"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 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.
(...)
"It looked different. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word 'ugly' was just a proxy for 'different.'"


excerpt of Malcolm Gladwell's blink

1 comment:

  1. A diferença é uma conquista interior, mas é o interior que faz a diferença.

    ;)

    ***

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