Putting lipstick on the pig

I have used the statement "putting lipstick on the pig" many times in my Marketing career. The reason is that I have marketed products I don't fully understand. At Harrah's I marketed gambling, and I don't gamble and don't really understand how to do it. At Cisco I marketed networking technology, and I don't know much how a server works. Today I market liquid fertilizers and waste water management tools, and there is so much chemistry and biology involved as well as farming knowledge that I do not understand. I don't know how to raise the pig, I don't know how to turn the pig into delicious bacon, but I know how to stick lipstick on it and make it attractive.

All this has made me think how important it is to understand your customers. The 4 P's are product, price, place and promotion and the 5 C's are customer, company, competition, context and collaboration, but are any of those really worth anything without knowing the customer?

Today I work for a company with a great proprietary technology that can do all kinds of great things for a farmer or waste water technician. The challenge is now which of these things does the customer care about? What color of lipstick does these customer like? Which color will they ignore? You can have the greatest product ever but if you don't know your customers and what they want you are just spewing white noise.

So this is the challenge, knowing exactly what your customers want, and what attributes of your product they care about. I feel too many times we get so hung up about specific attributes of our products and how cool they are we just assume the customer wants them and so we are going to market those. The customers might not give a care about these things, so your marketing falls on its face and fails.

Granted, there are companies out there who say the customers have no idea what they want so you have to give it to them, like Apple and the iPod. Sure, the customer might not have been able to fathom that a device could come along and do what the iPod does, so they might not ask for it, but you still need to understand the customer likes music. You might have some other makeup besides lipstick to stick on the pig that the customer could not understand but would like, but you still need to understand from the customer that they like makeup on the pig.

Assuming that the customer wants what we think is cool is a mistake. You need to understand who your customer is and what they want or you are going to throw a ugly looking pig in front of the customer that they want nothing to do with even though that pig could give them everything they need.