The first time I saw chocolate coins I didn’t get excited until I found out that under the gold foil was chocolate. The gold didn’t impress me as much as the chocolate. That’s me. 🤣
Not everything that glitters is gold. Yet, our perception plays a key role in what we esteem as value.
We all know, at some level, this to be true. Something may appear to have great value until you scratch the surface. Yet, many of us have become used to dealing with the superficial and make countless decisions daily without any appraisal of our own.
Marketing and commerce take advantage of this fact and direct our senses to focus on what you will see as beneficial or desirable. This isn’t some secret. We all willingly play this game because, in spite of our weakness of not being able accurately appraise value, our perceptions are usually close enough.
The industry of cosmetics is driven by our need to look our best, to be perceived as having value. We put ourselves on the market, so to speak, and do what we can to hide our blemishes and enhance our good qualities. Even after the best makeover, at the end of the day when the makeup comes off and we dress down, we are left with an image in the mirror virtually identical to the one we saw before getting “made up.”
The key to finding real value is to get past the superficial. Open that carton and see what’s inside. Open the book to see past the cover. Get to know somebody and look beyond the outward appearance. Because, when it comes down to what’s important to you, finding out what something really is worth will make a difference.
Sometimes the best products don’t meet their market potential. A classic example of this was the TI-99/4A home computer. Texas Instruments is the company that pioneered some of our best technology. Inventors of the transister radio. Jack Kilby, the same year, invented the integrated circuit while working for them. The company went out of its way to hire the best engineers available and designed their flagship product that would go down in history as a collosal failure.
The TI-99/4A was the first 16-bit home computer. It featured 16 color graphics with sprite support and audio with speech synthesis. There was a cartridge interface where all you had to do was insert a new cartridge to add games or development tools, such as an assembler/disassembler. It also provided peripheral expansion so you could add a hard drive and floppy disk support. Today, that may not seem like much with our 64-bit processor driven tablets and iPhones. Yet, today’s most amazing technology owes its existence to the genius of those engineers and what they managed to develop in a home computer.
So, here was an amazing product with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of a thousand dollars soon to be sold in K-Marts across the country for $49.95. What happened? Very simply put, Texas Instruments in all its technical brilliance failed in its marketing approach. The perceived value was well below its actual value.
That failure made it possible for me to purchase a computer at a time where that kind of technology was out of reach unless you had a lot of money. While I was hospitalized to have my tonsils removed, I taught myself programming with my TI-99/4A connected to the hospital room TV. My doctor, recognizing the model, asked me if it was any good. He told me he purchase one but that it was still unopened in its box.
Sometimes the real value of something isn’t evident until a later time, when history has provided context. It’s easy to look back and judge Texas Instruments but they were simply following the strategy that success was based on building a better product. That is certainly part of it, but the rest is being able to let people know it exists. Then the world will beat a path to your door.