Oh, how we love to fall in love with the product, or service, our company provides.
We put in long hours over days, weeks, years, and sometimes decades, crafting our products, refining them over and over so that they shine so brightly.
We gaze at their beauty, and feel a sense of deep pride that we had the privilege of participating in the sculpting of such a beautiful work of art.
It reminds me of the character Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.
Remember how the ring becomes to Gollum, “My Precious!”
And as we constantly think about, and talk about, “My Precious,” our customers look at us and ask, “Hey, what about me?”
Mi Amor!
Alas, all product marketers, myself included, are not immune to this problem of loving our products, for their own sake.
I would agree that team members of companies do need to love their products in order to compete effectively.
However, the correct orientation is to love the prospective customer through the products.
In other words, your company’s product is only a means to an end, not the end itself.
It’s your customers who are “Your Precious!”
It’s so much easier to forget about your customers and love your product because you and your company are in control of creating your product, whereas you are most certainly not in control of your prospective customers.
It is so much more difficult to constantly seek to understand all the seemingly ever-changing needs and wants – emotional, physical, spiritual – of your customers and bring that understanding back into your company’s product development process, including how you will communicate – branding! – to those customers that your product will improve their lives.
But That’s Different!
Most Pregnancy Help Centers are very poor at this.
Returning to the talk I gave at the PWHC conference this past Saturday, during the Q&A part of the discussion, I was not surprised to see the “My Precious!” tendency on full display.
It was very clear that participants were looking for a marketing strategy where they could “push” the wonderful benefits of their services into the minds of young women.
Accept the program!
This rarely works, and when it does, it usually only lasts for a short while as a fad.
Interestingly, when I gave an example of a PHC that has done that kind of ground work, and then implemented their learnings into their branding, the pushback from audience participants was, “Yes, but their product is different than ours. We’re not PHCs.”
They might have been right about that in some respects, but more a question of differences in degree rather than differences in kind.
What’s most interesting is that their pushback wasn’t focused on customer needs, but on their own product features – a telltale sign of the “My Precious!” ailment.
Regards,
Brett