Marketing & Engineering…a perfect match
We spend a considerable chunk of time at the office, bumping alongside people who we would unlikely cross paths with in our out-of-work lives. And in most work environments there are the diametrically opposed departments who will never be on the same wavelength. Often referred to as the ‘coloring-in team’ marketing can be seen as a million miles away from engineering. But in this season of love and hope I would like to make the case that is simply not true.
As we worked on our themes for the upcoming event Simcenter@RealizeLIVE the complementary perspectives became increasingly apparent. Mindful of Engineer’s Week and inspired by a post by my colleague Nazita, 8 things I learned from mechanical engineers, marketing had a interesting conversation with some of our lead engineers…
Frontloading Engineering
Engineers’ perspective:
Make all the mistakes you are ever going to make early in the design process and learn from them. Engineering is an iterative process, behind every beautifully engineered final product there are hundreds of failed “design improvements” that didn’t quite work out. If you are going to make mistakes, you should make them early, when they cost less, and they provide the most useful information for the rest of the design process.
Marketeers’ Perspective:
Deliver what the customer wants, deliver it quickly (ideally before any competition has even considered there is a problem to be solved) and give them something unique. Then we have a compelling story to tell, and everyone loves a story.
Digital Twin
Engineers’ perspective:
I think that simulation and test engineers think that we have much greater ownership of the “Digital Twin” than we actually have – after all, we’ve been building fully functioning digital prototypes for years. However, as the Digital Twin concept has grown to be much bigger than just our component of it’s important that we learn from and benefit from the more holistic concept.
Marketeers’ perspective:
Digital enables us try out messages and media to gauge customer reactions, what resonate and what doesn’t. We can isolate variables that have big impacts and importantly we can do all of this without big budgets.
Beyond Simulation
Engineers’ perspective:
One of the problems with engineering, is that you spend many hours of your life predicting the performance of a product that doesn’t yet exist, and (unless there is a serious problem in the field), little information on how accurate those predictions were. Fed by the “Internet of Things” the Digital Twin approach to engineering will change that, meaning that instead of being archived, our simulation models will become a living, breathing, part of a products future.
Marketeers’ perspective:
Buyer and consumer behavior have long impacted marketing practice, understanding the bigger flow to decision-making helps to ensure that strategy and tactics we deploy in our messaging reaches our target audience. We have to think beyond the immediate decision, every action has a reaction.
Simcenter@RealizeLIVE 2020
Perhaps you have a perspective we haven’t covered, or if you have an interesting, different or challenging story to tell then please submit an abstract today for our upcoming conferences:
Simcenter@RealizeLIVE Las Vegas – 22nd – 25th June – Call for Papers OPEN DEADLINE 1st March
Simcenter@RealizeLIVE Berlin – 2nd – 4th November – Call for Papers OPEN
More event information and more reasons to share your story DOWNLOAD here
