If you wouldn't use your own product, could you still sell it? Could you still believe in it? Possible...?


I don't think so. I firmly believe that you have to believe in what you own/build/market/sell, etc... or you're just pushing the company line and will never really see a success that is beyond average.
Case in point, a story came out recently about longtime Windows development chief James Allchin, who wrote in a January 2004 email to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company co-founder Bill Gates that the software vendor had "lost sight" of the needs of customers. He said he would buy a Mac if he wasn't working for Microsoft.

"In my view, we lost our way," Allchin, the co-president of Microsoft's platform and services division, wrote in an email dated Jan. 7, 2004. The e-mail was presented as evidence late last week in the Iowa antitrust trial, Comes v. Microsoft Corp.
"I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems our customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that does not translate into great products."

In my view, there's a few ways you can look at this. First, you could say that this person should have been applauded and promoted and put in charge of making those changes. The second way of looking at this is to wonder why this person stayed with the company if he didn't really believe in the product.
My first reaction to this email as Bill Gates would have been to call a meeting and address these issues and find out if they were really true. Then I would have put a team together to fix the problem.
So, what would you have done? And when you look at your own marketing experiences, or general work experiences as a professional, can you, or would you, or have you worked for something you don't believe in? If so, why?
Personally, I live for the passion around something, and I could never work or promote something I didn't believe in.