Marketing in a manufacturing company fails for one reason, and it isn't the work. It's the currency. Engineers accept evidence, tolerance and repeatability; most brand decks offer adjectives. Reframe brand as demand-risk reduction and the argument changes, because 70% of technical buyers pick the better-known brand when two solutions are technically equivalent.
The first brand review I presented inside an engineering-led business ran eleven minutes before someone asked, politely, what the payback period was. Not the ROI — the payback period, in months, the way you'd ask about a conveyor upgrade. I didn't have one. I had reach, share of voice, and a nicely typeset positioning statement. The meeting ended early and I deserved it.
Fourteen years later I've run brand and communication inside tractors, trucks, printers, freight and now steel. The pattern repeats in every one of them, and so does the fix. What follows is the version I'd give my younger self before that eleven-minute meeting.
Why does marketing lose the argument inside engineering-led companies?
Because it asks to be believed rather than measured, in a building where nothing else is.
An engineering-led company runs on an evidentiary culture. A design change carries a test report. A supplier change carries a qualification trial. A capex request carries a payback in months. Then marketing arrives with a campaign proposal whose supporting evidence is a benchmark from a different industry and a slide titled "why brand matters."
This isn't anti-marketing prejudice. It's consistency. The same room would reject an unvalidated bearing spec with exactly the same politeness. The mistake marketers make is diagnosing it as hostility and responding with more persuasion, when the actual gap is procedural.
There's a scale problem underneath it too. India's manufacturing sector grew 8.4% in the first half of FY26 and holds a roughly 17–18% share of the economy, according to the Economic Survey 2025-26. These are large, capital-heavy businesses where a marketing budget looks like a rounding error next to a plant expansion — and is scrutinised harder precisely because nobody can point to the machine it bought.
How much of the decision is made before sales gets a meeting?
Most of it. The 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, based on more than 4,000 buyers, found that 94% of buying groups had already ranked their preferred vendors before first contact with a seller — and that the pre-contact favourite goes on to win the deal roughly 80% of the time. Sellers confirm decisions now. They rarely create them.
The technical-buyer data says the same thing from the other side. The 2026 State of Marketing to Engineers study from TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec found engineers spend 62% of the buying journey researching online, 53% say brand familiarity influenced their most recent purchase, and 70% are more likely to choose the better-known brand when comparing technically similar options.
That last figure is the whole argument, and it is the one to put on the first slide. It says the specification sheet stops being the tiebreaker at the exact moment two suppliers can both meet spec — which, in a mature industrial category, is most of the time.
Translating brand into a language engineering already accepts
The reframe that worked for me: stop selling brand as awareness and start selling it as procurement-risk reduction. A plant head choosing a supplier is not buying a feeling. They are buying the probability that the line doesn't stop. Familiarity is a proxy for that probability, and it is priced into the decision whether or not anyone admits it.
Brand in a manufacturing company isn't a communications budget. It's a procurement-risk discount you pay for once and collect on for years.
Here is the translation table I now use in the first meeting with any new engineering stakeholder.
| "We need to build awareness" | Unfalsifiable spend | "We need to be on the shortlist before the RFQ is written" | Share of shortlist appearances per quarter
| "This campaign drove engagement" | Vanity metric | "Enquiries from unqualified accounts fell; enquiries from target accounts rose" | Enquiry mix by target-account list
| "Our brand is trusted" | Assertion without test | "Buyers who knew us before the RFQ closed at a higher rate" | Win rate split by prior familiarity
| "We should invest in thought leadership" | Content for its own sake | "Technical buyers research for months without contacting sales; we should be what they find" | Inbound RFQs citing published material
| "Rebranding will modernise us" | Cost with no output | "Nine sub-brands are splitting the recognition one name should be earning" | Recognition per name, cost per name maintained
None of these are new metrics. They're existing commercial metrics, cut by a brand variable. That distinction matters more than it sounds: you're not asking the business to adopt your dashboard, you're asking to add one column to theirs.
Four moves that earned the function credibility
1. Borrow the engineering evidence standard, publicly. Every claim I made carried a source, a year and a sample size, the way a test report does. When I couldn't source something, I said so in the meeting rather than rounding it into a confident sentence. Credibility in that room is built by the things you decline to claim.
