Definition PR, the science, engineering and industrial communications specialist agency with offices in Manchester and Leeds, has published Good Engineering Does Not Speak for Itself, a report based on a survey and interviews with engineering professionals across the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada and the Netherlands, to understand their perception of marketing, and the results are… not ideal.
The report reveals that 85% of engineers believe good engineering speaks for itself and does not require marketing and communications support, while 25% go so far as to say marketing and PR are a waste of time. 57% have seen communications activity that completely misrepresented their technology, and only 12% say materials from their marketing team are consistently accurate.
88% say they would trust content more if they knew an engineer had written it.
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In the qualitative interviews, engineers describe marketing colleagues who take a specification and return something that overpromises on capability and timelines, generating friction, commercial overcommitment, and a mistrust that poisons subsequent collaborations.
But the interviews also revealed some contradictions. 35% of engineers, most of whom think their work speaks for itself, also report that their competitors get more media attention despite having inferior technology. Both things cannot be true simultaneously, Definition suggests.
Engineers’ own purchasing behaviour confirms that when choosing between two technically equivalent suppliers, they default to the better-known name.
The interviews with communications professionals in technical sectors reveal experiences of a labour-intensive, unscaleable process of learning engineering content from scratch to earn the credibility needed to do their jobs.
The report sets out five ways to close the gap:
- Internal education programmes
- AI-powered technical learning tools for marketing teams
- Shared measurement frameworks
- Benchmarking efforts in things like share-of-voice and AI visibility to better gain buy-in from engineers
- Conduits: communications professionals who are also trained engineers, capable of speaking both languages without losing anything in translation
“Definition has been working with some of the biggest engineering firms in the world for over half a century. In that time, it has become clear that engineers and technical experts are skeptical of marketing and communications,” said Mike Newby, associate director of science, engineering and industrial communications, Definition.
“The research shows that their skepticism is more nuanced than a simple lack of professional respect. Engineers are problem solvers who spend their entire careers building up invaluable experience about what does and what doesn’t work. Marketing and communications hasn’t been working for them.
“This is a massive problem for engineering firms, it gets in the way of their ability to tell their own story as effectively and accurately as possible. But it’s not the marketing team’s fault; it’s a structural issue.
“The simplest way to address it, in our opinion, is a bit of internal communications and education, and a really solid conduit. A PR agency with real engineers in the team who can speak the languages of both technical and communications experts can bridge the gap immediately.”
