Siege Engines & The Marketing Engineer's Mindset 🧠

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Today's essay is part of a series we started two weeks ago when we introduced Marketing Machine, and continued last week with the story of the emergence of the Marketing Engineer. Today we're digging into the weeds of Engineering and how it applies to Marketing. 🚀

Siege Engines

To understand the mindset of the Marketing Engineer, it turns out we need to start back in the 14th century and medieval warfare.

The term engineer was first used for one who "builds or operates a siege engine." A siege engine is a device of war used to break down castle walls. In the 14th century that was a battering ram, a catapult, a siege tower, or something like that. They were complex machines for their time. Naturally they gave rise to a class of soldier tasked with running them. The Engineers.

In the last six or so centuries since the emergence of the engineer, they have continued to evolve. Along the way, The Storytellers emerged (or already existed) and became The Marketers when the markets emerged. When we look at modern business dynamics, it's no surprise that the Marketing Engineer skillset has now taken shape. As it turns out, marketing and engineering have always been of kindred spirit.

In a business context, marketing is the department tasked with leading the charge into the market. Their marketing machine is expected to break through the attention of the consumer, expand their awareness of the product, and drive them to convert to user or customer. In this sense, your Marketing Machine is very nearly a literal siege engine operated by Marketing Engineers to run campaigns in the market.

The cool thing is that we don't have to re-invent the processes to build and refine these machines, because The Engineers have already worked out systems we can apply. But, before we dig in on what The Engineers have learned since the days of the siege engine, it makes sense to take a look at the one other function of a corp of Engineers, because it turns out that applied for The Marketers too.

Building Bridges

The function of engineers in the modern military still includes building and maintenance of the segue engines, but these days they are also well know for building infrastructure like dams, roads, and bridges. While the original challenge for The Engineers was how to break down a wall, it expanded to all of the other means of conquering the landscape in front of them.

When we expand from catapults to bridges and dams, we can start to see how the discipline evolved from a function of war. Someone had to imagine the catapult, and then engineers had to figure out how to build it. That turned into standing with an army at the edge of a river where the The Engineers were asked to come up with a way to cross. Eventually everyone wanted those bridges to look nicer, adding a new layer to the problem: art.

One of the keys to The Marketing Engineer's mindset, if not the discipline of Engineering as a whole, is to realize that we find ourselves asked to exist at the intersection of science and art. In a sense, Engineers are the ones tasked with realizing the theoretical. Here I mean "realizing" as in, "making real". It's the job of The Engineers to take all of the analytical rigor, calculations, data, theory, and design the real world tests to see if the science bears fruit. Then to scale those tests to build something beautiful, or at least functional. Often, a literal bridge.

In the world of marketing this means living somewhere between data science, market analysis, social science, storytelling and graphic design. On one side of the bridge we have behavioral and predictive analytics, market research, reports from the data science team, the results of A/B tests, et cetera. On the other side we have creative storytelling, graphic design, copywriting, and all of that. It is then the job of the Marketing Engineer to realize these things; to make real a marketing campaign, driven by data and science, but artfully engaging the market through imagery and storytelling.

So, finally, let's take a look at what The Engineer has become since those days of siege engines lobbing stones at castle walls, and then we can take a look at their processes as applied to marketing.

The Modern Engineer

From Wikipedia: "Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to solve technical problems, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve systems". This is a pretty good place to start.

So far in this series we've largely talked about engineers as the ones building and maintaining the machines, but this isn't really the whole picture. Engineering a discipline. It's a "practice." It's a mindset about science, math, technical problems, efficiency and productivity. It isn't just about turning wrenches, and it isn't even just about designing machines. It's about systems. It's also about a specific design process applied to solve problems within and among those systems.

When we realize that engineering is about the practice of a design process, we're one step closer to understanding how this might be applied to marketing and one step closer to understanding how the Marketing Engineer brain works. Certainly, design was a common enough term in marketing halls even before all of this software showed up to start eating marketing. Once that happened, it's barely a lateral move to see how the marketers start thinking like engineers.

