Lipsticking the Pig

This Ad Age article may be about how Motorola used marketing (and using it early on in product development) to improve its market share, but what Gothamist will take away from it is this Jonah Bloom line: "How many marketers at other companies have no such influence but are instead left to simply put the lipstick on the pig?" God, we love that. "Man, I can't blog that, it'd be putting lipstick on the pig."

Motorola's website

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By Jen Chung in Miscellaneous on May 28, 2003 12:42 PM

Comments [rss]

Tom Karlo

Haven't heard that one, but I know that there were uses in interface/product/usability design that date earlier than that. The Design of Everyday Objects (Norman) comes to mind.

jhtnyc25

i think the phrase is actually from banking. i know elliot spitzer had some emails from henry blodgett talking about a crappy company they were going to cover, and his research effort was described as putting lipstick on the pig.

jake

i hate that expression- it's so much disgusting market-ese. They use expressions like that around here all the time- it's like "rearchitecting" or "business transformation"- i feel ill.