Malcolm Gladwell - THE KENNA PROBLEM: Why asking people what they like is sometimes a bad idea

Malcolm grew was born in England grew up in Canada and he graduated from the University of Toronto with a history degree from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s he worked for The Washington Post and today he is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine he is working on a second book which should be out in about a year and he's going to talk about that a little bit I hope you'll join me in welcoming Malcolm Gladwell you very much that generous introduction I'm very happy to be here I you know I've only ever been to an herb indepence of Cola before in fact the only places in Florida I've ever been were Disney World's Disneyworld and South Beach so my my sense of Florida was a place where you were either dressed up in a in a in a mouse suit or you were dressed up in almost nothing at all and I'm very happy to discover in fact there are people such as yourself who dress very nicely so it's a big relief to be here and my my opinion of Florida has been permanently I think rescued by this experience but I am a gather some of you are are familiar with my old book tipping point and it just occurred to me that I could have talked about that and could still or I can talk about my next book maybe that's more exciting the I haven't really talked about my new book to any audience before so um you guys are in them you're in the vanguard I don't know whether this is going to be a treat or a I'll discover that in fact the whole thing was one big mistake but I'll try and judge from gage this from your reaction the book I'm running on I'm running now is it's a book about first impressions and snap judgments and things like that and it's a it's the basic idea is to ask the question what would happen if we took the unconscious seriously as to say what would happen if we try to structure our world in a way that that aids particular attention and like I said took seriously gut feelings and intuitions and the things that bubble up to the surface without we really knowing where they come from now obviously that's a really I think it's a really interesting topic and there's a million different directions you can go in that with that and I have chapters on what it means to make decisions if you're fighting a war and you know under extreme pressure I've chapter on police officers when they make the decision of whether to shoot or not which again is like really interesting do you know do you go with your god what happens when your god is wrong you know why is your gut wrong all these kinds of things I have long discussions of what it means to return a tennis serve which if anyone is a tennis fan I'd be happy to talk about but for those of you who aren't I won't bore you with that moment but the one I want to talk about today is um oh I forgot major chapters on dating of course I mean what could be more interesting and marriage and other similar things but the one I want to talk to you about today is a chapter that is a it's really about market research although it to say that it's about market research makes it sound I think more boring than it actually is but it's a it's a chapter where I ask a really I think kind of simple question but a question that I don't think we asked enough which is if I ask you why you think what you think can I trust your answer that is to say are we very good at describing the reasons why we hold the opinions that we do now I've been interested in this question about six months ago because I met this guy named Kenna I don't suppose many of you will have heard of Kenna unless the only people who would have heard of Kevin cannot are if any of you have a very very very cool teenager between the ages of say 14 and 17 they may know who ken is Kenan is this guy who's credibly handsome tall charismatic young man I was born in Ethiopia and he grew up in Virginia Beach and a couple years ago he's a musician one of the musician so he recorded a couple of songs he made his own little demo CD now one of the things that makes can really interesting is his music is really interesting it's very very unusual you haven't heard music like this before and we'll come back to the significance of that in a moment but the someone I know who was a big fan of Canada said that his music is what happens when you mix the kind of British New Wave music of the 80s with rap know if you cannot know if you can imagine that but I really can't and couldn't until I heard what kena's music's like anyway it's a little weird so kenan makes this CD and he you know he's just some random guy living in virginia beach through a long series of coincidences it falls into the hands of an A&R guy a scout for a very big record label in new york and a scout takes the CD to the head of atlantic records one of the big record labels this guy who gets 150 demos a week right and just pops them in and he 99% of the time they're out of his CD player after the first 15 seconds he knows what crap is and you know he listens to canada he's like whoa this is really good gets on the phone with kennedy says come to new york and now i want to meet you kind of flies in and he's just the two of them sit in his office and this guy's and kind of sings his songs from right there and he's just his head as i going around and around and around around he said this guy is something special so at the same time kanna's music this little CD falls into the hands of a guy who works for as a producer for a man named fred durst again your kids will know who fred durst is fred durst is the lead singer for a band called limp Biskit he's a very very big deal this producer here's his music he calls up fred durst on his cell phone and he literally puts the self cell phone next to the speaker of the CD player and says you've got to hear this he plays fred durst like 30 seconds and Federer said where is this guy bring him to de la i want to sign him to my record label they fly him in people are going crazy about Kenna he runs randomly runs into the manager of u2 world's biggest rock the manager of u2 flies him to Ireland to discuss like their future together and all kinds of things they're going to do Kenna this point he's just again a random guy he goes to New York he goes to MTV noes to M TV channels MTV one the one the normal one that is MTV to which is the