Deep Marketing

Grabowski argues that projects should spend at least as much on marketing as on engineering, keeping a Marketing / Engineering Investment Ratio above 1. The article defines marketing as market research done before or during product engineering, distinct from sales, promotion, and advertising that come after the product is ready. Its reasons are that upfront marketing clarifies market size, user personas, and willingness to pay, and that path dependence makes product design costly to change later. The author also extends the idea to field building for emerging technologies, citing the U.S. government's mandate of TCP/IP for ARPANET users as an example.