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Marketing and Sales dept.


HoBo777

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Just curious if anyone has ever come across a legit for defense contractors to a have a sale's and marketing department as I've never heard of any country ever purchasing military hardware with out going through some sort of evaluation and testing program. Any actual insight into this would be greatly appreciated.

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Before stuff goes up for testing it's entirely up to the marketing & sales department to convince whatever acquisition committee to even consider their option in the first place. The marketing guys need to put together a good brochure demonstrating why their product matters, then string up a good presentation for possible meetings/state visits, and make sure that the product's positive qualities are highlighted and overshadow the negatives.

 

From a general public perspective, though usually purchases are made for an organisation (the military) and evaluated by officers and experts, the decision to support and fund said purchase is made by politicians, and politicians' decision are usually motivated by popularity and votes, and these come from people unrelated to the defence industry.

 

If you make everyone including the politicians themselves think, even if in vague terms, that your offering is the finest in the land and that it'll solve all the country's defence problems related to that area, then when the time comes to decide on whether to acquire the offering politicians will feel encouraged to support it since people will be feeling good about it.

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Thanks for the reply Lucas, I'm actually intimately familiar with the entire process from start to finish for nearly all US based contractors, I was just wondering if there was a "legitimate" reason for the existence of the sales and marketing teams. They after all represent sizable expenditures by the companies that are paid for by the US tax payer. I don't see the actual, logical, legitimate reason for that expenditure when the engineers already have reams of actual data. Seems to me that the people in the various armed services that are responsible for the use of the products and the engineers that designed and built them could have a far more detailed "peer to peer" discussion. I would hate to think that some sales rep with a BA in marketing wouldn't be the go to for all the correct facts, especially if their goal is to overshadow an negatives of the product. Also, has any body heard a CEO of a defense contractor that had any engineering skills. As a point of reference for the efficiency of I'm talking about achieving see Gwynne Shotwell, she may not be CEO but as COO she is the next most public face behind the business of SpaceX.

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Because sometimes they develop things 'on spec' in the hope they can interest someone after the fact ?

 

Because sometimes maybe they want to sell to someone other than the US Govt ?

 

Because they want to persuade the general public that the $610,000,000,000 dollars of US taxpayer money spent on the military in 2017 was money well spent, so they won't encourage the government to spend less ?

(If you wanted to distribute that differently, you could give 61 thousand dollars each to 10 million households a year)

Cheers.

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Because sometimes they develop things 'on spec' in the hope they can interest someone after the fact ?

 

Because sometimes maybe they want to sell to someone other than the US Govt ?

 

Because they want to persuade the general public that the $610,000,000,000 dollars of US taxpayer money spent on the military in 2017 was money well spent, so they won't encourage the government to spend less ?

(If you wanted to distribute that differently, you could give 61 thousand dollars each to 10 million households a year)

 

The Defense budget pays for far more than just bombs & bullets...

 

Easy to judge when you don't even live in the US.

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Easy to judge when you don't even live in the US.

 

I didn't pass comment one way or the other, only made an observation.

 

&

 

It's easier to see someone's drowning when you're sitting in the lifeguard's seat by the pool than when you're in the pool playing a game of water polo. :)

Cheers.

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Thanks for the reply Lucas, I'm actually intimately familiar with the entire process from start to finish for nearly all US based contractors, I was just wondering if there was a "legitimate" reason for the existence of the sales and marketing teams. They after all represent sizable expenditures by the companies that are paid for by the US tax payer. I don't see the actual, logical, legitimate reason for that expenditure when the engineers already have reams of actual data. Seems to me that the people in the various armed services that are responsible for the use of the products and the engineers that designed and built them could have a far more detailed "peer to peer" discussion. I would hate to think that some sales rep with a BA in marketing wouldn't be the go to for all the correct facts, especially if their goal is to overshadow an negatives of the product. Also, has any body heard a CEO of a defense contractor that had any engineering skills. As a point of reference for the efficiency of I'm talking about achieving see Gwynne Shotwell, she may not be CEO but as COO she is the next most public face behind the business of SpaceX.

 

Yes you're probably hitting the mark there on the oversized marketing teams. Which means it could more about the marketing than the actual product which makes sales go, shouldn't be like that imo.


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