kind of specialty one right which is the really hardcore music one company spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their music played on MTV too and if you can get it played a hundred times on MTV to your video you're the happiest company in the world cannot walks over to MTV to where he knows no one says I have the CD I think you guys should play it and by the way I made my home this little home video for my music and he gives them the you know the cassette they sort of randomly plug it into like whoa they play it 475 times fun this guy who walked in off the street and it's so Ken it's becoming ken has never performed live and some so somebody calls him up and says who saw him this little video and says you know someone called from the Roxy which is this really cool Club in LA and says we've had a cancellation I hear you're in California do you want to play tonight the rocks ken has never played before Ken it puts a little notice on his website at 4:30 that afternoon saying by the way I'm playing at the Roxy tonight he sells out the Roxy people are hanging from the rafters right he's just this incredible phenomenon anyway so this is where it gets really interesting in order to get music played on the radio you have to put it through a process of market testing and the way they market test reuse ik is they do what's called call out research it's done with a very very strict elaborate formula formula you take a little clip of a song and you call up a random selection of people who listen to your radio station and you play them you know fifteen or twenty seconds of it and then you say what did you think of that song do you want to hear it again other parts that you like then you go and you do a little more rigorously and use ended up people listen to the whole song and its entirety and they email back or they write back their responses or you're calling up on the phone this is done for absolutely every song that makes it on the radio you don't get on the radio unless you do very well on your on your on what's called your caller so kena the first thing these people do who are really really interested in Ken as they said well let's mark and research it because I'm not going to sign this guy to a million dollar contract obviously if the radio stations aren't going to play it and radio stations only play music that does well and call out so they think well it's not going to be a problem this kids amazing so they go out and they do call out research on Kenan here's what's happened what happens can I does abysmally fact he does so poorly on the call-out you know they give you these scores and if you're you know here you're going to get played ten times a day and if you're in the middle they'll play it a little bit ken is down here he's at the level where they take the CD and they flip it out the window right in fact I'll give you a quote from one of these things from one of the conclusions of one of these market research tests kena has an artist and his songs lack a core audience and have limited potential to gain significant radio airplay the radio guys are saying this man has no future the hardcore people in the music industry are going crazy over him and their heads spinning round and round and round right but in the world of music radio wins so radio so cannot did not get a record deal not from anyone not from these people who thought he was the second coming of prints so here's the question right here we have two completely radically different predictions as to whether kena is going to make it in the world of music which one of them do we believe right that's what the chatter is all about now this question is obviously not limited to music right we live in a world where absolutely everything is market research every move that politicians make every thing you buy in the supermarket every movie you see you know everything has gone through this the identical wringer will you go out and you formally ask people to to you have focus groups you have questionnaires you have all these different techniques that are that are done to gather information about what people think about your product and how should you change it in order to make it more acceptable to them right now what I want to argue is that this process is fundamentally flawed it is completely screwed up we totally overrated significance of what we find out when we go through this kind of formal process and the consequence of that sort of over reliance on this system is that we are cheating ourselves out of all kinds of wonderful experiences that we would otherwise have we're cheating ourselves out of the kennel Kenna's of the world so what I want to do now is to sort of describe to you why I think it's screwed up and what that means for people in this category of Kenna who are these apparently brilliant artists who are walking around without a record deal I think he's actually working for FedEx right now but I'm possibly the most musically talented employee in FedEx history so let me start by telling you the story a story that I'm sure you all know of in some way but sort of retelling it in a little more specific way and it's the story of the story of New Coke right the most famous product disaster in in one of the most famous in American history now remember how this worked coca-cola decided they had to change their formula because of they felt they were under extraordinary pressure from Pepsi and the reason they were under such pressure from Pepsi remember is that Pepsi was running the Pepsi challenge right they were going around the country and they were doing these taste tests and they would give you the way it worked was they would gather a panel of dedicated coke drinkers and they would give you two glasses one was you know em and one was Q and they said take a sip of both and tell us which one you prefer and then you would say why I think n is way better and then they would flip off the little labels into little pieces of paper and he would lo and behold you were just drunk Pepsi no you were dedicated coke drinker and you actually secretly preferred that the opposition right now this coke the first thing coke did when perhaps he started running these taste testers I think well Pepsi must have you know this must be some sort of trick so they did their own very quietly when I did their own taste test same thing happened Pepsi was winning