another face. “We’ve spent years and years developing these
skills,” she went on. “Twenty years. It’s like medical training.
You do your internship, and then you become a resident. And
you do it and do it until you can look at something and say in a
very objective way how sweet it is, how bitter it is, how
caramelized it is, how much citrus character there is — and in
terms of the citrus, this much lemon, this much lime, this much
grapefruit, this much orange.”
Heylmun and Civille, in other words, are experts. Would
they get fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not. Nor
would they be led astray by the packaging for Christian
Brothers, or be as easily confused by the difference between
something they truly don’t like and something they simply find
unusual. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to
have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the
locked door of their unconscious. This is the last and most
important lesson of the Kenna story, because it explains why it
was such a mistake to favor the results of Kenna’s market
research so heavily over the enthusiastic reactions of the
industry insiders, the crowd at the Roxy, and the viewers of
MTV2. The first impressions of experts are different. By that I
don’t mean that experts like different things than the rest of us