![]() Fuel prices were volatile demand was slowing stronger regulatory oversight was around the corner. Even executives within a business like Aviation were having trouble making sense of a rapidly changing industry. Some of its best-thought-out new offerings were fast becoming commodities. ![]() The businesses were maturing, and like other companies, GE was learning that it could not win simply by launching increasingly sophisticated technologies or by taking existing technologies to new markets. “So the challenge was how could market research really help us? Because we could literally pick up the phone and call everyone in the industry who mattered and find out what was on their mind.”īut things were changing. “You could put the entire industry in a conference room-it’s that compact,” says Thomas Gentile, the vice president of engine services for GE Aviation and a former chief marketing officer at GE Capital. The commercial aviation industry is relatively simple: a handful of aircraft manufacturers, two GE competitors (Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney), and about 300 airlines. Take GE Aviation, the multibillion-dollar division that develops and manufactures jet engines for commercial and military aircraft. Many internal skeptics did not see how marketing as a function could help GE grow its businesses. In a few GE businesses, such as appliances and the former plastics unit, marketing was a viable contributor but in most of the others, its brilliant minds were languishing in dead-end jobs. At best it was considered a support function at worst, overhead. In discussions about corporate strategy, marketing wasn’t at the table. People designated as marketers were assigned to sales support (lead generation and trade shows, for example) or communications (advertising and promotional materials). For decades the company had been so confident in its technologies that it seemed to believe the products could market themselves. Just 10 years ago General Electric had no substantial marketing organization. Marketers took their place alongside technologists and had a voice earlier in the process, as GE’s innovation expanded to include ideas grounded in customer needs and market trends. The result was a marketing framework for the entire company along three dimensions: principles (creating a common language and set of standards), people (getting the right leaders in place), and process (including very specific measures for grading performance). The marketing team took on the challenge of identifying and codifying from scratch the skills it would need. CEO Jeff Immelt issued a mandate that marketing should be a vital operating function across GE and an engine for organic growth. To succeed, GE would need a marketing engine that could collaborate directly with customers and lead to new markets-one with standards as rigorous as those for functions such as finance and human resources. ![]() And when it came to discussions about corporate strategy, marketing wasn’t at the table.īut as GE’s businesses matured, the company realized that it could no longer win simply by launching increasingly sophisticated technologies or taking existing technologies to new markets. Marketers had been limited to passing information along to the people centrally responsible for innovation-typically in R&D or engineering-with the result that brilliant minds were languishing in dead-end jobs. ![]() Until a few years ago, General Electric believed that its products could virtually market themselves. ![]()
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