001 | Knowledge Gets Lost: Someone Always Invents A Story To Replace It.

A piece of market research can say a product won't work and still be wrong, because people often behave very differently from how they answer a survey question. The real signal didn't come from a lab or a questionnaire. It came from watching two ordinary strangers do something nobody had told them to do. That's the gap between what a focus group says and what people actually do when nobody's measuring them. The product went on to sell in enormous volume, but it grew up in a completely different setting than the one everyone had planned for, and a competitor who tried to copy the formula still couldn't reproduce the trick. Old school instinct beat modern market research at its own game. This conversation was originally recorded for the Maffeo Drinks podcast with David Gluckman. Find more at themaffeodrinkspodcast.com.