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It didn’t take long after the launch of Apple’s new touchpad for the jokes to start flying. Yes, the name – iPad – sounds like a feminine product. Case in point: one of yesterday’s top trending topics on Twitter was #iTampon. For those of you who don’t get the relevance of that, trending topics on Twitter highlight the buzz – what everyone is talking about. Adding #iTampon to a person’s tweet was quickly picked up as the way to make fun of the name of Apple’s newest product as an extreme faux pas. And the jokes were actually pretty funny, in a sick sort of way. If they were looking to build buzz with the name, they certainly achieved their objective but I’m not sure this was the kind of buzz they anticipated.

Interestingly enough, the “Apple IPad” was originally a not-so-flattering skit that MadTV put on years ago. Just search for iPad on YouTube and you’ll find it.

The biggest question I (and many others have): didn’t someone do their RESEARCH before launching this product? Were there any women on the team? And if so, were they not comfortable enough to speak up? HOW could this have gotten past any level of market testing and scrutiny?

This is a perfect case for why you need diversity on your teams charged with innovation. You need to consider different points of view based on gender, ethnicity, culture, language, and psycho-graphics of whoever constitutes your target demographic. And it would be nice to make sure you’re not offending or isolating an entire population of people. Just PLEASE, Apple, don’t release the new iPad in red….

Tags: Apple, diversity, innovation, iPad

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 7:30 am and is filed under business success secrets, innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.