Familiarity Breeds … Adoption

Innovative: Featuring new methods, ideas or technology that are advanced, original and creative.

  •         Synonyms: new, novel, unusual, unprecedented, avant garde, fresh, experimental

American industry has fallen head over heels in love with the concept of innovation.

And we mean all of industry — tech products, cosmetics, shoes, snacks, subscriptions, software, clothing. If it is a thing that can be sold as a product, then chances are there is some iteration of it that someone, somewhere has tried to market as innovative in the last 15 years.

The main critique of the innovation infatuation that has been sweeping the land is that the term is so overused a concept as to have become essentially hollow. And the fact that Tesla, bubble wrap, PayPal, gel pens and Craisins are all called “innovative” lends some credence to that complaint.

Scott Berkun, the author of the 2007 book, “The Myths of Innovation,” told The Wall Street Journal that this comes down to a case of incorrect word choice that has caught on big — people say “innovative” when they mean “very good product.”

Innovation — as in real deal epoch makers like electricity, radio, printing presses and, perhaps in the more modern age, iPhones — don’t come around that often. Real innovation is hard — conventional wisdom has been noting for years — because truly new, creative and original thoughts, technologies and methods are exceptionally rare.

But the raw difficulty of being truly innovative is only half the story and only a portion of why being a successful innovator is so hard to come by.

As it turns out, while investors, inventors, entrepreneurs and early adopters love innovation, regular consumers — not so much.

The science on the subject indicates that the average consumer isn’t hard-wired — psychologically speaking — to respond to things that are genuinely “innovative.” Being innovative means being new and with newness comes unfamiliarity. And that is problematic since familiarity is a deeply ingrained part of how people make all kinds of decisions and determinations.

We Get What We Expect (Often Because We Expect It)

“We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well.”

So began the 2009 TED talk of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the beloved and renowned author and neurologist who, sadly, passed away earlier this week. Sacks’ research over the last several years was more accurate than he knew.

As it turns out, though we tend to think of our eyes/ear/tongues as telling our brain about what it is we are seeing/hearing/tasting, as often as not, the relationship is the other way around.

Case in point:

Chia-Jung Tsay was a piano player before she was a respected psychologist and a professor of management science and innovation at University College London. And by all accounts she was a very good piano player. She performed at Carnegie Hall when she was 16. That success, however, was uneven; her performances were always more highly rated when she competed in person or sent video clips of her concerts than when she only sent in audio of her playing.

This made her curious. How much of a musical performance competition was being won or lost on the visuals?

So, she did some experiments to find out.

In one she took a group of non-musicians (people with no special musical training) and divided them into three groups.

The first saw a video performance with sound of three finalists vying for a spot in a prestigious piano competition.

The second got the audio of the three-way face-off but no video.

The third group got the video but no sound.

The groups were then asked to pick who they thought won based on the input they’d been given. She then stacked those results against the actual results.

Since the participants had no musical training, the expected result was that they would do no better than random chance picking the winner. And, in the cases of those who heard the audio only or heard the audio with the video, that ended up being the case — participants guessed correctly less than 33 percent of the time.

However, the group that had no sound did much better — they guessed the winner 50 percent of the time.

And, in fact, studies across different areas of interest confirmed this. In a colorfully titled article, Priceonomics spent about 2,000 words busting your cousin who spent a semester in Paris 20 years ago and came back “knowing all about wine.” As it turns out, he’s probably been lying to you or himself for two decades because most people can’t taste the difference between quality wine and cheap wine. And if they can, they often prefer the cheap stuff.

And while it is easy to pick wine and classical music, as it turns out, this effect works for things as humble as pudding. Color it brown, most people will note it tastes like chocolate; color it pale yellow, consumers will note it tastes like vanilla. They will note that vanilla taste even if lemon flavoring is added to it, as long as the color doesn’t change.

It gets better — and weirder. In a different study, participants were asked to rate the effectiveness of a college professor based on watching a 30-second clip of them teach. Those ratings matched up three-quarters of the time with the actual reviews given by actual students at the end of the term.

In an even more surprising result, participants managed an equally high correlation rate when asked to rate professors effectiveness on the basis of a 6-second clip when comparing those results to how students actually performed on tests.

