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Marketing is often presented as a creative exercise, full of slogans, campaigns and trends. For people used to tolerances, test data and structured processes, that can feel vague, unmeasurable and frustrating. But the danger in ignoring marketing is that your best ideas might not get the attention they deserve.
When marketing doesn’t make sense
It’s not that you can’t do marketing – far from it. The problem is that marketing is rarely explained in a way that fits how you think and work.
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting where a marketing budget was signed off with no clear way to measure return, you’ll know how uncomfortable that feels. For someone who spends their career building systems that deliver predictable results, that kind of guesswork simply doesn’t sit right.
This isn’t just a mild irritation. Poor marketing can hold you and your business back. A competitor with a weaker product but a stronger message can easily overtake you in the market.
And as you progress in your career, being able to articulate commercial value becomes just as important as technical excellence. If you can explain why a project matters in a way that directors, investors or clients understand, you’ll find it far easier to gain influence and win support.
Here’s the good news: marketing doesn’t have to be vague. Like any process, it can be broken down into stages, measured and improved.
Start by mapping your customer journey:
- Awareness – how do people first encounter you?
- Engagement – what convinces them you are credible?
- Conversion – how do you make it easy for them to choose you?
- Retention – how do you keep them coming back and recommending you to others?
If you treat each stage as a component in a larger system – with clear inputs, outputs and measures of performance – marketing stops being a gamble. It becomes something you can design, refine and run, just like any other process.
One manufacturing company I worked with had excellent products but relied heavily on word of mouth. Leads trickled in, but growth stalled. By introducing a structured system to generate and nurture leads, they doubled their order pipeline in 18 months – without changing the product itself. However, customers didn’t buy because of a flashy campaign. They bought because the company finally had a process that connected technical excellence to customer needs.
An empowering tool
Once you start to see marketing as a system, you’ll find it less intimidating and far more empowering. You’ll gain confidence to engage in board-level conversations, explain the commercial impact of your work and ensure that your best ideas don’t stay on the drawing board, but reach the people who need them.
This isn’t about diluting your technical expertise. It’s about adding another professional tool to your kit: the ability to communicate value in a structured, measurable way.
You don’t need to fear marketing – you just need to treat it like engineering. If you can design a machine, you can design your growth. And when you do, your ideas don’t just stay in the workshop. They make a real impact in the world.
IMechE offers a range of training courses on business and commercial skills. Find out more and book.
Ros Conkie (MEng) is a chartered marketer and fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, she specialises in helping technical professionals apply systems thinking to marketing. She is the author of The Marketing Machine: How to Engineer a System That Drives Sales and Growth.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.