hands-down right so you can imagine this is unbelievably devastating to the management of coca-cola right here you've got this the one of the most powerful brands in America it's been around forever and what is the basis of Coca Cola's sort of strength and genius and reputation this wonderful secret formula right that produces this amazing drink and they've had the confidence for years that they're making the best soft drink the world has ever known and now they're going into the marketplace and they didn't just do by the way when they did these taste tests to try and test to see what Pepsi were doing they weren't doing ten or fifteen or twenty five they were doing hundreds of thousands of tests right they're going into malls they're spending millions and millions of dollars they're not leaving anything to chance here we're talking about a multi-billion dollar company and the results came back over and over again that something like 57% of dedicated coke drinkers preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test now that that doesn't sound like a big deal but that's seven that's huge that's your core audience basically so they panic and they think oh my goodness we're like in trouble this is the end of coca-cola and if you read so what they do is they so they go back into the laboratory and they produce a new version of Coke one that they think is going to stand out much better than Pepsi and and what they did is they changed it so it was a little bit lighter and a little bit sweeter and coke so that much closer to the taste profile of Pepsi and then they go out and they do blind taste tests with this new coke right and they do exactly the same tested it before and now perhaps a Coke is not losing the Pepsi the new Coke is beating Pepsi right and they do it not just once they do it hundreds of thousands of times in every single city in the world until they are absolutely sure that this is a product that is superior in every way to the competition and then they hold that famous press conference in Atlanta and they stand up and they say you know we're changing coke we're coming out with new coke and this is going to be a world beater and they said someone actually asked them at the time you know how certain are you isn't is a big risk and the guy the CEO of coke says I have never been so certain of a decision in my life and why shouldn't he have been right they just spent I don't know how many millions of dollars testing this with hundreds and thousands of people in every corner of the globe and in every single test they come back beating Pepsi right now of course they were wrong spectacularly wrong right New Coke was not a success it was a disaster no one liked it everyone hated it when I got into the market and not only that this kind of edge that Pepsi appeared to have had in the tape in a taste test that was supposed to drive the old coke out of to extinction never happened today old coke is still more popular than Pepsi right so they were wrong on every single count they were fundamentally they made a fundamentally disastrous decision right now if you go to business school you will study this story as a case study and they will tell you all the reasons why coke screwed up and there's all kinds of things about the corporate culture and the business model and the listen to that together what I want to say is there's a way simpler explanation of this and the explanation is that the reason coke screwed up is that taste tests are a really really really bad way at getting to the question of what people actually think of your drink right they are fundamentally flawed now that sounds incredible right how can that be true what could be a pure way of me finding out what you think about my drink by having you test it in a blind taste test right it seems like ridiculous that there should be something wrong with that but in fact there is there's all kinds of things wrong with it first of all the first thing to understand about the Pepsi challenge is that I always find a mildly comic by the way that I end up but here I am discussing the Pepsi challenge like it's some famous you know this is on a par with the great research experiments of the you know anyway it kind of is interesting first of all it's a sip test now that's tremendously significant when it when they when you sit down the Pepsi challenge they don't say drink the whole can they say take a sip right now the beverage industry also has something called the home use test what that is is they give you several cases of their beverage you take it home and you drink it over the course of several weeks and then you come back and give you your answer about what you think of this beverage now the interesting thing is that you get fundamentally different answers from home use testing than you do from sip testing why because sip testing is biased in favor of something sweet you will always prefer something sweet if you just take a small sip if you drink the whole can then things that are very sweet start to become very close and unpleasant right so have see is the sweeter Cola so the sip test is is setup is biased completely in favor of Pepsi so that's problem number one that they were they basically Pepsi built a product that was designed to shine not in the marketplace but in a sip test right so now the question is why doesn't coke make this argument 1984 why don't they come out and just say well don't believe the sip test because this is an artifact of the fact it's just a sip if you drink the whole can you'll prefer coke well that's a very very very good question they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they've done that but it is perhaps the reason is that it's actually very hard to say that to people because it sounds like you're being condescending right you don't really know what you think we know better drink bill you know it sounds very like you know mother to son or mother to daughter it's not a it's not a the kind of position that you want to be in if you're a consumer products company any case they don't make that argument and they fail as a result okay so let's go further there's another flaw in in the taste test and it's based on something that that is known as sensation transference now sensation transference is something that's discovered by a guy named Lewis chessmen and Lewis chessmen is he's part of there's a whole