Overview

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Developing a revolutionary design or product or software often becomes an all-consuming pursuit in industry. Yet, many gifted engineers and technologists are eventually bewildered to discover, only too late, that their innovative product is wholly insufficient. A great design accomplishes nothing if it fails to address critical needs and the only means of aligning those is a deep understanding of the consumer or business customer. Fully 94% of executives admit that their organizations fail to truly understand the customer. They are, strategically, running full-steam in complete darkness. This course can be taken for academic credit as part of CU Boulder’s Master of Engineering in Engineering Management (ME-EM) degree offered on the Coursera platform. The ME-EM is designed to help engineers, scientists, and technical professionals move into leadership and management roles in the engineering and technical sectors. With performance-based admissions and no application process, the ME-EM is ideal for individuals with a broad range of undergraduate education and/or professional experience. Learn more about the ME-EM program at https://www.coursera.org/degrees/me-engineering-management-boulder.

Syllabus

Introduction to Tech Marketing

Our first objective is to demonstrate to (often skeptical) engineers that technologies and innovations do NOT sell themselves. To consumers or to businesses. The media tends to cover only the exceptional, glamorous companies that floated to Unicorn status (Billion-dollar valuation) seemingly with ease. The other 99% of successful Tech deployments have required strategic marketing programs to get there. We explain how Marketing is far broader and more diverse a function than just advertising: Essentially all companies do marketing even if they do not advertise (See Tesla). Then we get into the value and mechanics of the guiding project for the term, the Marketing PLAN.

How Marketing Makes and Breaks Tech Companies

Now we will cover the common pace and patterns of adoption of novel technologies into industries and consumer markets, punctuated by examples of a couple of famous companies. We will see how many tech firms continue to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors and assume that the enthusiastic early buyers are like the later ones, the ones you need to make a profit. We will learn to apply two analytical models; The Technology Adoption Life Cycle and Roger's Technology Diffusion metric. Finally we get into the value and mechanics of our guiding project for the term, the Marketing PLAN.

Consumer Behavior and Markets

Now we analyze exactly how consumers and businesses make buying decisions. What are specific influences and processes and apply the Decision-Making Unit approach to define which parties have influence on these decisions. The we distinguish between high complexity/cost/risk purchase decision processes and those that are simple/cheap/quick. Finally we discuss what Client characteristics make for an engaging and straightforward PLAN process.

B2B Buyers and Markets

Now we learn about businesses as customers, the nature of these markets and how they compare and contrast with consumer markets. Next we take a brief look at the burgeoning filed of Behavioral Economics (where psychology and microeconomics intersect) and how its lenses can be useful here. We learn to develop a deep understanding of the customer through a rich profile called a Persona.

Market Research

We analyze types and charactersitcs of Market Research sources, first Primary, that collected for and explicityly applicable to THIS purpose/project. Then we learn the mechanics of creating the most-used type of primary market research, the Survey. Next we learn about secondary research, that collected for broader use but nevertheless quite valuable on the program at hand. The forms of research collection vary greatly in cost, time, quality and reliability of outputs, external validity, etc. Lastly we learn the practical collection of cost-free secondary research for your PLAN or any cash-constrained business.

The Data-Driven Organization

Now we learn to convert the raw outputs of research into useful data. The next analytical approach is choosing and applying effective means of Segmentation, subdividing your whole customer field into more useful and specific groups. Then we discuss how to strategically focus resources on the most promising subsets and then an advanced approach to same, Conjoint Analysis.