'All great truths begin as blasphemies'

Thank you for the opportunity to meet and talk with you. Especially since I'm in the wrong business and you're in the right business, at least if the current generation of graduates are to be believed. Half of all graduates say they would like to be in the media and not in manufacturing, engineering or inventing. It's clear that engineers have an identity crisis – and probably one of our own making.

The serious problem facing Britain is that we have 37,000 engineering vacancies and only 24,000 engineering graduates every year. We've become more concerned with the cerebral process of communication rather than actually making things.

Jeremy Bullmore said this of advertising: 'Who gets neglected? The inventor, that's who. The designer the engineer, the chemist, the brewer, the boffin.'

Since I'm, wrongly, thought to be anti-advertising and anti-ad agencies, this may be a rash appearance in the lion's den. If I escape unmauled, it'll be because I've convinced you to let the facts tell the story.

THREE FACTS AND A PARADOX

First, I do believe that too many marketing campaigns, too much PR, and too many ads, are misinformed or oversell.

Second, I don't think this is the fault of marketers.

Third, I do believe that the fault usually lies with the clients and their brief. Too many businesses give priority to the ad campaign rather than getting their product right. It's partly a financial problem and partly a cultural one.

We British love to live life as a contradiction. We vote Brunel the second most admired Briton (he was half-French, but let's not let details get in the way) and continue to lap up programmes like Tomorrow's World and the Discovery Channel. But our bank managers refuse a loan to an engineer, a loan that they'd happily give to a bookmaker or pizza parlour.

Yet we still say we are a nation that encourages inventiveness. How do we explain this paradox? Our politicians and our leader writers love to wave the flag of British inventiveness. We think we're all in favour of good old British inventiveness. In theory. But, in practice, everyone from bank managers to cartoonists disparage engineers, designers and inventors.

Wasn't the Millennium Bridge's wobble hilarious? Wasn't it yet another typical British cock-up? Not really. It was a bold design. But we seem to revel in failure and it's poisonous.

If there is praise, it's waxing nostalgic for a lost world that never existed. The popular image of invention is Eureka moments – Archimedes jumping from his bathtub or Newton under the apple tree. Such moments are rare. They're almost always the culmination of long hours of experimentation and endless mistakes, rather than a flash of inspiration.

BRITAIN VS JAPAN AND THE REST

Back in the real world, the Japanese have built the world's second largest economy by taking the opposite view. They put no faith in individualism. They have an anti-brilliance culture. The British need a hero. The Japanese don't.

Journalist Dejan Sudjik attended the launch of the original Sony Walkman. When writing up his story he called Sony and asked a simple question: who designed the Walkman? Half an hour later he received a fax with not one name but 50.

The Japanese know that quantum leaps are rare. Constant development will result, in the end, in a better product. And that is my experience too.

1978 was the year I had the idea for a vacuum cleaner that didn't clog or lose suction. I wasn't searching for it. Frustrated, I found it. The first production run of my design began in 1986. I'd licensed it in Japan and five more years passed before I produced anything in my own name. Such a long gestation is commonplace in Japan.

And the people out there running the companies are engineers, like Sony's Akio Morita and Soichiro Honda. They are the rule, not the exception.

It worries me that Britain, the nation that started the agrarian and the industrial revolutions, is slipping behind the competition in the global revolution. We accord more value to spin than to substance. We Brits pride ourselves on being inventive. But here's the reality: Britain has fallen to 11th in the league table of patent filers. We lag behind not only Japan and Germany, but also Taiwan.

And even Switzerland! Graham Greene's anti-hero Harry Lime said: 'In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' But Swiss industry pays high salaries.

It will become true of Britain, if we continue to think media studies degrees are more valuable than engineering and technology degrees. Compare our trickle of 24,000 graduates in engineering with a mighty 300,000 a year in China and 450,000 in India.

Does it matter, you may ask, if everything is made in China, as long as it is designed in Britain? Be warned. The Chinese Minister of Education has made a simple statement: 'We aim to change the ubiquitous “Made in China” tag to “Made and designed in China”'.

