Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

“Techies need to know the business,” reads this Business Week piece. Which, in my way of thinking about it and putting it, means they need to know what their companies’, or their products’, brands are promising to customers and users.  Unless the people in engineering and R&D have an intimate understanding of why their target customers buy things, those guys are not sufficiently informed to conceive, design and engineer anything of value for those customers.    

Where marketing and product development share data, insights, ideas – where they interact – relevant product innovation and value propositions flourish.  Companies like Procter & Gamble, Clorox and Apple broke this code early in their respective lives.  Others?  You know who they are.  They’re the ones who just could not compete because the functions were isolated in silos.  “Sales” drank coffee with customers, “engineering” remained remained cloistered, and “marketing” ran errands for both of them and felt sorry for itself for being out of the loop.  

It’s encouraging to see that biz schools are pushing functional commingling as an Rx.  Overdue.