Engineers and Marketing

Why Engineers Should Never Be In Charge Of Marketing

So sometimes, when engineers are asked to create and implement marketing ideas, you know, like generating ideas to reduce development lead times, things go wrong. Terribly wrong. Ugly wrong.

Engineers are best left to design new phones and make coffee. (not in that order) Anyway, here is evidence of what happens when good engineers introduce bad marketing.

So . . . we were trying to find some way to help engineers speed up their design process for LCDs. What else could be done? We supply sample code, specs etc., but we had to find something else to reduce their time to market.

Well, we came up with the idea of same day delivery. –For free.– Anywhere in the United States. Not using UPS or Fed Ex or Amazon. But with a very large rubber band and two trees.

The idea being that if we knew the general direction of the engineer’s office, and the wind was in our favor and there are no birds or airplanes in our path, we could just launch the LCD samples via a very large sling shot.

We figure this was such a good idea that we would also send over someone from technical support with the LCD. Talk about a game changer of an idea.

Needless to say, this idea met with failure on several levels. First, all the LCD support engineers called in sick that day (Gutless).

So we moved ahead with launching just the LCD sample. But that went ugly wrong when we miss-read the wind and speed direction causing the 3.5″ TFT to be delivered to someone sitting on a park bench. (See photo at top of page). We do believe in customer service so we let him keep the sample at no cost. After all, without good customer service, what do you have to set yourself apart?

Then we hired an out-of-work super hero to throw the LCD samples to the engineers across the US. But the video below shows that this too failed.

In the end, to avoid lawsuits, we ended up just having the folks at online components ship the LCD samples in a much calmer, safer manner.

We can still help engineers rush new designs because FocusLCDs.com samples are in stock with US based support.

Still want to try the same day delivery option? Let us know a GPS coordinates then put on your helmet and catching glove and wait in the parking lot. Just try not to be walking in a park anywhere north of Chandler, Arizona on a windy day.