Malcolm Gladwell on the instability of preference. A conflict prevented me from attending PopTech this year, but fortunately Doug Kaye was there with his microphone. The talk I most wanted to hear — Malcolm Gladwell's — was posted over the weekend. In this two-minute clip, Gladwell sums up the dilemma of the Aeron chair,
a wildly successful product that might never have seen the light of day
had the Herman Miller company believed its market research. From this
parable and one other — the New Coke fiasco — he draws several
conclusions. One is that preferences are highly unstable. Another is
that, when you ask people to explain what they want, their preferences
tend to shift toward the conservative, familiar, and easy to explain. … [Jon's Radio]