way of psychologists who in the 1950s many of whom actually are from Europe in fact many of them come from Vienna and are former students of Freud or Freud's disciples and they're obsessed with understanding the role of the unconscious in in in marketing and market research and I think these guys actually I love these guys I think are all I'm in fact in many ways a good deal more sophisticated than marketers are today anyway what chess can discover cheston's big thing was that when some people when consumers gave an assessment of something they would buy in a supermarket they would without realizing it transfer sensations or impressions that they had about the packaging onto the product itself in other words chest guns great insight is that consumers don't make a distinction on an unconscious level between the product and the package the product is the package in a certain way now he did all kinds of cool work with with margarine that's another example of a phrase I never thought I would hear myself say margarine I doubt any of you are old enough to remember this none of you certainly look like you're old enough to remember this margin at the very beginning what comes out of the second world war is a disaster right no everyone hated margarine why did they hate margarine because they thought it tasted terrible didn't taste nearly as good as butter and in the beginning as well remembered margarine was white it was not yellow you couldn't make it yellow because the dairy farmers had some past special laws that anyway so Cheston came along and his TAT he was told he was hired by the margin guys to save margarine but everyone said you know what's going to be impossible because problem is it just doesn't taste good you never going to fix that chessmen said no no I can fix it so here's what he does first thing he does is he lobbies really hard and he gets the restriction against coloring at yellow lifted so all of a sudden Marvin's not white anymore it's yellow second thing he does he's working for Imperial margarine at the time now Imperial margarine at the time chess can start is not called imperial it's called like you know I don't know but one of the things he says them is you guys are going to call yourself Imperial margarine by the way from now on because we're not selling some downscale product we're selling something that I'm going to put a big crown on it because it's really high quality and then he says we're going to wrap it in foil we're not going to wrap it in paper or whatever it was and at the time some sent today but at the time and it back in the 50s foil was what you wrapped things that were really special in you know it was what you wrapped very expensive chocolates in so he says we're going to wrap it in foil we're going to color it yellow we're going to we're going to put a crown on the package I'm going to call it Imperial margarine right so he does all those things and sure enough people once you do all that they report that they actually quite like margarine and amazingly enough it tastes just like butter in fact you may even taste better than butter but he does all these incredibly complicated he puts on all these lunches for like society women and he he doesn't tell them that it's margarine and then he asked them after what did you think about that that that we just think of that bread that we gave you like the bread I like to bet she liked the butter too now but it was excellent thank you very much and so he's not anyway so there's all kinds of really really cool stuff this concept of sensation transmits is actually incredibly powerful and I am for example a couple years ago if you remember this sprite changed the design of their cans and they made the lime on the side of the sprite can larger Mostyn spreaders of 7up whoo sprite and then immediately after they did that they were inundated with calls from hardcore sprite drinkers saying why did you change the formula of my sprite you made it too lemony I think like we didn't change anything yes you did it's all lemony now didn't used to be so lemony you've ruined my sprite and they realize that people saw the lemon on the side and they were transferring that sensation from the package onto the product and so they shrunk the lemon back down and suddenly whoo and like their sprite again this is the same reason why I'm why the girl on you and the Sun made raised in package does a girl well I have had long Libre not long discussions with the package consultant for sun-maid raisins about the size of the breasts on the sun-maid raisins girl and the reason is that if you're selling son made raisins the way our impressions of the girl on the package shaped the way we think the raisin tastes and you know it's a big issue if you're trying to sell as many good tasting raisins as possible just exactly what that impression people are drawing from the Sun made raised my girl is so this guy told me literally he goes to how to forget him he's a del Monte I don't know who makes Sun meters but he is sat in long meetings where they've got you know PowerPoint and like slides of the girl with this this and this and like which one do we want and like I mean this gets incredibly complicated for the same reason you know when you if you ever have the misfortune to buy Hormel came they said that but you know those Hormel cans of whatever there's a little sprig of parsley between the m and the e right on the Hormel package you know why it's there because if you have a sprig of parsley there people will report that the food tastes fresher then if you don't put the sprig of positive there so that's why it's there anyway so the point is that when it comes to developing our sense of what something tastes like or our opinion of something or are we are making a very very holistic determination we're not zeroing in just on the product we're gathering all kinds of impressions and sensations and and associations from all over the place and we're mixing them all together in a big jumble and that's what it means to have an opinion or to feel that something tastes a certain way or it's not some narrow thing it's a very kind of so what this means for Coke and Pepsi is quite simple that the problem with blind taste tests is not just that they're hopelessly biased in favor of the sweet it's also that the whole concept behind a blind taste test is ridiculous why because in