Marketing does not give birth to a product

I face marketers on a daily basis. To give life to a new product, all parts of a business have to come together and donate to the gene pool.

However, not every gene is a bright spark. I do not bemoan my colleagues as they know what I expect from them. However a business group is very large and I get "out-sourced".

In a nutshell, marketers have to acquire knowledge on customer demands and trends that are specifically relevant to a product or service. Marketers are data gatherers of the business world and utilize the data to create marketing campaigns or promotional plans with the general appeal or aimed at a niche market. A marketer's main goal is effective communication.

But effective communication does not translate into product innovation.

An article titled The 9 Dangerous Myths of B2B Marketing by Geoffrey James reminded me how the relationship of engineer and a marketer work. Of course, in the process of product innovation, things can veer totally off tangent and resulting in resources wasted. This is a result of the engineer being too removed from the targeted customer base.Trust me, I have seen it happen and I feel sorry for the product.

A engineer wants to develop/find/make a good and useful product where a consumer will look at it and says,

"Hey I need that! Why didn't I think of that before?"

But a marketer more often than not tend to interfere during innovation and pretends to be the customer, which causes confusion and the product to be less successful as it is based on the marketer's notions rather than what the engineer or product manager had envisioned. Practicality, and not spinning "maybe"s, should be the engineer's main concern.

Heard the term "market requirements"? Market requirements does not mean the marketer's own requirements. The market is in a constant flux. How can an enginner be expected to innovate with a clear goal in mind if the market is a moving target?

The goal should be to innovate and then improve on the existing product.

Ideal way to start of on a design? Get the marketing people to give their 2-cents worth of findings at the beginning of the cycle and keep them out of it until the product is done. Too many cooks do really spoilt the broth, or in this case the product.