Alan's musings : home
Alan's musings ... some personal views and rants
on this digital marketing malarkey
When you're inside the bottle,
you can't read the label
'Get out of the bottle so that you can read the label'
Back at the time when I was in retail management [the late 1970s-early 80s] I used this phrase regularly - at that time I used it as an analogy meaning that if you are too close to a problem you can be too subjective, but if you take a step back you see a bigger picture and so can be objective. I don't know where I originally picked up the phrase. Not a book, I didn't read theorists back then. I've got a feeling it was from an old film - a detective saying it about a murder case perhaps? In my mind's eye I'd like it to be Humphrey Bogart or Steve McQueen - someone cool, but that's not likely to be the case.
In recent years I have been using it in reference to website design - but it can work for all aspects of marketing.
In an e-marketing context I first used the phrase around the beginning 1999 when talking to some techies. I was trying to tell them that they were too infatuated with the coding of the site [the technical bit] and so were not seeing the site as the target audience would [the marketing bit].
I think it works well for websites, getting across a message that I have been eulogizing since I got involved in this e-commerce malarkey back in '96. That is that a commercial website is for its users. Not for its designers. Not for its publishers. Not for the CEO or MD of the organization whose site it is. Sadly, I come across far too many websites that are obviously
not
developed with the user - read customer - as the prime concern. Just to show that I am not alone in this way of thinking - usability guru, Jacob Nielsen says designers are not users.
In a wider marketing context 'when you're inside the bottle, you can't read the label' means that we - the marketers - should always look at the product / brand / organization from the perspective of the customer, not our own.
Of course it is always possible that I have picked up this use of the term from something I have heard [conference?] or read [book, article] - if you've seen or heard it elsewhere anytime this century drop me an email, it could be where I got it from.
Footnote: if you've arrived at this page via a search engine it was originally a support page to one of my first books [Internet Marketing; a Practical Approach] in which I used the term. This page was referred to in the book to offer readers a wider explanation of the phrase.
How to cite this article:
Charlesworth, A. (2008). when you're inside the bottle, you can't read the label. Retrieved [insert date] from AlanCharlesworth.com: https://www.alancharlesworth.com/Alans-musings/inside-the-bottle