My early-October blog entry on market development has sparked a good number of responses, but all through e-mail.  Again, I’m going to pass along an anonymous comment that came in last week, while I was in Dallas at Storage Networking World.  Here it is, unedited…

There are those in the room far more educated than I am, but never-the-less, in an effort to stretch my thought processes, please allow me to make the following observations.

In your sales-driven example, you make your case based on the assumption that the salesperson is apparently unaware that he is working in a “Cuban-style restaurant in Miami.” How different might his input be, if in fact he were a Cuban national, who had, for nearly all his life, watched and helped his mother prepare authentic Cuban cuisine?

The chef in the engineering-driven example, is not given credit for much intelligence either. What if he was using his culinary skills to master the all new, Cab-Over-Pete Burger and Log-Hauler Fries? I agree that marketing, in the end, should drive product development. However, I think that any company that fails to make use of all its available resources in decision making is missing opportunities that might prove to be quite profitable.   

Whatever decision making process is employed, it needs to take advantage of the diversity of viewpoints available. The free exchange of ideas and possibilities offers opportunities for new and fresh perspectives, and for this very reason must be encouraged.  The risk in having marketing drive product development is in the exclusion of valid ideas. Still, the input of sales or engineering must be filtered through marketing. This is the only way, in my opinion, to ensure the right product is produced at the right time.

To the author…thanks for the input and additional perspective, but what’s a “Cab-Over-Pete” burger?