the real world no one drinks Coca Cola blind right you drink it out of the can and you import all of your impressions about the can and the brand name and all of your memories of coca-cola and all of the advertising and the fact that you had it when you were 6 years old and it tasted so great all of that stuff is factored into the taste that's the way you experience in the real world probably with that blind taste test is it's a completely artificial way of measuring someone's opinion so let's go to Canada because I think this really bears on Kenna callout research is a blind taste test right I give you the music and a little snippet sick of all of the other associates I don't even tell you what you're listening to right I just give it to you cold and I ask you for your impression now but that's not the way we listen to music when we listen to music in real life you know we take a home use test we're not doing a sip test we experience the whole thing and we you know we're sitting when we hear it it's the way it sounds coming out of our speakers it's you know there's up great someone who does color research told me that whenever they do call out research on new songs by Madonna they do terribly but the instant you tell someone it's Madonna through the roof right classic example it's the coke thing all over again she fails the sip test she wins the home use test because we have all of these kind of very very positive associations with her so the same thing with Kenna the people who loved him of the people who experienced Kenna they listened to him they saw him they sat next to him they went to the Roxy they you know they heard his whole kind of weird spiel they you know they saw this kind of funky little video that he made on MTV - they got all the other associations and they loved him then but they didn't love him when he was all by himself stripped of all of oh you know when he was when he was just being given to them in a sip um there's another reason to be suspicious of the way I can it was judged that has to do with the difference between expert opinion and non expert opinion that is - that is the difference between asking someone their opinion who knows the subject well enough to be able to explain their opinion and asking someone for their opinion when they don't know the subject very well right let me give you another example from the Cola business and I promise this is the last Cola related example I'll give you there's something called the triangle test in the cola business and what it is is you fill three glasses you have three glasses right each of them is covered with a thing and you say you're going to doing a comparison test of Coke and Pepsi you put Pepsi and one and Coke in the other two or Pepsi and two and cooking of the ones you're saying so you have you got two and one in some combination and you give people you line up the three cans and you say I would like you to drink all three and tell me which one is not like the other two it sounds really really simple right right everyone should be able to do that right can't do it if you do that the thousand people what you'll discover is that the accuracy rate is 33% it is exactly the same as chance now I know that all do you think that you can distinguish coke from Pepsi normally and most of us are pretty good that although it's harder than you think it is but and it is hard to believe that simply by adding another glass into that equation I make it impossible for you to distinguish but it is true trust me I've done this friends I actually that tells you something about how long-suffering my friends are but I actually had a dinner party where I invited deliberately another people who are dedicated color drinkers and I had them all do the triangle sip test and actually I got worse than chance in this room they were useless at it so now why is that why is that why is that hard why should that be so difficult the answer is that when I give you two glasses and just ask you to distinguish it you can do it quickly and kind of intuitively if I give you three make you think and when I make you think about what your preference is it starts to screw up your preference and this is a really really really important point there's lots of really interesting psychological work on this a lot has been done by a guy I like to guys a guy named Tim Wilson at UVA and a guy named Jonathan schooler at Pittsburgh and Jonathan schooler actually is even as we speak on the other side of town at that conference they did a famous study about strawberry jam and what they did is they went to Consumer Reports did you know one of those exhaustive exhausting Consumer Reports studies of some arcane thing anyways pneumatophores did a massive study of strawberry jam and they had 44 strawberry jams and they had a panel of Jam experts and they had them ranked all 44 strawberry jams so what's cool room Olson did is they went out and they bought the top-rated strawberry jam the one that was eleventh twenty four thirty second forty fourth right so they get a complete distribution of this range of strawberry jams and and they were the best one was top rated was Knott's Berry Farm two was alpha beta never heard of alpha beta feda wait was three act me for Sorrell Ridge was five then he asked a group of college students to come in and I asked him to do the same thing we want you to rate these jams right question is how close are the college students going to be to the experts right in ordering these jams and because they they're we're talking about a pretty wide variation in quality here the experts said that the worst one sore Ridge was like dreck and the best one Knott's Berry Farm is really good okay so they bring in the college students having did exactly the same process and what you find is that college students people who nothing about jams are actually pretty good at ordering the jams the same way the experts - so we're all pretty good at knowing what's good jam what's not and the so for example the they have the college students just reverse the order of the top two which are very close anyway they have I think the the worst one they they also agree that the worst one is worse and they had the same one at number three so it's if you do a correlation the correlation between the experts and the college students is 0.55 which how many of you know about correlations but that's