2. Start with the aftermarket, not the flagship. Deloitte's 2026 Manufacturing Industry Outlook notes that aftermarket services carry margins more than twice those of equipment sales. Aftermarket is also where marketing can show a short payback period, because the buying cycle is weeks rather than years. Win there first. The flagship budget gets easier to defend once you've already produced a number.
3. Put engineers in the content, not marketers. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, fielded among 1,934 executives, found 71% of hidden decision-makers have little or no interaction with sales, and 79% are more likely to advocate for a proposal from a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership. It also found 86% want perspectives that challenge their assumptions. Your application engineers already hold those perspectives. My job stopped being to write and became to extract, structure and publish.
4. Show up where the buying group actually is. McKinsey's 2024 B2B Pulse, covering nearly 4,000 decision-makers across 13 countries, found buyers now use an average of ten interaction channels, up from five in 2016, and that e-commerce has become the top revenue-generating channel at 34% of revenue. A plant buyer and a procurement head do not use the same three channels, and neither of them reads the corporate brochure.
The uncomfortable part of move three is that it makes marketing look smaller. You become the function that makes other people credible. That is exactly the trade that buys you the budget conversation eighteen months later.
What should a manufacturing marketing budget actually look like?
Lower than the cross-industry benchmark, and that's fine. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, with 56% of CMOs saying they don't have enough to deliver the strategy. Quoting that 7.8% inside a heavy-industry business is a mistake — it's a blended figure dominated by categories with far higher gross margins and far shorter purchase cycles.
Bring the shape of the argument instead of the number. I've written separately on how much a B2B company should actually spend on brand, and the short version holds here: argue from category economics and purchase cycle length, never from a benchmark table.
Purchase cycle length is the argument that lands hardest in manufacturing. Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute established the 95-5 rule in 2021: at any moment up to 95% of business buyers are not in the market, because firms change major suppliers roughly every five years. In capital equipment the replacement cycle is longer still. Every rupee of in-quarter lead-gen is fishing in a pond containing a small fraction of your buyers — which is a sentence a finance director understands immediately, because it's an inventory-turns argument wearing different clothes.
The mistake I'd warn you against
Don't fight for the word "brand" in year one. I did, twice, and both times I won the vocabulary and lost the budget.
In a product-led company, marketing should give up the word "brand" for the first year and earn the right to use it back. Talk about shortlist presence, enquiry quality, win rate by familiarity, cost per qualified RFQ. These are the same activities. They are simply named in a way that survives a plant review. Once two consecutive quarters show the pattern, you can put the word back on the slide and nobody objects, because by then it refers to something with a history.
The related trap is over-claiming attribution. Manufacturing buying groups are large, slow and multi-touch. A model that confidently attributes a ₹4 crore order to a LinkedIn campaign will be tested by someone who models mechanical systems for a living, and it will not survive the test. Under-claim. Show correlation, name it as correlation, and let the pattern accumulate.
What this means for you
If you're the first or only marketer inside an engineering-led business, here is the sequence I'd run.
- Week one: get the last twelve months of won and lost deals, and tag each by whether the buyer had prior familiarity with you. This single cut is usually the most persuasive slide you will ever build.
- Month one: pick one aftermarket or spares category with a short cycle and run a measurable campaign against it. Publish the result including what didn't work.
- Month two: interview four application engineers and publish four technical pieces under their names. Not case studies — genuinely useful answers to questions buyers are already searching.
- Month three: build the shortlist-presence metric and report it monthly alongside the sales pipeline, in the same deck, in the same format.
- Quarter two: only now propose the brand investment. You'll be arguing from your own data instead of someone else's benchmark.
Two related pieces if you're building this function from scratch: why B2B brand awareness is the wrong metric to track covers what to measure instead of recall, and marketing in the supply chain deals with the specific problem of selling an invisible service. If your business runs multiple product names, the five-layer brand architecture framework is the place to start before you spend anything on campaigns.
One more thing worth holding onto. Deloitte's 2026 outlook estimates that more than 81% of task hours in manufacturing will remain human-driven even as smart-manufacturing investment accelerates. The buying decisions in this sector are still made by people who visit plants, remember bad shutdowns, and carry supplier reputations in their heads for a decade. That is a brand argument. It just needs to be said in a language the building already speaks.
So the question I'd put to any marketer inside a product-led company: if your CFO asked tomorrow for the payback period on brand, in months, what would you actually say — and what data would you need to have started collecting six months ago to say it? I'd like to hear how you'd answer that, on LinkedIn.
