Market Engineering: Because Markets Don’t Build Themselves
Bruce Cleveland
Silicon Valley Press (June 2026)
How to create or recreate a market with sustainable competitive advantages
How does Bruce Cleveland define market engineering? He suggests that the term seems to be an oxymoron (i.e., mutually exclusive) because markets are “messy, human, emotional. They shift with taste, politics, and mood — qualities that epitomize unpredictability.
“Engineering is precise, predictable, mathematical. It builds bridges, microchips, and space probes — things that obey the laws of physics, not the whims of customers.”
Companies need a process that may be “the single most competitive asset in your company’s repertoire — the deciding factor between success and failure.”
Let’s repeat that: great Market Engineering is “almost always what determines who ultimately leaves the table a winner.”
Fortunately, almost everything you need to know about the Dos and Don’ts — the HOW — is provided in this single volume.
Bruce Cleveland identifies and carefully examines each of the forces that make great companies inevitable. They include:
o Category Design (See Pages x, xi, 2-4, 9-10, and 21-22)
o Positioning and Messaging (3-4, 39-40, 43-44, and 50-52)
o Storytelling (3-4, 76-79, 87-90, and 91-92
o Thought Leadership (96-97, 98-100, and 100-109.
With all due respect to AI, markets don’t build themselves. Nor do assembly lines, printing presses, autumn harvests, factories, vineyards, distilleries, and other production initiatives. Humans build them. They also improve them to be more efficient, more productive, and more economical.
I heartily congratulate Bruce Cleveland on creating Market Engineering. It is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!
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Here are two suggestions while you are reading Market Engineering: First, highlight key passages. Also, perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at-hand, record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the thought-provoking questions or assertions with which Cleveland concludes each of the chapters.
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.