really really really good you rarely get correlations that high in this kind of work so then Wilson school do the same experiment over again with a little twist they have these students come in and they say we want you to rank these jams but this time they say we want you to tell us why you're ranking the jams the way you're ranked we're going to give give us your reasons if you want to put Sorrell Ridge first tell us why you're putting Sauvage first if you want to put alpha beta v I want to know why what's net makes self you know blue so these other groups they go all they write down all the reasons and what happens well all of a sudden the college students are not like the experts anymore they're all over the map in fact they've completely screwed it up no it's berry the far and away the best Jam in the bunch is now the worst Jam or the second worst Jam they somehow if they're forced to think about it they suddenly turn this great tasting Jam into a terrible tasting Jam right so Ridge which was the experts worst Jam which is Drac now comes in a strong third these students are convinced now that they think about so root is pretty good now the correlation between the experts of the students is 0.11 in the world of correlations that's nothing that's horrible that's like basically what we're saying is there is no correlation between what the experts thinking what the students think so there is asking people to think about their choices to switch them from a kind of unconscious mode to a conscious mode messes up our decision-making process right it makes us reach very very different decisions and we would have just sort of intuitively asking someone to think about their opinion other words changes their opinion now this is not true obviously for experts experts can do this they can think about their opinions that come up with the the jam experts if you ask them to rate jam intuitively and think about it first that have the same rankings that's what it means to be an expert that you know you have access to the kind of world of knowledge about but that's but that's not the same it's not true as well for people who are not experts those of us who don't know a field very well we get screwed up when we have to come to account for the reasons why we like I had this hilarious lunch when I was doing this um this this chapter with these two women from New Jersey who were professional tasters they rent themselves out to companies to tell them what something tastes like because you think about it say you're coming up with a new kind of potato chip you really want to know does this potato chip taste like Lay's or does it taste like something that's not even on the potato chip map right so who can answer that question there's no scientific way to do this so you hire these two women they come in they say well on you know they they have 50 different dimensions and on 47 of these dimensions it's a lot like Lay's and they'll tell you precisely on the three dimensions it's not you know there I mean imagine having I took them to a really really really fancy restaurant in Manhattan imagine having these people and they've had their experts on everything and they're they've been doing it for 30 years and they have a whole shtick but imagine having a really really really good lunch with these with two very very funny women who have the most unbelievably developed taste buds about everything ordering dessert alone took like 25 minutes and I was in stitches by the end as they had this like long argument the waiter about the panna cotta that's for another time anyway they have these guys these two women is so good they can actually strew they can taste account coke and they can tell you the plant it was bottled in right they can also there's something called rework I didn't I've no no idea before that's what rework is but rework is where if you're a cookie company you got two kinds of cookies and you you've got some leftover ingredients from cookie a when you take those leftover beans and you use them for cookie B even though it's not precisely the same thing but it's close enough they can tell rework they'll say they'll take a look tastes like a wheat then they'll say what were we thinking what okay you know they have those look imagine so much fun the M they they did this whole thing on on why you they explain me why I why we don't like store-bought Cola why doesn't store-bought Cola work well the whole thing this is a sigh but it's worth it the thing that makes Pepsi and Coke really really genius is they've managed to do something will be hard to do which is all the different flavors of coke and peppers like you know I don't know how many six seven dominant flavors they are perfectly in balance in Coke and Pepsi it's an incredibly smooth experience nothing as they say spikes spiking is bad in the beverage business when you drink those video averages it's all you know the cinnamon the vanilla that this the sugar the lime it's all in one little smooth thing store brands can't do that they're not smart enough they're not pay enough money for it they're buying a cheap so what happens is certain tastes spike and that's what you're getting in a store brand so in particular the things that spike in store-bought Cola are citrus and cinnamon like I said the one of these women said that when you drink a Starbuck holistic it's like there's this big fat hunk of cinnamon sitting in the bottom of the bottle right now you and I can drink store-bought Cola and when we drink it we've no it doesn't taste as good as coke but we don't know why we have a kind of vague impression we can't put our finger on it why because we don't have the training but more important we don't have the vocabulary what these women have is the vocabulary they can break down you know there are 12 different kinds of vanilla and they know all 12 kinds there are you know you know there is vanilla knee velvet vanilla lean raised knee prune caramelized whiny tobacco that's just vanilla right then you can go into citrus and oh my god is all in more categories for citrus there's still lemon and there's Express lemon and there's blue can you like lemon you know goes on or not the point is then that that's why they're so that's why they aren't thrown off by having to explain their opinion because they have the vocabulary to explain it they can very very precisely say what something