Introduction 2. Lipstick and Blood 3. Lipstick and Blood: a History 4. The Blood-Red Myth 5. The Blood-Red Myth in Practice 6. Conclusion
In the previous post, I mentioned that as a writer, one of my favorite tools is the ability to put myself in other people’s shoes. As a marketing consultant and autodidact, it is also one of my favorite tools.
It’s not at all uncommon for people to be surprised when they find out that I have different ideas about products than they do. For example: the product I am currently working on is called Freedom (for those who don’t know it, here is a short description). It is an app for managing your finances, based on a simple, elegant premise: you want to be free to focus on what you do best? Then use Freedom!
Freedom has two main platforms: Android and iOS; there are two different versions of each platform.
I recently had an interview with a young woman who works in tech (and yes, her actual title is “product manager”). She and her team were asked about the product: how did it come about? They said something along the following lines: “We thought it would be cool if we could let people use their Android phone as portfolio storage. There are tons of apps out there but most are limited in what they can do with Android devices. So we decided to develop an app that would allow users to use their phones as portfolio storage.”
Wait… what?! And where do you think our app came from? It was born from the idea of Freedom — it was developed by our friends at BB Partners because they wanted us to build them something… something better than other apps… But their vision didn’t match ours; so we built our own!
The interviewee continued: “we started some basic research on how other apps work with portfolio storage but then got distracted by all the incredible things developers are doing with this technology so we just started building ourselves. We were like ‘hey maybe there are things that could be done with this technology but actually we don’t know anything about it and working with other people may make us sound dumb! So let’s just make our own app.’”
And thus began Freedom — and so began my apprenticeship as a marketer! And then came the first version of Freedom (yes, I wrote my first version before I talked to them):
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