A great way to understand exactly what it means to "think like an engineer" is to finally jump into the weeds of the design process they use to solve problems, with examples applied to marketing. Let's go!

The Process

Although there are different takes, the engineering design process roughly involves 7 steps: Define, Research, Ideate, Plan, Prototype, Test, Improve. These steps make up a methodical approach to solving complex technical problems in an iterative fashion deploying creativity, critical thinking, and efficient solution development. Critically, this process uses testing and data to make decisions, which is what will unlock the power of all of our modern marketing tools. Let's break the engineering design process down and apply it to a marketing campaign.

1. Define: Begin with a clear definition of the problem. Understanding the challenges from various perspectives lays the groundwork for effective solutions. In marketing this is identifying our target market, our ideal customer profile, pain points.

2. Ask: Dive deep with questions about the problem, its stakeholders, and why a solution is necessary. This step emphasizes the importance of thorough research and ideation, akin to market analysis in marketing. Here we begin to ask our customer what problems they have and we begin to think of the stories that might provide the answer.

3. Imagine: With potential solutions on the table, narrow down the options by imagining their implementation. This phase encourages creativity, allowing for the conceptualization of innovative marketing strategies and narratives to align with our product or service, and the problems of the target audience.

4. Plan: Detail the chosen solution's specifics, planning its execution. In marketing this is the strategic planning phase, where concepts are refined into actionable plans. Campaigns are outlined, and user journeys are articulated.

5. Prototype: Develop a prototype or a pilot version of the solution. For the Marketing Engineer, this could translate to testing small-scale campaigns running multiple options of creative, or creating sample content, providing a basis for iteration. This step is a core differentiator between The Marketing Engineer's mindset as compared to traditional marketing. Campaigns are not simply launched they are tested.

6. Test: Put the prototype to the test, gathering data on its effectiveness. At this phase we put our prototype campaigns in market, let them run, and collect data on their performance. Often, at this stage, we do not expect any return on investment beyond learnings.

7. Improve: Based on the data collected, refine the solution. Data in hand, we now make decisions. We decide which creative assets to allocate budget toward, which to drop, and which to improve and cycle back into testing.

While we used the quick example of campaign optimization in this case, I hope you can see how this applies to any sort of problem solving in marketing. Need better conversion on a landing page? Need better engagement with your marketing emails? This design process can help you find a data based solution.

The Marketing Engineer's Mindset

The above journey, from the history to the process, is a look the evolution and application of The Marketing Engineer's mindset. Realizing that this is actually nothing new, but the application of thinking and processes that evolved over centuries allow us to see and understand the power and impact of the merging of marketing and engineering disciplines.

The mindset is a way of thinking, developed by engineers and crafted to apply to the storytelling of marketing. It's also a process which, when applied to marketing, is the true unlock. This way of thinking, and this process, allow us to harness modern marketing tools, and the data they produce, to the fullest. It allows us to use them in an iterative fashion, which allows us to roll out marketing campaigns based on more than a good story and the hopes that we nailed the customer need through our research.

Learning How To Engineer

The coolest thing about all of this is that you can learn. We start from the history and end with the process to make that clear. The Engineer's mindset is not magical. It's not even particularly complicated. It evolved over centuries, but has been refined into the list you already ran through above. You get better by simply doing it.

So, if you're a marketer, pull up this post next time you start planning a campaign. Take a look at the process, and see if it helps guide your hand. If you want to keep learning, well, I'm happy to say that you're already in the right place. Stick around. Join in. We're all here to explore the new and the old through the lens of The Marketing Engineer as we learn together.

🧠 Adam

Sign up to get posts like this in your inbox every week. If you thought this post was the weeds, strap in. Next week we've got our first technical deep dive from Mark Richardson, our VP of Demand Gen, with a reaction to Gartner's report on Account Based Marketing in 2024.

Feeeedbaaack!!