Kenna’s Dilemma

The chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Kenna’s Dilemma” shows with a real example how difficult is to reach the insights of the customers that are targeted in some markets. We know that music industry, as every other industry, is moved from a business approach so us, as marketers, must have this in the top of our heads in the moment of gaining insights of potential customers and launch a new product into the market.

The first example of the chapter, Pepsi’s Challenge, is an illustration of how difficult it is to find out what people really think. I will go further in this adding that apart of the difficulty of getting into people’s insights, marketers can influence directly on this thoughts and change their perception about the products. To explain myself I will use the example of Pepsi and Coke. As the author explains, when tests are made people prefer Pepsi to Coke, and actually regular customers can’t really distinguish them when a triangle test is made. Even though, Coca-Cola is the leader beverage company in the world and there are lots of Coke loyal customers reject to drink Pepsi, not because they don’t like it but because they have a strong belonging feeling to the Coca-Cola brand.

Staying in the same subject, if marketers find the way of creating link between a need in the consumers and their product they can make that this same consumers think in their product among another one that they might at first impression like better. For example, the brand Kleenex, at least in Spain, has such a brand notoriety that when people think about paper tissues directly talk about Kleenex although they don’t really care which brand to buy. Another example is the sport shoes. In Spain there was a brand when sport shoes started to commercialize that was cold Bamba’s. Now this brand don’t even exist any more but people still refer to sport shoes as ¨bambas¨, I think something similar happens here, in the US, with the Nike’s. The point is this brands have made a link between the need of using the sport shoes to the brand on the beginning of the product life cycle that unconsciously customers think on this brand when they talk about the product.

Now, I would like to talk about the second issue I think can be instructive when thinking about gaining costumers insights that I have extract from Kenna’s Dilemma, which by the way is closely related to the first lesson. How knowledge give first impressions resiliency or what is more, not just consume the product but think about it when consuming.

Usually we don’t stop and analyze a when we are about to consume it; we just proceed to do what our unconscious or our experience push us to do. This is why, as showed in the lecture, there are products which we could rank better or worst depending if we take our time to think about its components or if we just give our first impression. As happened with Kenna, experts think that his music its outstanding because they have a lot of experience and knowledge internalized, so they see how good is his music by hearing it once. In the other hand, in the mass market people don’t think about music that much when they hear about it and that’s why in the different surveys it appeared that Kenna’s music wouldn’t be a hit.

Marketers should have always in their mind that is different to target expert people or regular consumers. In my personal case, and as I know it happens to many people, when I don’t know much about a product I’m very open to suggestions about friends or sellers about that product. In another way, I would buy what others tell me is the best option rather than choosing one by myself. In the other hand, if I have knowledge about something I want to buy I tend to buy what I have in my mind from a beginning. What it’s more, as I always ask to sellers if they give me an information I think it’s not correct what would happen is that it would create a skeptic thinking in me about the store. So the only thing that can happen is to create in my mind a negative linking.

Getting to the end of this blog, there are some markets, as the music market can be in this case, in which everyone (both experts and the mass market) have their own impression and thinking of the product. Us, as marketers, shouldn’t try to tell costumers what they should think but we should strengthen our products by using marketing tools so as to improve the perception consumers have about those products.