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Blogger's Note: This is a nice introduction and application of Thin-Slicing that you can use. Read on... 8-)

MARKETING Rx: How do we apply Gladwell's concepts in marketing research?
Posted: 2:22 AM Oct. 21, 2005Dr. Ned Roberto and Ardy RobertoInquirer News Service
(Published on Page B2-3 of the October 21, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)
URL: http://money.inq7.net/features/view_features.php?yyyy=2005&mon=10&dd=21&file=1

QUESTION: As marketers who believe in marketing research, how do we apply the concept of Gladwell's "thin-slicing" to marketing research? Are there marketers who have the gift of thin-slicing when deciding what new products to launch, new markets to capture?

Answer: We'll limit ourselves to your two questions instead of reviewing Malcolm Gladwell's latest bestseller, "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking." His previous bestseller was "The Tipping Point."

What is thin-slicing?
On to your first question: Let's start by being clear what "blinking" or "thin-slicing" is. Gladwell defines this as "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience." He also calls this ability "rapid cognition," and unfortunately that's where many people get stuck: the term, the ability (which is a result) rather than the process of 'blinking,' thin-slicing. As a process, thin-slicing is paying attention to the one or two things that matter in decision-making.

You'll find that thin-slicing is less difficult to apply if you see it as a process rather than as a result. This interpretation can be seen most clearly in Gladwell's Chapter 5 discussion of failed and successful "marketing research blinking." So we're glad you focused on application to marketing research.

Let's just take the one example that's probably known to all: the case of the new Coke. What you can learn from this case is this: "There's such a thing as a WRONG thin-slicing and a CORRECT thin-slicing." That is, picking the wrong one item that matters versus picking the right one.

The real thing?
In the case of the New Coke some years ago, those working on the New Coke did the wrong thin-slicing. They picked on "taste" as the one thing that mattered in deciding how to stop Pepsi from eroding Coke's market share. But to the bigger and more vocal segment of the cola drinking market, the one item that mattered more than taste was "the name, Coke's brand equity."

It's a classic case of what we regard as a fundamental marketing mantra: "In anything you do in marketing, always start where the consumer is; never with where you [the marketers] are."

In the New Coke case, "taste" was the Coke marketers' and product development people's preoccupation. Of course, to Coke consumers, taste also mattered, but that's the original century-old Coke taste. If you changed that taste and place on this new formulation the Coke name, then you'd be in trouble.

The name and the old classic taste are what loyal Coke consumers have grown attached to for generations. Changing is tampering with the Coke image. Remember, it's an image that's embodied by the Coke name. To the loyal Coke consumers, the one item that mattered most was the thin-slice-name.

Rapid cognition in marketing research
Learn the one or two things that matter most to your market, your consumers.

The idea of "learning" thin-slicing challenges your second question, which assumes that thin-slicing is a "gift." To be sure, Gladwell admits that there are people born with thin-slicing ability.

But he qualifies this by pointing out there are more who have learned the ability.

In fact he was very explicit: "The power of knowing, in the first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves."

Practice your system of validating your thin-slicing and always validate against a plausible rival thin-slicing.

Let's go back to the New Coke case to clarify. What was Coke product management's hypothesized thin-slice in the decision to introduce a new Coke? It was that "taste is what matters in getting back lost market share." What was the validating system used? It was the blind product taste test versus the taste of Pepsi. The assumed plausible rival thin-slice was "Pepsi's taste."

What should have been the correct plausible rival thin-slice? It's Coke's name. And what's marketing research's validating system for this? That's brand name testing, or the "identified product test." If Coke had followed the blind product taste test with the identified product test, Coke marketers and product development people could have seen what they saw after they launched. They would have seen how the new Coke's rating score on "% definitely will buy or prefer this" after the identified product test would have plummeted. And if they had probed why, consumers would have told them so. It's therefore critical to validate against the
CORRECT plausible rival thin-slice.

Unsolicited help for Gladwell
Of course this is not at all how Gladwell explained the case. He explained it the way a good reporter and a talented storyteller does, because he is one. But he is not a marketing researcher at all. That's why he incorrectly concluded and said: "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." The marketing researchers he talked to in reporting on the New Coke case didn't know how to thin-slice the correct "instrument to pick up the distinction between the bad and the merely different." And so in this interpretation of the New Coke case, we're pitching in for him. The New Coke case is all very well when the situation is like what it often is in marketing research. There's a system for validating and practicing the correct blinking or thin-slicing. But what about those more common cases where there's no explicit system around? In fact, Gladwell says that these are "surprisingly what's common." There are those (what Gladwell calls) more "subtle, complex cases." Here, he observes: "Do people with the thin-slicing skill know why they knew? Not at all. But they just knew."

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