the best-selling chair in the history of the company. Before long,
there was no office chair as widely imitated as the Aeron.
Everyone wanted to make a chair that looked like the
exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect. And what are the
aesthetic scores today? The Aeron is now an 8. What once was
ugly has become beautiful.
In the case of a blind sip test, first impressions don’t work
because colas aren’t supposed to be sipped blind. The blind sip
test is the wrong context for thin-slicing Coke. With the Aeron,
the effort to collect consumers’ first impressions failed for a
slightly different reason: the people reporting their first
impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they
hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so
new and unusual that they weren’t used to it. This isn’t true of
everything we call ugly. The Edsel, the Ford Motor Company’s
famous flop from the 1950s, failed because people thought it
looked funny. But two or three years later, every other car
maker didn’t suddenly start making cars that looked like the
Edsel, the way everyone starting copying the Aeron. The Edsel
started out ugly, and it’s still ugly. By the same token, there are
movies that people hate when they see them for the first time,
and they still hate them two or three years later. A bad movie is