The very best marketing language you can use — bar none — are the words of your customers.

The very worst language you can use — bar none — are the words of your engineers.

Guess whose words the vast majority of consumer electronics makers use?

Stunningly, inexcusably, most manufacturers allow their engineers to shape their marketing. Most consumer marketing and communications originates with engineers and their strange cousins, the product managers.

Why?!

Because it’s just the way it has always been.

Hear me clearly on this: nothing your engineers say should ever be allowed to leave the walls of your offices. Let them engineer. That’s what they’re trained to do. And today’s consumer electronics engineers are clearly good, because most consumer electronics to make it to the mainstream is excellent.

But today’s high-tech marketing is uniformly pretty terrible.

Because engineers, not consumers, are shaping it.

Ask your consumers how talk, think about, and use your products. Ask them what they love, hate, know and don’t know about your products. Ask them why they bought what they bought, who uses it in the house, and why. What feature do they use most? Why? Ask.

Ask.

Ask.

Beg if you have to.

But before your marketing department goes to work on which features will be heroes, and what language will resonate best — ask your consumers.

They are never wrong.