Marketing for Engineering or Bridging the Gap between Geekdom and Advertising by Gabriella Cerrato-Jay

The line bridging the gap between geekdom and advertising actually comes from the MIT Advertising Lab blog, which is run by a grad student at the MIT Media lab. In my mind, the phrase truly captures the challenge of advertising for highly technical products. When I work with my marketing colleagues, I am amazed at the nuances that they can find buried in the technical jargon that engineers love to use. Let's face it, we engineers like to impress our audience, and project the image that we know what we are talking about� and we are really good at what we do. But, generally speaking and no offense taken (I am in the same boat), we find it very difficult to communicate what we do and why in simple terms that can be understood by someone who is outside of our field (in my case, noise and vibration).

So, I applaud the marketing specialists for constantly finding innovative ways of translating the geek jargon into common terms that anyone can understand. I am one of those people who actually likes watching commercials on TV (from this, in case you had not read my name, you can probably infer that I am a woman and, as such, fundamentally impaired in the art of high speed channel switching). Commercials are fascinating: they are all about delivering the right message for the target audience and there are so many different marketing and cinematographic techniques to achieve this objective. To this day, I am still impressed by how different TV commercials are in the US, Europe and Asia.

Anyway, if you decide to check the MIT Advertising Lab blog, make sure that you look at the Ad Tech Watchlist, because there is a susrprising variety of advertisements for technical products. Also, check the MIT Media Lab website -- they work on an amazing variety of totally cool things.

What does marketing have to do with noise and vibration? Well, the answer is a lot. Several years ago, I learned from Dr. Norm Otto, a Senior Technical Fellow at Ford, that the two of the most researched areas in automotive sound quality were the sound of a door closure and the sound of automotive accessories (window lifts, powered seat adjusters, pedal adjuster and so forth). But neither has anything to do with how the car actually drives and handles! True, but both these groups of sounds affect the first impression that the customer has of the car he/she is considering to purchase. No matter how stylish the car, how powerful the engine or how wonderfully it handles, if the door closes with a cheap, metallic sound and if the pedal moves with a unbearably annoying sound, then you may think this car actually good quality. So, you see, in noise and vibration, if the problem is technical, it may not be a real problem, but if the problem affects the customer buying decision or his satisfaction, then the problem is real. Power to marketing!