And expert judges — it should be noted — generally don’t fare any better than average people. When Tsay repeated her experiment with trained musicians, the results were the same. Those who heard the audio of a performance did no better than chance at picking the judges’ favorite; those who only saw the performance guessed the judges’ pick more than half the time. Professional sommeliers have been fooled into describing the same white wine in wildly different ways when it is first served to them correctly and then covertly re-served to them with red dye added to it.

In experiment after experiment, the same conclusion comes out: When human beings are evaluating anything, the process is more complicated than taking in external input and making a quality determination. Instead, when input goes in, a complicated internal matching game happens where the input is measured against memory, expectations and a variety of idiosyncratic, internal barometers and then that whole, part and parcel, is what the consumer’s consciousness makes the call on.

The Trouble For Innovators (And Those Who Aspire To Innovate)

The synonym list for innovative spells out the problem: Things that are unusual, avant-garde and truly novel don’t function that well in the internal matching game that happens when customers are making decisions on their sensory inputs.

Take, for example, Febreze. When Febreze was first developed, its makers thought they had the patent on a market-changing innovation — an air freshener that didn’t try to cover up a bad smell with a good smell but instead actually absorbs and removes bad smells. So, they sent it to market.

Where it bombed.

Because it was a little too new. The point of an air freshener is not to make one’s house smell not bad (because no one thinks their house smells bad). Procter & Gamble learned that customers buy air fresheners to make their homes smell good, and an air freshener that aspired to make your house smell neutral was not what consumers thought of as an air freshener.

P&G figured out how to add perfume to a substance that eliminated smells and remarketed it as an air freshener that eliminated bad odors and made your house smell like lavender.

Another famous example is the Aeron chair, the most ergonomically correct office chair possible. The problem was it didn’t look comfortable; it looked, according to Malcolm Gladwell, like “the exoskeleton of some prehistoric insect.” Initially, consumers rated the chair poorly for comfort — though it is a rare case where opinion evolved over time, likely because the chair is legitimately very comfortable, if slightly alien-looking.

The internal matching game elements of consumers’ reactions to innovations also explains why some things go well and are hailed as innovative and clever, while others are derided as massive missteps — even when the same innovator is behind both.

Ron Johnson is widely credited with the incredibly successful launch of the Apple physical retail stores. While today we all know and love them, when they were announced, the concept was met with some head-scratching. But when the doors opened for business, the naysayers were quiet because not only had Apple done retail right, they had upped the bar for everyone else. The stores were sleek, modern and had a design element that looked just a little bit like a set from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Which, for a cutting edge tech brand, made total sense and was widely admired.

And Johnson was not a one-hit wonder. Before Apple, he was the mind credited with making Target the cooler alternative to Walmart.

But all that bold vision was not cheered when he tried for the hat trick in turning around the floundering JCPenney brand.

“There is nothing good to say about what he’s done,” Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada, who is now a professor at Columbia, said. “Penney had been run into a ditch when he took it over. But, rather than getting it back on the road, he’s essentially set it on fire.”

Johnson came in with big ideas: eliminating the endless sales in favor of “fair pricing” everyday and boutiques within stores to attract hipper shoppers to a more bazaar-like atmosphere. But while the Apple Store spoke to what a tech customer would want in shopping for a computer, and Target spoke to the inner desire to pay less money but not feel like you’re at Walmart, the JCPenney innovation missed for everyone.

“JCPenney, on the other hand, is stuck with a ‘reputation as the place your mom dragged you to buy clothes you hated in 1984,’” as a Consumerist post put it.

That was clearly not a reputation to fix. But the strong association in consumers’ minds with that idea meant that a one-step leap into trying to become the boutique bazaar of the future was just a little too weird for most customers.

The Moral Of The Story

Innovation is hard and not just because good ideas are hard to come up with.

Even the iPhone, which is currently held up as the gold standard of capital “I” innovation, didn’t just pop onto the market one day and change consumer behavior. Arguably, Apple started the march toward getting the market ready for its most successful product in 2001 with the release of the first line of iPods. Over the next few years, that device evolved, redesigned, started being able to play video media files, got touch screens and eventually wireless Internet connections.

And then, six years later, Apple released the first iPhone, which looks remarkably similar to the iPod touch. The impressive innovators’ lesson in the iPhone isn’t just that Apple came up with a great idea but also that it effectively softened the ground among consumers for a over half a decade in advance so when that signature innovation dropped, it looked familiar enough that consumers wanted to buy it.