[PT] Malcolm Gladwell
He’s giving us a preview of Chapter 3 of his new book, Blink. He’s going to talk about the development of the Aeron office chair. When it was first tested, the testers said they hated it because it was ugly. Yet, it’s become the best selling chair in the history of chairs. But after it became popular, the same groups said the chair is beautiful.
We find out what people like by asking them, he says. But the story of the Aeron chair shows that something gets lost between the feeling of a preference and the expression of a preference. What does this tell us about human nature? “Our preferences are extraordinarily unstable.”
He points to problems with blind taste tests like the ones Coke and Pepsi run. First problem: If you only take a sip, you’ll almost always prefer the one that’s sweeter, but not when you drink the whole can. Home use tests give different answers than sip tests. Second: People pick up cues unconsciously. We can’t explain how we do things or why we prefer them. Third: Asking people to think about what they prefer changes their preferences.
The real problem is that we have trouble distinguishing between things that are truly ugly and things we have trouble being articulate about because they’re too new.
Conclusion: We have to be skeptical when customers say “No.” And we have to understand that we don’t always understand our own hearts.
[Excellent talk and a great start for PopTech. And Gladwell is so good at making points by telling stories. But I’m a little confused. In some of his examples, the problem is that our prefs are unstable. In others, the prefs are real but we don’t report them accurately. In others, the test itself is flawed so the real prefs that we express accurately – we really do like the sip of Pepsi better than the sip of Coke – don’t reflect prefs outside of the testing environment. I assume the book lays all this out
Categories: Uncategorized dw
What they want vs. what they say they want
Joho the Blog writes up a talk by Malcolm Gladwell, who says that “when [the Aeron chair] was first tested, the testers said they hated it because it was ugly. Yet, it’s become the best selling chair in the history…
The word you’re looking for is “ethnomethodology” – the study of the ordinary, mundane acts of living an ordinary life. It’s the “ethnomethods” that get to the heart of these sorts of issues.
Although, at the end of the day, this is just the problem with the concept of “what we *really* want”.
Is that something which is defined behaviouristically or an inner cognitive state or something which needs us to take cultural and social context into account?
I have to agree that the stories that he uses are confusing sometimes, but if you think about it for a little while then the stories may start to make sense. Do we need to go back to another good book that i have been reading called “The powers of Impossible Thinking” Right in the beginning there is a story about people who saw a picture of Bugs Bunny at Disney and they swore that they saw him there when they went. The problem is that Bugs Bunny is never at Disney. Makes you think how some peoples memories can also change like their opinions.
Going on with what you had about the ugly chair, im sure that almost everyone has done that with a song. Sometimes if you hear the song early on a friends computer or wherever and then you hear it on the radio played over and over again you may like it because of its popularity.
All in all its a good book but you have to take the time to read it and let the stories sink in. If you havent bought it or borrowed it, you should.