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This time the reception was downright chilly. “They didn’t understand the aesthetic at all,” says Dowell. Herman Miller was told to cover the Aeron with a solid fabric and that it would be impossible to sell it to corporate clients. One facility manager likened the chair to lawn furniture or old-fashioned car-seat covers.
Another said it looked as though it came from the set of RoboCop, and another said that it looked as if it had been made entirely from recycled materials. “I remember one professor at Stanford who confirmed the concept and its function but said he wanted to be invited back when we got to an ‘aesthetically refined prototype,’” Dowell remembers. “We were behind the glass saying, ‘There isn’t going to be an aesthetically refined prototype!’”
Put yourself, for a moment, in Herman Miller’s shoes. You have committed yourself to a brand-new product. You have spent an enormous amount of money retooling your furniture factory, and still more making sure that, say, the mesh on the Aeron doesn’t pinch the behinds of people who sit in it. But now you find out that people don’t like the mesh. In fact, they think the whole chair is ugly, and if there is one thing you know from years and years in the business, it is that people don’t buy chairs they think are ugly. So what do you do? You could scrap the chair entirely. You could go back and cover it in a nice familiar layer of foam. Or you could trust your instincts and dive ahead.
Herman Miller took the third course. They went ahead, and what happened? In the begi
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 fu
“When you are in the product development world, you become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in mind the fact that the customers you go out and see spend very little time with your product,” says Dowell. “They know the experience of it then and there. But they don’t have any history with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it, especially if it’s something very different. That was the thing with the Aeron chair. Office chairs in people’s minds had a certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The Aeron chair of course isn’t. It looked different. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different.’”
The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different. In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Norman Lear produced a television sitcom pilot for a show called All in the Family. It was a radical departure from the kind of fare then on television: it was edgy and political, and it tackled social issues that the television of the day avoided. Lear took it to ABC. They had it market-tested before four hundred carefully selected viewers at a theater in Hollywood. Viewers filled out questio
That same year, CBS was also considering a new comedy show starring Mary Tyler Moore. It, too, was a departure for television. The main character, Mary Richards, was a young, single woman who was interested not in starting a family—as practically every previous television heroine had been—but in advancing her career. CBS ran the first show through the Program Analyzer. The results were devastating. Mary was a “loser.” Her neighbor Rhoda Morgenstern was “too abrasive,” and another of the major female characters on the show, Phyllis Lindstrom, was seen as “not believable.” The only reason The Mary Tyler Moore Show survived was that by the time CBS tested it, it was already scheduled for broadcast. “Had The MTM been a mere pilot, such overwhelmingly negative comments would have buried it,” Sally Bedell [Smith] writes in her biography of Silverman, Up the Tube.
All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in other words, were the television equivalents of the Aeron chair. Viewers said they hated them. But, as quickly became clear when these sitcoms became two of the most successful programs in television history, viewers didn’t actually hate them. They were just shocked by them. And all of the ballyhooed techniques used by the armies of market researchers 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. Ke