at CBS utterly failed to distinguish between these two very
different emotions.
Market research isn’t always wrong, of course. If All in the
Family had been more traditional — and if the Aeron had been
just a minor variation on the chair that came before it — the act
of measuring consumer reactions would not have been nearly as
difficult. But testing products or ideas that are truly
revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful
companies are those that understand that in those cases, the
first impressions of their consumers need interpretation. We
like market research because it provides certainty — a score, a
prediction; if someone asks us why we made the decision we
did, we can point to a number. But the truth is that for the most
important decisions, there can be no certainty. Kenna did badly
when he was subjected to market research. But so what? His
music was new and different, and it is the new and different
that is always most vulnerable to market research.
5. The Gift of Expertise
One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run
a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum. Their names