is we can't do that so that's sort of I think what's going on with with with Kenna that the experts when they're asked why do you think this guy's so good they can say well I think he's XY and Z and but for the non expert for the people who just sort of randomly chosen and that in the call-out research when they are confronted with this battery of questions they don't have the vocabulary to be able to answer those questions in a way that is in that is it conforms with their actual opinion now I think they're really critical points I'm going to go into it a little more detail also going to have of water um by the way I was as I drank this water having all kinds of sensation transference from particular Canon but um it isn't just that thinking about our preferences changes our preference is it thinking about thinking about our preferences changes them in a very very specific and interesting way Wilson in school those two cigars leader this is not another experiment that shows us really beautifully they um they use posters a big room full of posters and I brought these students in and they said pick any post you like take home yours right I did since it then about another group in and they said pick any post you like but before you take it home we'd like you to tell you tell us why you like the poster you picked right okay so sure enough what he found was that the service again yes and what he found was just like in the jamb case when you ask someone to give reasons why your choices change the kids asked to explain why they were doing pick different posters but listen to the posters they picked the people who walked in and could just take anything without explanation overwhelmingly chose of impressionistic a lot of posters of impressionist painters for example Monet's water lilies a lot of them took Monet's water lilies people who are asked to give a reason for their choices gravitated away from the impressionist posters and towards a lot of these sort of cute posters so a lot of the Muellers posters would have like a kitten that's hanging from a bar and it says hang in there baby you know vecinos they were much more likely to take the cute one of the kitten than they were of the of money then second thing that happens is that several weeks later Bilson's go to call up students and they say you know you got your poster for free a couple weeks ago do you like your poster the ones who picked Monet's water lilies say love my poster the ones that took the cute kitten were like no what was I thinking I you know I do now so why does that happen well it goes back to this language issue right you know you may like a poster or some jam on a kind of gut level but since you don't know really why you can't join the language available to kind of capture that properly when I ask you to come up with an explanation you just make an explanation up you pick the first thing plausible thing that comes into your head right what do you think of the texture the jam I know nothing about the texture of jams you ask me about that I'll just say I don't know I guess I thought it was a that one seemed a little bit Bruce Lee so I you know so I've decided now that you know Knott's Berry Farm is a little bristly and I've you know now Lee plans that he have Bruce Lee in my head now so now when you say well you know you know actually I kind of like Knott's Berry but I think about it it is bristly and Bruce Lee's not a good thing and so I'm going to I start knocking Knotts buried down from number one to number three to number four and you know we make up these reasons and then we sort of get attached to these reasons even though these reasons may have nothing whatsoever to do with the way we feel so what you're doing then when you ask people to introspect about their decisions is you are not just changing their choices but you're changing their choices towards things that are easily justified right the choice you're favoring the choice for which really really plausible reasons come easily to mind people intuitively prefer water lilies right but when they account for their have to account for the decision they choose cute kittens why because it's really easy to explain why you like the cute kitten I had a cat when I was young I love cats I think the cat that looks really cute you know water lilies how do you exceed snot harder to come up with a kind of plausible explanation so what you're doing with introspection is you are forcing people away from complexity and you're forcing them towards simplicity so I think this is sort of what's happening to Kenna as well right ken is not easy he's not the cat he's the waterlily he's a little bit harder you don't know you can't place him he's not modern he's not quite New Wave he's not rap he's a black guy but he's from Africa it's you know he doesn't fall into a kind of classic category so when people are forced to explain why they like this music all of a sudden they run out of line which really can't cope with the reason so what do they do well it's a lot easier for them to say I like the new Britney Spears album because they can put Britney Spears into a into a nice you know understandable category this is a you know I think Hollywood has this problem all the time and this is one of the explanations for why for this complaint we all have that so many Hollywood movies are the same and are so bland or some conservative they're just like the last one right well because you're doing this very very elaborate test screening and they're asking people to justify did you or did you not like the movie you just saw and why right and when you ask people to do that they will start to give you very very conservative answers I talk to lots of directors of in Hollywood who told me that one of the most common things is you have a comedy and you'll screen a comedy for an audience and they will laugh uproariously and afterwards you'll say weren't you think of that movie who knows him and the thing was that Palin was that funny right and I said well which do you believe and they said well we we have to believe what they said we don't have to believe with it that's why movies aren't funny um anyway I think this is insane clearly let me try one more idea out on you um to explain this phenomenon because I've oh my eyes I've been talking this long and that is about um is this story about the Aeron chair I don't know how