of the reasons for that was many of those people were true full stack marketing unicorns:the mythical engineer–marketer. Both parts of the brain working together to understand the new challenges startups were facing.

Ironically, growth hackers, while abandoning the term “marketer,” helped ultimately bring new credibility to the marketing profession. Contrary to popular opinion, marketers are not idiots and they watched what the growth folks were doing and started to make it fit into their industries. The explosion of marketing technology, has given even the most cash strapped of marketers access to pretty good analytics, testing and automation suites.

So I applaud you growth hackers, thanks for the reminder on the need for good marketing.

However if I had to guess, I would say that growth hackers are soon going to go through their own identity crisis. It appears that all you have to do to become a growth hacker is to find inspiration from a blog post on the subject and then change your Twitter handle to reference growth and add a couple things like: “tech,” “toast aficionado,” “whiskey neat,” and “From Mad Men to Math Men.”

I’m not sure where the growth hacking movement is going, but I guarantee pretty much everyone in the world still thinks of it as marketing:

Anyway, the “marketing” problem seems to be related to more than just semantics and a bunch off well-off, internet-famous folks arguing about the meaning of marketing or growth hacking. The underlying goal is about staying relevant, getting better professionally and finding work as a marketer.

I think we have to redefine what “marketing” and “marketers” are. Perhaps surprisingly, engineers could help provide a revised definition for both terms.

Marketing, Meet Engineering.

At Market Meme, we feel that marketers can learn a lot from the engineering profession and that the parallels between marketing and product are only getting stronger. Engineers, across industries, have proven to be adept at creating technology to help them become more efficient at their jobs. They have continued to demonstrate their worth to employers, command relatively high salaries and remain generally well-respected members of society.

This is for good reason: engineers play an integral role in developing the innovations that drive modern business.

As Peter Drucker, the father of business consulting, famously said: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

So if marketing is so valuable to business, why doesn’t it feel like that? Why are marketers given the back seat? Why is “marketing” a bad word?

We are not saying that marketers are engineers or that the two of us alwaysget along. We don’t have to be best friends. But we need each other. Marketers need engineers’ outlandishly brilliant ideas and practical problem-solving skills to build stuff, and engineers need marketers’ outlandishly brilliant ideas and practical problem-solving skills to get the word out about our innovations. ← See what I did there :)

This quote by Philip Greenspun in Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days has stuck with me and I think highlights the problem that we have with our current marketing identity crisis.

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don’t think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, “OK, here’s this problem that we have- how can we solve it?” The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That’s engineering. ― Philip Greenspun

If we do a little tinkering with this quote and make it a little more applicable to marketing:

Marketers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don’t think about the larger picture. To my mind, a marketer is not an ______, because an _____ is somebody who starts with a market problem that an organization or a society has and says, “OK, here’s this problem that we have- how can we solve it?” The _____ comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, helps build it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That’s _________.

So what do we put in the blank? There have been many tries: growth hacker, marketing technologist, modern marketer, full-stack marketer… But none of these really do it. If you say “engineer,” people get it. You can go to school for it, you can get a PhD in it.

But we don’t to do this. This does not work anyway. It is silly. Why try to create a word for something that already has a name? “Marketer” is the word. We just need to take it back and remind people what good marketing is.

Now, back to the Greenspun quote. If you were to repurpose the quote to relate to marketing, how would you do it?

I arrived at this modification of the Greenspun paragraph:

“insert latest trend here” are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don’t think about the larger picture. To my mind, “insert latest trend here” is not a marketer, because a marketer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, “OK, here’s this problem that we have — how can we solve it?” The marketer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, helps builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That’s marketing.”

Alright, so you agree? We should all call ourselves “marketers.” Case closed? Yeah, I didn’t really think it would be that easy.

“Marketer,” Defined

OK, back to the matter of how to actually define what a marketer is these days.

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about the matter:

wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketer

WTF, marketers? Did you notice that “Marketer” redirects to “Marketing”?

Yet Wikipedia treats “engineering” differently. The website has separate (and rather long) pages for both the terms “engineering” and “engineer:”

wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer

Wikipedia defines the field of “engineering” as thus:

Engineering is the application of mathematics, empirical evidence and scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to invent, design, build, maintain, research, and improve, structures, machines, tools, systems, components, materials, and processes.

Whereas as an “engineer” is defined like this:

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical, societal and commercial problems. Engineers design materials, structures, and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety, and cost.[1][2] The word engineer is derived from the Latin words ingeniare (“to contrive, devise”) andingenium (“cleverness”).

And no, I am not claiming to be an engineer.

That is the problem with marketing. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry who wants to do marketing can call himself a “marketer.” Marketing is being defined by the tactics that people use instead of the base assumptions related to qualifications and training, as is the case with engineering.

Real marketers certainly have qualifications and training though.

Perhaps a couple of examples of what real marketers look like will help.

Here’s an example, from a “real” marketer: …..

And here is another.

Pretty big difference in tactics than the kinds of crappy promotional tactics that is sometimes referred to as “marketing.”

So back to our question: what is a marketer then really?

At Market Meme, we are fans of the T-shaped skill set idea, which IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown popularized and Brian Balfour fleshed out a bit more specifically for marketing and calls for the marketer to have a strong base in core skills (statistics, behavioral psychology, design) as well as marketing fundamentals AND be an expert on specific channels while have familiarity with a wide range of other overlapping channels.

Below is an example from Mr. Balfour to what that might looks like.

Although the type of knowledge a t-shaped marketer possesses varies according to industry, I think the graphic above does a great job explaining the types of skills a T-shaped marketer should have in the tech industry.

Bringing Marketers Together

The problem right now — if you can call it one — is that we are in a time of innovation and it is only going to increase. Assuming, as Mr. Horowitz states,that this generation will truly unlock human potential, the rate of innovation will only escalate. All great innovations require marketing to succeed, so the need for marketing is only going to increase.

What we don’t need though is the kind of marketing that everyone hates. Marketing doesn’t have to be sleazy, spammy, fluffy, or limited by the past misdeeds of a few old-school marketers.

At Market Meme, we really want to help marketers’ expertise become more T-shaped, which is better for them and their career. If we can help marketers get deep technical experience in their area of interest, but also understand marketing and the technologies shaping it at a fundamental level, we think we can help speed up innovation.

We also want to learn and draw inspiration from engineers and the products they’ve developed while respecting the unique needs of marketers. It is still clear that engineering and marketing will always remain separate professions. But we think the marketer of the (near) future will need to have a depth of expertise similar to that of an engineer’s. The word “engineering” may derive from “andingenium,” which is Latin for “cleverness,” but the marketer of the future will give engineers a run for their money in that department.

Old-school marketing won’t cut it any more. What we need now is tech-savvy, T-shaped marketers that have the data to show you the multiple ways their efforts are driving growth. And we are here to help make that vision a reality.

So growth hackers, try this on for size: I am a marketer, who specializes in user acquisition and retention and some of my skills include: lean/agile methodology, JavaScript, Python, APIs and my experience includes working at early start-ups and helping to scale projects. My interests are expensive coffee, suspenders and mustaches. Marketers that I look up to include: Sean Ellis, Brian Balfour and Andy Johns.

Inbound ninjas, please repeat after me: I am a marketer, who specializes in user acquisition and some of my skills include: lean/agile methodology, content creation and testing. My experience includes working at established startups and helping to scale projects. My interests are reading, writing and spending too much time on Buzzfeed. If I could be a journalist and get paid six figures, I would do that instead. Marketers that I look up to include: anyone who works at Hubspot, Buzzfeed and John Deere.

Much more to come, stay tuned: