Sunday, March 8, 2009

You Can't Trust Anyone These Days

In the chapter titled, “Kenna’s Dilemma” Malcom Gladwell brings up several interesting insights, but I believe the most helpful are facts that you can’t always trust taste tests and you can’t always trust experts.

Experts
When it comes to experts, it is important to note that an expert on a certain subject, service, or product is not an expert on how people will receive a certain subject, service, or product. Just because someone knows everything there is to know about an industry, does not mean that they understand the growing and changing desires of the consumer and trends in the market.

The shortcomings of experts when it comes to understanding their own customers are painfully clear in Malcolm Galdwell’s examples about Kenna, and the “Chair of Death.” In both cases experts in their respective fields agreed that they had an incredible product that was better than what was currently available. Expert opinion of their own product was extremely high and all indications pointed to success. However, the experts did not correctly predict the reaction of the consumer. Even though the experts believed their product to be superior, their message was lost on the consumer.

The average consumer is not an expert. It takes time, skill, or training in many cases to recognize how one product is superior to another, and the average consumer does not provide that. Most customers can only evaluate products on what they already know, which causes new, innovative, or revolutionary products to sometimes fail, even if the experts all agree that the new product is superior to the old one. Expert approval does not equal guaranteed success.

Taste-Tests
Taste-tests are some of the most misleading marketing strategies ever. Consumers are not only led to believe that “tasting” a small amount of a product for a brief period of time is the same as normal consumption of the product, but also that products that win the taste test are superior. Of course we know that both of these assumptions are false. Malcolm Gladwell points out that Coke learned this lesson after the Pepsi taste tests and the invention of “New Coke.”

Coke was misled by taste-tests from Pepsi. Coke did not consider that a sip of Pepsi (as in a taste test) might be better than a sip of Coke, while at the same time the Pepsi product was not as good as, or at least comparable to, the Coke product. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but Gladwell points out that the difference of sweetness in the two brands causes the initial affinity toward Pepsi. Pepsi was smart to use the taste-test to its advantage, but consumers should know by now that the tests are unreliable.

The only accurate test of how a product’s quality or performance is a full trial. A used car may drive well in a test-drive around the block and on the highway, but what happens at the end of a long road-trip, or in harsh weather conditions. In this “test-drive” example, it is easy to see the shortcomings of a small test versus a full trial. In many cases, a small test is the only practical way to try a product (such as a car test-drive or walk through an open house), but it should not be an acceptable way to test the quality of everything.


The taste-test brings up an interesting dilemma. We already know that consumers can not trust expert opinions. Consumers can not trust the results of “tests” or sample studies. And now, even if we find ourselves in a taste-testing situation we know that our own initial reactions may not be an accurate indication of our appreciation of the product as a whole, in which case we can not even trust ourselves.

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