Why You Should Care About Marketing

Mention the word ‘marketing’ to to a group of techies and it is a fair bet that they will respond with some derision. To many I.T. types the marketing department epitomises the sort of soft, nebulous, arts-graduatey world from which we hard science types have long been culturally divided. Sure, they have some pretty girls over there, but they never talk to us, and the questions we get from them are so dumb. In a rational world they’d all be fired and sent back to school to learn some real skills.

This is a stupid attitude. Here are some reasons why you should care about marketing:

1) It keeps you in a job. The clue is in the name. Marketing is about creating and sustaining a market for your products. Without that, you’ve got nothing. It doesn’t matter how elegant your code refactoring is, or how quickly your application runs, or how cool your new design is; If nobody knows about your product and it fails to make any money then you’re on a one-way trip to the unemployment office.

2) It helps you do your job better. I’ve sometimes heard developers say that Agile development is about ‘getting the business to understand IT’, and that’s true, but it’s also about getting I.T. to understand the business. Knowing how your non-technical colleagues think and what they are trying to achieve will enable you to collaborate more successfully and fulfil their needs better. In the age of outsourcing these sort of softer skills can give you a crucial edge over the guy in Chennai.

3) You can help them do their job. You may have things to learn about business, but your business colleagues have things to learn about technology, and you can help. The web, in particular can represent a perfect marriage between marketing and I.T., but in a lot of organisations the marketing team may still run along fairly traditional lines and not be aware of the opportunities that are out there. Do they know about all the powerful campaign tracking tools offered by even a simple system like Google Analytics? Are they familiar with RSS? Have they heard of the new social networking craze taking the West Coast by storm? Perhaps you should tell them about it.

4) It’s interesting. No, really, it is. Who are your customers? Why might they like to buy your product? How do you tell them about it? What might they pay for it? How would you keep them? What new ideas can you try? What is it that makes you love brands like Apple or Google, and not (say) Microsoft? Who knows, if you figure these things out it could be your first step to running your own cool tech company.

5) You might get to talk to girls. I’m kidding. Obviously. But still, take a look around your office… *



Convinced? Here’s a few sites that are sometimes worth reading:
Advertising Age
Marketing Week
New Media Age
Media Guardian
Google Blog

* Edit: Feedback from female tech readers reminds me to stress the purely professional benefits of engaging with colleagues from other disciplines. Also that it affords greater opportunities to meet men who are popular and good at sports.