If the factory is in China, it becomes a simple matter of convenience. Locate the designers next door – and maybe the marketing strategists too. Chinese and Indian firms are already buying up western brands. And design rights: MG, IBM, Vax, even Tetley tea.

MANUFACTURING VS SERVICES: MISGUIDED PRIORITIES

Go to the Institute of Civil Engineers in Whitehall. Admire the portraits of great British engineers: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Telford. It makes you proud. Or it would, except that not one of them was born after 1900. You'd think we were turning into a museum.

Already, we run a persistent current account deficit, £7bn in the second quarter alone. In relative terms, UK manufacturing is falling off a precipice. Between the second quarter of 1997 and the same period this year, the volume of manufactured output rose by just 2.4%.

The output of services expanded by more than 38%. So that's no problem, then, is it? We have the shiny new world of service providers to redress the balance of old world oil, grease and machines. Except that's a myth too.

Ignore such modern re-eruptions of 'tulip fever', like the dotcom boom. Forgive the City's hard noses for occasionally being seduced by glamorous 'tech stocks'. They burnt £400 million buying Lastminute.com. At the time its turnover was just £195,000. Meanwhile Rolls-Royce was unable to raise £250 million to develop new engines.

Who employs most? Who exports most? Who creates the most wealth? And who is unique?

Just compare the finances of service companies and manufacturing companies. Microsoft's revenue for the latest year was $44 billion – but General Electric's was $150 billion and Toyota's $158 billion.

According to the Fortune Global 500, 11 of the world's 12 biggest companies are industrial. And only one is in the service sector. So, it matters for our jobs and future profits when Korea's Samsung hires 30,000 R&D engineers in one go: more than all the engineering graduates we turn out in an entire year.

It matters that British engineers are among the lowest paid, or rarely sit on boards and, when they seek finance to invent a new product or start a new business, the door is all too often slammed in their face.

And it matters to our intellectual property that the Japanese Government has injected another $125 billion into research and development. Here, the UK Government is merely talking about investing $1 billion.

According to Design Council figures, even Chile has come out ahead of us in terms of growth in R&D spend. IMF statistics show that international trade in intellectual property – that is, patents, royalties and licence fees – is rocketing towards $100 billion a year.

It's a business that matters for Britain. We're currently the second biggest earner from this 'trade in cleverness'. Second only to America. But today's earnings are based on yesterday's inventions. If we don't continue to invest in R&D, we won't look so clever tomorrow.

Labour and the Tories seem equally slow in getting the point. It was a Tory minister who told me that tax breaks were wrong because they result in 'distorted investment'. He feared people would start investing in R&D to 'get the tax breaks'. Well, exactly,' I told him.' That is just the point.'

With this sort of mindset – and no engineer in the Cabinet except, would you believe, Margaret Beckett – it's no surprise that we risk losing our appetite for big infrastructure and engineering projects.

France has maintained its appetite for large engineering projects. The TGV travels at over 200mph and serves all of France. Its modern nuclear fission programme protects its energy supply. And with Peugeot, Citroën and Renault, it makes a lot of cars too.

Would we follow France's lead and invest in large-scale beneficial projects like the TGV? Or would our decision makers prefer to divert our resources to adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan? Would they prefer to splash a billion pounds on the Dome with its Disney displays or invest it in R&D for a future? We know the answer to that.

ENGINEERS VS MARKETERS – MORE MISGUIDED PRIORITIES

No surprise, then, that when Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art, challenged 4 to 11-year-olds to draw 'an engineer', they each produced delightful pictures. But they depicted repair men fixing washing machines or the mechanic changing tyres. No pictures of Formula One racing car designers or jet engineers. This misperception is being hardwired into the next generation.

Meanwhile, much further up the ladder, is the marketing team. The marketers have become immensely powerful, influencing what new products should be built, and what they should include.

One reason for the ascent of the marketer is that what he or she recommends is usually based on evidence. Good, scientifically based evidence: what sells and what does not. Armed with these insights, the marketing director is often the oracle.

I have no problem with market research based on evidence. But too great a swing in power from the engineer and the inventor to the marketing men would create a static society. Because, in truth, they only know what has been selling, not of the unknown breakthrough yet to be invented.

