On the last days of engineering school, a teacher I liked said, ”Even if you develop the world’s most useful software, you aren’t considered successful if you fail to market it.”. Even though we didn’t fully understand the meaning of this at that time, as each year passed, my experiences kept hitting me in the face with facts. What was it that they didn’t teach us at engineering school?

They teach the students in an engineering faculty how to approach and analyse problems like an engineer. Analytical thinking skills are one of the essentials when it comes to being successful in our education. But us engineers make a habit of using these skills in our everyday lives and creating an analytic world around us, or imaging the whole world is like so.

For example: a dialogue between an engineer and a doctor can be expected to occur as so.

Engineer: Doctor, will I be ok?
Doctor: We did everything we could.
Engineer: Well, will everything you’ve done be enough to make me better?
Doctor: We also did our best for it to be enough.

At the end of this dialogue, an engineer will be unhappy because he will feel that he didn’t get any information. I describe the engineer’s futile quest in finding certainties as efforts of him trying to swim in the reverse direction of a river’s flow, in addition to life being full of uncertainties. It’s obvious that an engineer can never be happy in case he analyses life with the formation taught at school.

Humans are social beings who not only communicate by speaking or by body language, but also with what they own.

One of the mistakes engineers also make is, assuming that everybody in their analytic world will make rational decisions. Yet humans aren’t rational, due to their nature. Human history rose thanks to decisions great leaders made, which didn’t seem so rational at their time. The fact that people don’t make rational decisions becomes more significant especially while purchasing a product. Sometimes, we choose a product because it’s more expensive or just because someone else prefered it, because humans are social beings who not only communicate by speaking or by body language, but also with what they own.

We actually buy the dream of saturation while buying bread.

I think we can state that without marketing there wouldn’t be production, but without production there still can be marketing. I can hear you saying, ”How so? Without anything being produced, what is there to market?”. Us engineers think that it’s the product we produce that we are marketing, when actually, it’s the dream about the product we market while selling it. We actually buy the dream of saturation while buying bread or the dream of communication when purchasing a telephone.

So, you can market a pinch of drum powder, a little bit of the shadow of a minaret and a pair of mole eyes by wrapping them in a paper bag, and become a millionaire in this business. The real question is what you expect the buyers of these products to imagine. Don’t think of the supplying raw materials issue. I can email you the drum powder and the shadow of a minaret. The mole issue is a little difficult though.