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Home > Michelle's Blog > Previous Postings > 02/05/07
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Previous Postings |
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February 5, 2007:
InnovationWe had an innovation team meeting this week - a team of innovators at my company who have been hand-picked by me to determine the future of the company and products. Our topic is the "face" of our software. We have a very innovative, "smart" software that, for a small company, stays very current with the issues facing today's businesses. We have very modern functionality in our products, but let's just say, new people looking at us, can't get past the "skin".
As we moved through these discussions, talking about which areas of our 30 year old software system need to be re-written, one of my programmers said, "We are just putting lipstick on a Pig." So I kept running with that analogy and we further discussed that when you walk into a bar, do you find the smart, intelligent, logical person? Or do you find the pretty/handsome person and hope they have those other qualities?
Sometimes if your product is not "pretty", people will discard it without even knowing anything about it's personality. It's like a movie I watched on Lifetime called, "To be fat like me." A teenage girl, athletic, smart, attractive, decided to try to win a scholarship to college and made a fat suit and used make-up to make her over-weight. She thought that everyone would treat her the same, because she had a good personality and that we are not that vain. Her younger, over-weight brother did not agree.
She found that people really do judge by the cover and that first impressions are very important. That if you can't get past the gatekeeper, you'll never get to meet the queen. In this day and age, the face of our product DOES matter, and that is what our company is focused on with our newest Innovations.
Maybe if the tube of lipstick were just a little bigger it could cover more...
Keep Smiling!
Michelle