About Marketing Engineering

The concept of "marketing engineering" is practically not used in Russian management theory and practice.

This article is devoted to the reasons for this situation and the importance of an engineering approach to marketing activities.

The fact that marketing engineering is not an established term for Russia is evidenced by the extremely small number of mentions of it on the Internet. At the same time, marketing engineering is a management area at the intersection of marketing and management. Their relationship can be interpreted in different ways, subsequently forming the understanding of marketing engineering that the owner or general director will be guided by when building the company's management system.

Marketing and Management

Without delving into theory, but from the perspective of enterprise management practice, three basic models are typically implemented.

1. Marketing is part of the organization's management.

In this case, management is understood as the entire field of management, while marketing is one of the management functions. As a rule, the special role of marketing as a function is recognized here, but nevertheless, it is still just a function (part of the overall process). With this approach, marketing is subordinate to management and must be integrated into the overall enterprise management system.

2. Marketing and management partially overlap.

The management model is based on the idea that marketing mainly deals with the external environment of the enterprise, while management forms the internal structure of the company. They have a common field of interaction, and they have their own exclusive areas with specific working methods.

3. Marketing as a kind of philosophy of company management (the concept of market orientation) stands above management.

In this case, management tools are designed to provide the internal resources necessary for the implementation of the organization's marketing strategy. It should be noted that this view on the relationship between marketing and management is quite radical and is implemented in the system of business processes in practice quite rarely.

What is Marketing Engineering?

The very phrase "marketing engineering" seems to call for moving away from the dispute about primacy and establishing constructive cooperation between marketing and management. Management engineering is a category that generally denotes the design of management processes in an organization. Then marketing engineering should be understood both as building processes for managing the marketing function (if you lean towards the position that marketing is part of management), and as constructing management processes through the prism of the company's marketing development tasks (which is important for supporters of the priority of marketing).

In practice, marketing engineering seems to be a very promising approach, as it:

1) defines the priority of marketing / market goals in the company's activities,

2) implies the integration of marketing processes into the system of the organization's business processes,

3) coordinates individual business processes within the framework of achieving the company's market goals,

4) builds a clear system for managing marketing processes themselves based on the general principles of the entire organization's management.

Implementation of the Marketing Engineering Concept in Practice

The fact that marketing engineering is a productive idea for improving the business model and its individual components becomes clear given the accumulated experience of working both within companies (in-house in managerial positions in marketing and the commercial unit) and as an external marketing consultant.

Often, owners or company managers understand marketing not even as a function of management, but as its part – promotion and advertising. A deep analysis of the situation, as a rule, shows that the constraints on the company's development lie not in the area of promotion, but in the entire marketing complex and, first of all, the product. Here we are still formally not going beyond the classical understanding of marketing as a management function. But moving further logically and, for example, identifying the reasons for the imperfection of the product, we will inevitably face problematic business processes in completely non-marketing areas – production, supply, finance, etc.

Here we are faced with a bifurcation point. If we want to ensure a qualitative breakthrough in the company's work in the market, then we are "doomed" to understand business processes that are supposedly non-core for a marketer and optimize them in order to bring the product (in our example) in line with market requirements. Of course, this requires the involvement of functional specialists and their managers, sometimes the help of external profile experts, but there is no other way. A consultant, as well as an in-house marketer, working in the philosophy of marketing engineering, take on the authority to design all business processes that are critical from the point of view of the company's success in the market.

Far from always, company marketers have the necessary competencies to work as a "marketing engineer," but with motivation, this approach can be learned under the patronage of an external consultant and then applied in current activities. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that it is easier for an external expert to work, as he is independent in making his decisions and is not bound by exhausting operational activities.

An experienced and professional consultant will try to build work on marketing engineering in such a way as to use the potential of the existing team at the enterprise (primarily marketers) and skillfully manage resistance from persons who are the owners of the modernized business processes. At the same time, the involvement and attitude of the company's top management is extremely important, as they provide the process with ideas, expert assessments and build a system for executing the decisions made.

Competencies of a "Marketing Engineer"

In order to draw a conclusion about the potential effectiveness of implementing marketing engineering procedures within your company, you need to evaluate the specialist who will be engaged in this activity. Regardless of whether it is an invited employee or a staff member, and especially regardless of the name of his position (the bearer of the concept of marketing engineering may not be a marketer, paradoxically), advanced competencies in the following areas are important:

1) analysis of the external environment,

2) planning and forecasting,

3) product policy,

4) pricing,

5) work in sales channels,

6) promotion and advertising,

7) business processes,

8) organizational behavior,

9) organizational structure,

10) management reporting,

11) team building,

12) setting and controlling task execution.

The list can be continued, but in general it is clear that the content of marketing engineering as a type of activity imposes high demands on a professional in this field.

At the same time, it is not necessary that in all areas the existing knowledge and practical skills be at the level of the best experts. For such an activity, a broad outlook and experience in different positions, at different enterprises and in various markets are more important. The ability to think systematically, conduct composition and decomposition of processes and goals, and form a consolidated position of all project participants is of particular importance here.

Choosing an effective partner for implementing the concept of marketing engineering will allow the company not only to improve the results of its commercial activities in the short term by eliminating "bottlenecks" in key business processes, but also strategically ensure growth potential through the development of the enterprise's internal resources.