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More than Just Lipstick on a Pig

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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