Photoshopping our B2B tech products

I saw an article in The New York Times this morning on the practice of fashion photographers and magazines to photoshop to create a more perfect look, pixel by pixel. There’s not much new here - most of us know that already good looking models and actors get altered to a completely unattainable plane of beauty. And most of us women “know” (or at least “feel”) that we look better when we have a bit of make up on. (Interestingly, a few years ago there was a very fancy black-tie-ish wedding in our family. My sister Kath hired a make up artist she knew to do five of us - sisters and cousins - for the event. I have to say, we all looked fabulous - like ourselves, only better.)

What really struck me from the article was the picture of three magazines - all with Reese Witherspoon on the cover. The only one I would have recognized as Reese Witherspoon was the Vogue cover. Even looking closely at the others, I could barely make her out on Marie Claire. On Elle, the only way I would have said Reese Witherspoon would be if they’d offered me a multiple choice with Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep as the other choices.

As a B2B technology marketer, what a movie star looks like never, ever, ever factors into my work. But the article did get me thinking about how we sometimes fall into the temptation of photoshopping our products, metaphorically speaking.

No, we’re not out and out lying. But maybe sometimes we go a step further than we should when we over claim a benefit, or fudge a bit on a feature.

So maybe a good thing to do when we’re writing about a product is to ask someone who knows that product to see if they can recognize it in what we have to say about it.

Yes, we absolutely do want to put our products in the best light - brush on a bit of mascara to bring out those baby-blues, and maybe a touch of color on those cheeks so it doesn’t look like death warmed over…But if you’re taking major nips and tucks, airbrushing out defects by denying them, we’re not doing our products or our prospects any favor.  Are we under any obligation to highlight flaws? Hell, no. But anything that might mislead your prospects into thinking that the product works one way, when it really works another is out of bounds. If your “enterprise scale” software falls over and plays dead at the 10th user, then maybe you shouldn’t be saying “enterprise scale” to begin with.

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