Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [59]
There are firms, for example, that post new songs on the Web and then collect and analyze the ratings of anyone who visits the Website and listens to the music. Other companies play songs over the phone or send sample CDs to a stable of raters. Hundreds of music listeners end up voting on particular songs, and over the years the rating systems have become extraordinarily sophisticated. Pick the Hits, for instance, a rating service outside Washington, D.C., has a base of two hundred thousand people who from time to time rate music, and they have learned that if a song aimed, say, at Top 40 radio (listeners 18 to 24) averages above 3.0 on a score of 1 to 4 (where 1 is “I dislike the song”), there’s roughly an 85 percent chance that it will be a hit.
These are the kinds of services that Kenna’s record was given to — and the results were dismal. Music Research, a California-based firm, sent Kenna’s CD to twelve hundred people preselected by age, gender, and ethnicity. They then called them up three days later and interviewed as many as they could about what they thought of Kenna’s music on a scale of o to 4. The response was, as the conclusion to the twenty-five-page “Kenna” report stated politely, “subdued.” One of his most promising songs, “Freetime,” came in at 1.3 among listeners to rock stations, and .8 among listeners to R&B stations. Pick the Hits rated every song on the album, with two scoring average ratings and eight scoring below average. The conclusion was even more blunt this time: “Kenna, as an artist, and his songs lack a core audience and have limited potential to gain significant radio airplay.”
Kenna once ran into Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, backstage at a concert. “This man right here,” McGuinness said, pointing at Kenna, “he’s going to change the world.” That was his instinctive feeling, and the manager of a band like U2 is a man who knows music. But the people whose world Kenna was supposed to be changing, it seemed, couldn’t disagree more, and when the results of all of the consumer research came in, Kenna’s once promising career suddenly stalled. To get on the radio, there had to be hard evidence that the public liked him — and the evidence just wasn’t there.
1. A Second Look at First Impressions
In Behind the Oval Office, his memoir of his years as a political pollster, Dick Morris writes about going to Arkansas in 1977 to meet with the state’s thirty-one-year-old attorney general, an ambitious young man by the name of Bill Clinton:
I explained that I got this idea from the polling my friend Dick Dresner had done for the movie industry. Before a new James Bond movie or a sequel to a film like Jaws came out, a film company would hire Dresner to summarize the plot and then ask people whether they wanted to see the movie. Dresner would read respondents proposed PR blurbs and slogans about the movie to find out which ones worked the best. Sometimes he even read them different endings or described different places where the same scenes were shot to see which they preferred.
“And you just apply these techniques to politics?” Clinton asked.
I explained how it could be done. “Why not do the same thing with political ads? Or speeches? Or arguments about the issues? And after each statement, ask them again whom they’re going to vote for. Then you can see which arguments move how many voters and which voters they move.”
We talked for almost four hours and ate lunch at his desk. I showed the attorney general sample polls I’d done.
He was fascinated by the process. Here was a tool he could use, a process that could reduce the mysterious ways of politics to scientific testing and