I know we’ve done everything to enter the boardroom: we made marketing an all surpassing commercial discipline, we invented fancy job titles like  “CMO” and we spiced up our careers with expensive marketing degrees. But since this week, I realized that we may have gone too far. What happens if marketeers really become the boss? And marketing becomes a too dominant force within a company? Check the logo above this post, check the headlines. For decades VW was an innovative car maker, with trend setting cars and great affordable technology for all. Then the marketeers took over. In due time, priorities shifted from engineering to something called premium. Unfortunately, premium was not about premium technology, but about premium feel: the image, the design, the smoothness of the leather, the click of the closing door, even the sound of the engine was enhanced by fake engine sound from the speakers. Marketeers thought they could sell more cars by engineering a premium feeling. And they were right. They managed to do so successfully for many years. But of course, this is not really engineering. Far from that.

The last decade all car makers are struggling with the ever more stringent emission regulations. When Honda and Toyota invented hybrid and hydrogen technology to meet these regulations, VW was very skeptical about this strategy. Instead they chose a different route, which in hindsight turned out to be the easy way out: they would improve existing diesel technology by downsizing the engines and relying on high turbo pressure and very high combustion temperatures for performance. Needless to say this requires far less investments than developing complete new technologies such as hybrid and hydrogen power. But every engineer must have known that this technology has both reliability and emission issues. Tests and research show the decline in reliability of the engines time after time. And the differences are staggering: Honda’s engine failure rate is 1: 344,  Audi: 1:27. But marketeers don’t read statistics. And neither do consumers.

As a result, this route turned to be a dead end. In order to meet the very strict emission regulations for diesel cars in the US, apparently the only “escape” was to manipulate emission test results by very clever software in the motor management of diesel cars that recognize and “fool” test situations. With this trick the cars pass the test (by temporarily cutting back the power), but in practical road use, the diesel engines exhaust up to 40 times  (!) the amount of NOx than is allowed. Now we are not talking about a lack of engineering anymore. Worse than that. Now the engineers were asked to develop technology to cheat, creating a car that is not meeting the specifications.

What happened here? Who made the engineers do this? We’re not sure of course, but I am guessing it was the marketing department. By award winning commercials and convincing slogans (“Das Auto”), the consumers seemed to buy it. But not anymore. Some people label it “protectionism”, but the American authorities reminded us of something we all forgot:  a car is a product of technology. It’s not a fashion item, not only a lifestyle product, where appearance and image is crucial. Cars offer us mobility by technology. With the need for ever safer and cleaner cars, that technology better be good. Is this a plee to get rid of all marketeers? No. The CMO can stay. As long as he listens to the CTO.