I find that watching him lecture on the book before or after I read the book helps to solidify the concepts in my mind. His ideas and perspective really resonate with me.
AHEAD OF HIS TIME. People GOBBLE this throwback 80's-inspired stuff now like CRAZY. Had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times and it always really bummed me out that he didn't get his due.
I'm 25 and have been listening to Kenna since I was 13! He was to me what U2 was to him during his youth! Still my all time favorite musician! Funny thing is after listening to him for years I finally took time to check out his music videos & realized I had already been expose to his music before becoming a fan & I didn't like him when I first saw him on MTV in his music video for "Say Good bye to love". I thought he was corny because I felt like he was trying to be like Pharrell, I remember clowing the entire video with my sisters & calling him a swagga jacka. I fell in love with his music after accidentally stumbling upon him when I was trying to find a song I had heard on someone's playlist but it brought me to freetime, vexed & glorious, war in me and I was hooked. I get so sad when people don't know who he is when I say he's my favorite musician. But it is an awesome feeling when they check out his music and dig it then rant about being so late to hear about him. I always say hes a hidden Gem! 😊
I have too many RU-vid accounts & forget too often what I do on said account bwahaha I don’t even remember writing this comment bwahaha it’s all true though 😂😅
Very informative lecture. And for the record, I discovered Kenna's music when he opened live for Dave Gahan in NYC 2003, and he was a great performer. I certainly hope he gets the recognition he deserves. He's charismatic, a great showman, and has a really unique sounds that needs to be heard.
Mr Gladwell is clearly super & I have such admiration for his work, but it's humanising to see that he has improved so much in giving speeches since this talk. I hear he became a dad. Congratulations
I wanted to watch some of Kenna's videos and found people mentioning this and the book, "Blink" so I had to dig into it. This explains so much. I found Kenna's music on MTV2 back in 2001 when the "Hell Bent" video dropped and I was an immediate fan. That song is so haunting and beautiful. I immediately went onto Napster and downloaded and burned a cd of all the Kenna songs I could find and played that cd out for many years and "New Sacred Cow" gets regular rotation on Spotify even today. I never could figure out how it was that this incredible artist and musician could suddenly come on the scene then just fade off into supposed obscurity. I never heard his music on the radio, not even the local College radio and I was the only person among my immediate peers who knew who Kenna was. It's good to see the passion for his music that others had/still have as evidenced in these comments, and it's just disappointing when a deserving person doesn't get their feet off the ground in the way they should have.
I found myself teaching marketing age 19, in 1972. It made my life. The tutor took I'll six weeks into the diploma course of the British institute of Marketing 12000 miles away. He couldn't return so I was engaged to finish it. We soon moved to a far larger room. It changed the lives of all those who, even joined ten weeks late. I love your work.
I saw the Kenna video during a few of those 475 plays on MTV2. I loved it and would have bought the record the day it came out...but it didn't come out. Years later Gladwell discusses the situation in detail and here we are. I agree that due to a flawed model, society misses out on many good things. Except for those who search for things that are "underground."
What happened to Kenna happened to my band, who happened to be on the same label at the same time as Kenna. We literally had the DJ staff of several radio stations love us and go to our shows and wear our shirts only to fail in the stupid market testing and not get added to the national playlists. It was very frustrating.
I’m really glad that a potential big star from my country almost conquered the world. I’ve never heard of Kenna up until I read Blink which is a fascinating book. Even though the flawed American bureaucracy failed him I think it didn’t fail The Weeknd (another Ethiopian star).
O my God! This is what RU-vid does to me all the time! I open the site in the hope to watch something fresh and new, and the algorithm always gives me stuff similar to things I've watched before.
I love Kenna's music, and I was in my late twenties when I first heard New Sacred Cow and loved it. Teenagers were NOT listening to Kenna. In fact a group of early 80s new wave fans in their late twenties/thirties (and I am a huge fan of early 80s new wave) recommended Kenna and his music to me.
WOW!! I can't believe Malcolm wrote a book about and talked about people not knowing what they want... years before RU-vid, Amazon and Netflix using algorithms tracking what we've watched or shown interest in to predict what we might like when they found out asking us is just a bad idea..
People are ignorant. The first time I heard Hellbent on MTV2 I got chills. The first time I heard his album, which was a bootleg I got chills for every song. The beats, the vibe was amazing. I got the chance to meet him in Austin. Amazing art. Thank you!
