test, but people don’t make their product decisions on sip tests.
Coke’s problem is that the guys in white lab coats took over.”
Did the guys in the white lab coats take over in Kenna’s case
as well? The market testers assumed that they could simply
play one of his songs or part of one of his songs for someone
over the telephone or on the Internet and the response of
listeners would serve as a reliable guide to what music buyers
would feel about the song. Their thinking was that music lovers
can thin-slice a new song in a matter of seconds, and there is
nothing wrong with that idea in principle. But thin-slicing has to
be done in context. It is possible to quickly diagnose the health
of a marriage. But you can’t just watch a couple playing Ping-
Pong. You have to observe them while they are discussing
something of relevance to their relationship. It’s possible to
thin-slice a surgeon’s risk of being sued for malpractice on the
basis of a small snippet of conversation. But it has to be a
conversation with a patient. All of the people who warmed to
Kenna had that kind of context. The people at the Roxy and the
No Doubt concert saw him in the flesh. Craig Kallman had
Kenna sing for him, right there in his office. Fred Durst heard
Kenna through the prism of one of his trusted colleagues’
excitement. The viewers of MTV who requested Kenna over and