Marketing for aerospace and defense companies

• The cycle is measured in program phases and budget cycles, not quarters — nurture has to survive years, which means systems, not memory.
• Every asset needs a review path: what can be said, to whom, at which clearance and export status. Marketing that ignores this ships nothing.
• Primes, OEMs and government customers each buy differently. One deck for all three is a deck for none of them.
• The credibility bar is absolute: one over-claim in front of a program manager and you're a vendor they mention with a raised eyebrow forever.

I built aerospace account plans at Motivo Engineering and ran its presence at VFS Forum — the vertical flight community's technical conference, where the audience is engineers and program people, not badge-scanners. I've worked the adjacent circuits too: ACT Expo for advanced transportation, SEMA on the mobility side. I know what a capabilities statement is for, why your AS9100 cert belongs in the story, and which claims will die in export review before they ever reach a page.

And the constraint most marketers can't work inside: when roadmaps, customer names and specs can't touch a public LLM, the AI-native systems I build run on locally-hosted models with your IT — nothing leaves your infrastructure.

1. Build the cleared story: the public capability narrative that survives legal and export review, per audience — prime, OEM, government.
2. Map target programs, not just target accounts: where the budget is, what phase it's in, who influences the requirement.
3. Stand up the long-cycle nurture system — signal monitoring on programs, contract awards and hiring, feeding a queue your BD team can act on.
4. Run the AI visibility audit on your category queries. Defense-adjacent buyers use LLMs like everyone else; the sources those models cite are where you need to exist.