I had the very same reaction. That song made me download his songs from Napster at the time and I had a burned disc of that album along with some other songs of his that weren't on that album. I never get tired of listening to New Sacred Cow.
I agree. I enjoy listening to him speak. He's a decent writer, and his work can be both interesting and entertaining; unfortunately, it's usually not as profound as it appears to be at first.
There was a very interesting documentary about the way marketing shaped modern America which was on the BBC about 20 years ago. It made me realise how easily influenced we are.
A key learning of this video is that by asking "Why do you like that" we can tell whether the person knows what he or she is talking about. When buying a company, I get a lot of value by asking people "How did you come up with that price"?
TL;DR: Trust your gut instinct every so often. If you over analyze everything, eventually you will either second guess yourself, or even worse, lie to yourself because you're not sure why you have the gut instinct. Reason if not always great for creative taste or literal taste.
For some reason Malcolm is not mentioning that the success of margarine had to do with (nearly entirely) the pushing of new diet standards and anti-butter hysteria in the 1960s and 1970s. So all of a sudden margarine became the "healthy" choice (I know that it is a debunked claim but that was why it became popular -- and the gimmick was to make it taste like butter)
This is so simplistic. Market researchers have long known how difficult it is to ask direct questions which is why we never take this as a given. His comments about the use of blind taste testing shows he knows nothing about product development. Much of blind taste testing is simply to show that an existing product in a fixed pack design and one in the same pack design but with a new formulation cannot be differentiated. This is critical in any product that potentially changes annually like cigarettes which are an agricultural product. Knowing no differences can be perceived are critical. Conjoint or Choice Based modeling has long been a solution to this "we cannot ask a question" and has been in use since the early 70's. No mention of this technique at all from a guy who claimed to be a great friend of Howard Moskowitz who is a master of this technology.
Chris Robinson I wanted to read more about it.. this technique that you have mentioned... can you please provide some links where i can read more about it?
"Anyone can make a drink like that." I'll bet it's not that easy. Look at New Coke. We are surrounded by products that won out over hundreds of others in long-term economic wars, and the formula they use or offer, once solved, seems straightforward. But trying to create one yourself will show you how difficult it really is to create something that's pleasing.
It's kinda funny to see Malcolm here, so young and naive to public speaking. He hits his stride for sure, as he always does, but at first...he's unsteady for sure. It's endearing lol.
Page 187 of the book BLINK. Kenna is an exceptional artist. Check out his Videos on You Tube. Page 187 in the book 'BLINK' ...A short 2-page story that is now a full lecture on Marketing and feelings....that split second.
It's not that easy, because the market is so competitive. For example, if you walk into a supermarket, every product you see at eye level is from a company that paid to be there, because we can see those things better. And the companies that make those drinks fight like hell for things like that, things that help them shove their drinks in everyone's faces more than all the others.
Nothing alarms me more than the controlled way in which music is regulated. Only songs that survive a shitty survey get on the radio. No wonder I never hear Tom Waits on the radio.
yeah youtube viewers do have access, but how do you know who to look for if you've never heard of them or their music? rarely do i discover artists on youtube just by looking around. i usually hear a song first then search for them. i discovered kenna through a friend and i probably would have never found him through youtube.
OR...maybe the people as a collective have better intuition than the experts sometimes? Turn the argument around - more often what happens btw - is that you have a great artist or band that the experts have no clue about. And those artists break through regardless because the people feel a connection.
this was him trial testing his new material i guess so yeah he wasn't as sure of himself. as i'm sure you've seen his later talks on this subject are far more solid.
The Coke / Pepsi thing is interesting. Pepsi is sweeter initially, but if you keep drinking it from a can, it will be too sweet and fill you up. But, what if you put it on ice. Then it will hold its sweetness longer. Doesn't that just make Coke and Pepsi different in drinking profile over time? I used to prefer Coke and never drink Pepsi, now I can't drink either or them. There are some good new low sugar drinks that really taste good now, more flavor and less sugar, but sugar's cheap.
I'm always confused by this story - no mention of how Kenna was high school friends with the Neptunes (Pharrell and Chad) and around this time in 2003 his New Sacred Cow album (produced by Chad) is released by Sony/Columbia records, and also his "Hell Bent" video is on MTV2 and floating on the internet in heavy rotation. I must've watched it a bathousand times on each. So he did have a record deal by the time Blink came out, but man he still never really "hit" and I will never know why. Stupid radio people were right - not too many people buy this kind of genius stuff
Okay, I'll make a comment that might piss a bunch of people off, but given the subject matter may be given a fair hearing. NO ONE will admit they like pop music, but pop music is actually, by test, the most pleasurable for people to hear. The same people who bash Justin Bieber (or in my day the Spice Girls or N'Sync) will secretly go home and play their albums all day. When you ask people what they like, tons of biases will cloud your results. Don't ask, just give them privacy and observe.
it's actually because he's Bi-racial!..i.e half Black. His mother is a Black Jamaican.. he tells his compelling family story ( including his familial connection to Sec. Colin Powell) in his amazing book called "Outliers" .
