always a bad movie. The problem is that buried among the
things that we hate is a class of products that are in that
category only because they are weird. They make us nervous.
They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to
understand that we actually like them.
“When you are in the product development world, you
become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in
mind the fact that the customers you go out and see spend very
little time with your product,” says Dow-ell. “They know the
experience of it then and there. But they don’t have any history
with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it,
especially if it’s something very different. That was the thing
with the Aeron chair. Office chairs in people’s minds had a
certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The
Aeron chair of course isn’t. It looked different. There was
nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a
proxy for ‘different.’ ”
The problem with market research is that often it is simply
too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the
bad and the merely different. In the late 1960s, the
screenwriter Norman Lear produced a television sitcom pilot for
a show called All in the Family. It was a radical departure from