That's where the inventor comes in. The difference can be summed up in the words of Thomas Edison: 'I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.'

NEW IDEAS NEED NURTURING

Let's take some examples. First, Morita, Sony's co-founder.

Akio Morita

Morita created a strange device with headphones for his personal use as he travelled: his own music, wherever and whenever he wanted. But that was all it could do. Play. So his marketers were horrified when he proposed to leave off the record button. It was after all a tape recorder, the product upon which Sony had built its empire.

There was no market data to rely on. Nothing like this had ever been seen before. But this was Sony. The engineers were in charge. Morita got his way and this strange device of limited use was launched. But he didn't get his way in everything. Against his wishes, the name chosen was: the Walkman. So engineers aren't always right.

Alec Issigonis

The fuel shortage at the time of the Suez crisis prompted Alec Issigonis to design a car for Lord Nuffield's company, BMC. Production was about to start from two lines when – disaster! – in came the market research. It revealed the small car's Achilles heel. It wouldn't sell because people thought it looked 'silly', because it had no proper, big wheels – only little ten-inch jobs.

BMC was in a quandary. Should it strangle the new baby at birth? In the end there was a good old British compromise. The car went ahead, but on one line, not two. Of course, very soon after the car hit the road the nation went crazy for: the Mini. The 'silly' car became the biggest-selling British car in history, 5.3 million rolled off the production lines.

People loved the Mini's look. They loved the price. And they loved cavernous space allowed by those silly small wheels.

So was the market research inaccurate? No. It captured exactly how people felt about cars as they currently understood them. What an inventor does is design something so good it changes the way we see things. And you can't get that from studying straw polls.

So the verdict is clear from the evidence: the engineer, the designer, the inventor, must have a place in defining what the product is not instead of the marketing team.

We sell our vacuum cleaners and hand dryers, so I know that marketing is very important in the task of selling. The engineer is not going to explain their work as succinctly and powerfully as the marketing professional. My worry, though, is that, unless properly regulated, marketing can damage new technology. I'm content for the ad industry to be self-regulated – but the regulation must be strict enough to protect the integrity of the industry.

THE DAMAGE DONE BY SPIN OVER SUBSTANCE

Let me give you an example of what can damage both the ad industry and new technology: the attempt by manufacturers, aided and abetted by their agencies, to neutralise a rival's technical advantage by pretending to have the same technology. Let's take the case of stereo.

The original inventor of genuine stereo brings out a great product for music lovers. Two or more speakers to surround the listener with sound – an orchestra in your living room.

A rival undercuts the genuine article, selling mono sound but through two speakers. The rival still calls it 'stereo'. The technological advantage has been neutralised. The winner has the cleverest marketing campaign, but not necessarily the best product.

The result of our two-drum washing machine technology was an 'A' grade wash in half the time of the best competitor. In spite of repeatedly being asked to stop by the ASA, Bosch went on and on claiming quick washes without pointing out that they got an 'H' grade or worse.

So we need truth in advertising. Regulators should prevent your clients pressing you to pretend their products have qualities they don't have. Otherwise we'll all lose in the long term. Public trust will be lost. Our trust in our political leaders and in our press, has already diminished.

Don't go down the same route. It can be very tempting to use communications skills, not exactly to lie – but to mislead. All sorts of people succumb to the temptation.

So what can you trust? Or to be more germane to this audience, what kind of ads can you trust?

The ads I trust most are comparative ads. I think that, to communicate genuine improvement, you have to do a comparative ad. That is how you get people to understand the technical differences between one product and another.

Britain and the US are healthily robust about comparative ads, provided they are truthful. Some other countries won't let you tell the truth about rivals, in case it upsets them – sensitive souls.

Belgium is a case in point. We read in St John's Gospel: 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free'. Not in Brussels it won't. Comparative ads there are close to blasphemy.

We were banned from saying 'we have no bag'. So we didn't. Once again, George Bernard Shaw may have hit the nail on the head when he said: 'All great truths begin as blasphemies.'

I hope I've left you with some little truths about engineers and inventors. And not too many blasphemies against marketing and advertising.

This article featured in Market Leader, Winter 2006.