"Sweet and stimulating and quenches your thirst" are good things. You seem to talk against yourself. It may also be that they target young people because they are the ones who are forming life habits. But yes, there is crappy or average pop music too, but if something is not that great, they will stop using it eventually. For example, the Beatles are still popular decades later, Hillary Duff could barely make it a few years.
it's fine if you think his music bad lol, but i don't think that's why he doesn't have commercial success. his label is notorious for being crap at managing and promoting their artists. i don't think i've ever heard a kenna song on the radio or anywhere for that matter.
Malcolm states Kenna was unable to achieve commercial success because he didn't market test well due to its truncated methodology. RU-vid viewers have unfettered access. Too bad "Daylight" was uploaded in 2007 and has 57,000 views. Obscure Jonathan Richman songs have more views. P.S. Kenna is not a mix of British New Wave and Rap: that would be Joy Division and Biggie Smalls teaming up, not Kenna's sound which mimics Wham's and Usher's. No, views do not equal quality, but Kenna has neither.
I wouldn't say that exactly. Pop music is like Coca-Cola. People drink Coca-Cola because it's sweet and stimulating and quenches your thirst, and that's all. That's why Coca-Cola targets kids, because they're too young to realize that there's nothing special about it. But the real question is, why do people buy it? And the answer is, because it's everywhere. If I had to say one good thing about Coca-Cola and pop music, it's that they're palatable: in other words, they go down smooth.
And for some idiot who posted years ago so I can't reply, Kenna does not have a huge number of RU-vid views not because his music isn't good, as it is -- as verified by many different persons, it is because he has never had any mainstream exposure, no appearances on any big shows (nighttime, daytime) or references, no soundtracks, no video game promotions, etc -- all the things required to get a musician national radio play. If his music was included in a movie soundtrack or a video game (see Midge Ure's previously unknown early 80s version of Bowie's "Man who sold the World" -- and Midge Ure was well known through his work with new wave phenom Ultravox) he would get a lot of attention. People think talent means success in the world of pop music. This is absolutely not true (not post 1990s anyway). In the days of the Max Martin pop song dominating the charts (look at how many pop hits Martin has written between 1999-2015), it is a hell of a lot harder for unique artists like Kenna to get exposure.
I only heard of Malcom Gladwell because of the 'Kenna Problem'. I was questioning why Kenna wasn't a bigger hit because he wasn't an obscure talent. He was on a decent label and made New Sacred with a great producer
I agree with your words. It is slightly cliché to mention Justin Bieber again. But what would explain this: Pop music in 1960's = The Beatles etc. Pop music in 2013 = Justin Bieber etc. It is just a move in times I believe. A complete test of conformity that is pushed by, and inadvertently backed by large amounts of money.
You knew when Malcolm mentioned Fred Durst as having musical chops that he needed to stick to number crunching instead of pretending he understands what is musically relevant. Limp Bizkit occupies too many "Top 10 Worst Bands of All Time" lists to suggest otherwise.
When it comes to public speaking, Malcom proves that it's okay to use a lot of fillers like ermmm, errrr, looking clumsy, making gestures all the time, nose touching etc as long as your contents and stories are interesting. Just proves that it's mostly about the substance rather than the form. Many polished speakers overperform on the form's department but still appear boring. Maybe just be yourself and tell your stories.
kenna is mediocre? says someone who likes lana del rey? hahahaha. i guess by your logic someone like rebecca black is great because she has millions of youtube views.
"Sweet and stimulating and quenches your thirst" are good things but they're not special. Anyone can make a drink like that. Just like Hilary Duff, her music sounds nice, but it's completely annoying to people who realize how ordinary it is.
Haha Kenna and K’naan were my favorite artist during my adolescence. Kenna, K’naan and K-os stayed in rotation!! Only listen to Kenna still as his music grows with you and speaks to varieties stages of life & the messages never gets stale just hits deeper!! I wonder if K’naan & K-os music is the same, haven’t heard them in years 🙂
