A model passionately talking about her favorite make up in front of a
white background.
A group of friends laughing while taking a drink out of an ice cold
bottle of Coca Cola.
A sleek car gliding across a barren highway.
If you’re like me, these are probably the sorts of images you think
about when you hear the term “marketing”. It’s not an incorrect thought, by any
means. These advertisements are a means of getting a product out into the
market, so I’d be wrong if I tried telling you this isn’t marketing.
But is this really all there is to marketing?
This was the thought that came into my head as I sat through a
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course a few weekends ago. I should preface
by saying that I would in no way consider myself a marketing professional. The
extent of my formal marketing training came in the form of one marketing class
I took in undergrad that I wish I could go back and take again.
Back to the CSPO course. On building the best product for your
consumers, one of the techniques taught in that course is the idea of a “product
box”. A product box begins as a big white box, and teams are encouraged to
decorate the box with the things they would want consumers to be excited about
or interested in. The point of a product box is for a team to think about new
features or functionality a product should include that they might not normally
think of in traditional ways of thinking.
The product boxes created by the various teams yielded some interesting
results. While some teams, like my own, were concerned about giving the “front”
of the box a traditional eye catching design much like cereal boxes, all the
other teams were focused on sharing as many features and functions of the
product that they could.
It was hard for me to focus on the rest of the course because I couldn’t
stop thinking about the implications of what this meant on marketing. Like I
said before, I am not a marketer. My background is solidly in IT. But for the
first time ever, I became profoundly interested in marketing. I have spent the
past few weeks reading books and listening to podcasts and have found that the cliché
shared by top marketers is not just a cliché:
EVERYBODY is in marketing. An advertisement for a product might look
beautiful or fantastic, but if the product is a stinker, then it is exactly
like putting lipstick on a pig. It’ll be a handsome pig, but at the end of the
day, it’s still a pig.
I decided to test this hypothesis amongst what other notable marketers
had to say about this. (Folks like Seth Godin and the Heath brothers.) Not
surprisingly, their works make a big deal out of this notion.
What does this mean for us?
Quality is something everybody has an influence in, regardless of
industry and how much say you have in your job. If I want to help my company
put out the best IT product, I can help make that product great by committing
myself to my work and holding myself to a high standard of quality. A McDonalds
employee can be friendly and helpful to customers ordering food. A CEO can
provide a clear, concise vision for where he or she aspires the company to be.
Like Seth Godin shares, it’s all about the story we tell.
One final note: I totally understand that there are those of you out
there who don’t like there job and only see it as a means to put food on the
table. My encouragement to you is to still put out quality work for own sake.
Why? Because you have something you can be proud of. You may not like your job,
but you can at least tell yourself, “Dang… I did a great job.” As much as you
may dislike your job, you can motivate yourself each day by being the best you
can be.
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