many do you know about Aeron chairs Aeron chairs all those they may not have mesh that weird shape they're black and they have a kind of back as water they're incredibly ergonomically designed they're the hip chair that in the last couple of years if you worked in Silicon Valley in 1999 you didn't have an Aeron chair that you felt like you were a kind of social outcast or loser they're like the cool chair if you look in TV ads for like cool people they're always sitting in the mayor on chair I noticed that some of the people upstairs at this is too heavily based around but um so the Aeron chair is made by Herman Miller and if they started working on it in the early 90s and chairs when you market research them are judged on two dimensions aesthetics comfort simple scale of one to ten and the rule is if you want to take a chair to market you got to get about seven on both those levels it's copy beautiful let's cut it so they make these early versions of the Aeron chair nearly 90s and they go take it out and they test it on people and the comfort scores are great sevens eights fantastic in fact some of the conference scores are higher than they've ever gotten uncomfort for but the bad news is the aesthetic scores are terrible people think this chair is hideous right and they say so I've looked at the reports and the focus groups and people are saying it looks like something out of a bad movie it looks like something you got out of a junkyard shop it looks like something Robocop would sit in I mean there's all those kinds of people hate it and the scores that are coming in are twos and threes now you cannot what people are saying is as comfortable as it is it's hideous and I won't buy it from I you know you can't sell a chair that people think is really really ugly so this is a very very similar dilemma to the ones that people have over kena only this time the stakes are way bigger Herman Miller is you know they have factories that they're tooling up at a cost of tens of millions of dollars they've got to mark you know they have spent years and millions of dollars developing this chair their investment at this point is enormous and yet they are hearing from the people who are supposed to buy the chairs and by the way people who hated the most or facility managers people who buy chairs they hated it so they're hearing from their customers that they think this is a monstrosity right huge dilemma so what do they do well they go ahead they're not a normal company they're like kind of wacky and they take chances all the time and you know many other companies would have shelved the project so they go ahead and they disregarded what people said they thought about this chair and they brought to market you know just the way they normally would so what happens well beginning not much pretty slow at the beginning and then a couple of like designer type start to pick it up and then kind of spreads and then it goes to Silicon Valley and people realize it really really is comfortable and starts to win some design awards and up and up up and up and then after it comes kind of a cult chair and the sales are started to rise and rise and rise so it's getting TV commercials sure enough by the end of the 1990s their sales are increasing 50 to 70% annually and by a couple years ago they realize that they have on their hands not only the biggest selling product in their history but one of the top selling chairs in the history of chairs this thing and then they go back and they go out and they they redo their focus groups right and they go to people in those days after the chairs a huge hit they say do you think of this chair is a you know on aesthetic scale of one to ten people say I think it's an eight it's gorgeous so what does this mean does this mean that we can never trust what people have to say no I mean there are some things that some chairs truly are ugly and there's some music that really is terrible and there are some there is some Jam that tastes awful you know that doesn't mean that we can't we can never trust what people say but I think there is a class of products ideas what-have-you chairs music that falls into a different category but sometimes when people are reacting to things that are very very new and very very different they say they don't like it but what they really mean to say is I don't have the language to describe it and I haven't come to grips with the fact that it's a little different than I'm used to right so what's the problem with market research is is that it ends up lumping together things that are radically new in a good way and radically new in a bad way and that is a real shame because those that's the last thing we want to do is to throw out the baby with the bathwater well I think this is canon's problem right I mean I think that his music was unusual people hadn't heard it before and they didn't know what quite what to do then it's going to take a little longer for them to get used to it but that is not an argument for not playing on the radio that is an argument for playing on the radio because that's what you really listen to radio is supposed to be all about right is to discover new things so they have your mind expanded but I think we're making this mistake over and over again in our world is that we're using these very very narrow instruments and what they are doing is that they are chasing away good ideas that have the misfortune of merely being different radically different in some way than what we're used to and it's shaping what we get I mean as a result we have a world which i think is a little more conservative a little more narrow a little less adventurous and ambitious a little more imaginative than it would be otherwise we're cheating ourselves of the true kind of fruits of human endeavor and I think that's a real shame anyway thank you

Channel: TheIHMC

Views: 120,046

Rating: 4.8585324 out of 5

Keywords: IHMC, Florida, Institute, for, Human, Machine, Cognition, 2003, Evening, Lecture, Series

Id: PwWq1K-s0Ms

Length: 48min 32sec (2912 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/Dr_Kerporkian]

Gladwell has this habit of making everything interesting.

[u/undercurrents]

Gladwell interview about Blink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TRioBKpUwY&feature=share

[u/Suralin]

Can anybody transcribe this? Even better, is there already a transcript?