Malcolm Gladwell Blink Chapter Summaries

Cameron Fuller
Professor Booth
English 1020-10
30 September 2014
Chapter Five Summary of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
In chapter five of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which Malcolm Gladwell has several main points of focus, which correlate previous chapters and bring new ideas into sight. In the previous chapters, he talks about “thin-slicing” (Gladwell Ch. 1, Section 2, Paragraph 7), which is finding patterns in narrow windows of experience and also how snap judgment can help you in situations in which quick reactions are used. In chapter five he focuses on the other side of “thin-slicing” (Gladwell Ch. 1, Section 2, Paragraph 7), showing that you cannot always trust it, how emotional involvement can
often lead us astray subconsciously, and how only when people are experts at something do they break open the locked door of the subconscious realm, gaining a much better understanding of what is at hand (Gladwell Ch. 5). Kenna, a rock musician from Virginia Beach had an incredibly tough time breaking into the mainstream music scene. He had everything going for him, the looks, the sound, and the people to back him. His first big break was when he opened for a famous rock band, No Doubt. At this show he didn’t reveal his name until the end when people were screaming and hollering, trying to unmask this unknown rock star known as Kenna (Gladwell Ch. 5, Section 1 Paragraph 2). His songs luckily landed into the grasp of the co-president of Atlantic Records, Craig Kallman and something amazing happened. Kallman hears hundreds of songs a day, “thin-slicing” (Gladwell Ch. 1, Section 2, Paragraph 7), or using his expertise and snap judgment to quickly hear a snippet from songs and deciding whether to give them a shot or not, which more often than not, it was the latter (Gladwell Ch. 5, Section 1 Paragraph 4). After catching the ear of several other big names in the music industry such as Paul McGuiness, the manager of the band U2 and Danny Wimmer, who in the past had worked with the lead singer of the band Limpbizkit, Kenna had finally gained some momentum. Not only did he have an army of influential industry folk, but he also got a lucky break when he took his music video to MTV, and without any coaxing he got over 475 plays over a short span of a few months. Most record companies have to pay thousands of dollars to get any plays, but people kept requesting it (Gladwell Ch. 5, Section 1 Paragraph 5). How could Kenna, who seemingly had everything going for him fail? In the blink of an eye, people with the complete and utter expertise like Kallman love this man known as Kenna, and believe he is one of the best he has seen. Unfortunately for Kenna, the human brain often fears things that are new, and often regard them as weird and unlikable. Gladwell explains that there are different companies that post various songs headed to the mainstream onto the internet, and then get all the information gathered through different rating systems and then rate that song on a scale from 4.0 to 0. Due to his different “weird” sound he scored a 1.3 by the rock listeners and a .8 by the R&B listeners (Ch. 5, Section 1 Paragraph 9). The “Chair of Death” (Gladwell, Ch.
5, Section 5 Paragraph 1) is another prime example showing that people are not able to understand why they feel a certain way, and fear it. Herman Miller, a furniture brand had created a very innovative new chair that was designed for people who constantly use office chairs, like business executives and other office workers. It wasn’t leather or big and black like most executive chairs, but small, wrapped with mesh over an exoskeleton, and with a new age look. It had a system that moved the top and bottom independently to allow for a more ergonomic feel. It was incredibly comfortable, cool, and different. They took these chairs to different offices and had the people rate the chair. To much disappointment of Herman Miller, the testers came to the conclusion that the seat wasn’t uncomfortable, it was just hideous and no one liked it because of that reason. The company could have just called it quits, but they kept pushing the product. Eventually the chair began to gain much needed attention for it’s design, winning numerous awards from high up design communities and eventually took over the chair industry as the chair everyone wanted (Ch. 5, Section 5 Paragraph 9). Once it became familiar to the masses, the chair gained attraction, because it wasn’t weird, and unknown. They were told it was beautiful, so in turn everyone began to see it in that light, going to show that unfamiliarity is a killer for new brands and ideas, or even Kenna (Ch. 5, Section
5).
Another point Gladwell expands on is people can get attached and have personal investment into a product, and not even know it. Coke found this out the hard way. After years and years of being the elite cola company, Coca-Cola had been steadily losing their market shares and profitability to a newer company named Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi started doing “the Pepsi Challenge” where they give samples of Pepsi and Coke on the street, and have the unknowing contestants rate it. Pepsi dominated this challenge. In turn, Coke had run their own similar tests and unfortunately for them, they found similar results. In an attempt to gain their market share back, Coke sent their beloved Coke recipe to the men in the white lab coats, allowing them to brew up a new taste. They eventually came out with a fresh product called New Coke in which the CEO announced that this was supposedly the surest business move that Coca-Cola had ever made (Ch. 5 Section 2 Paragraph 4). This plan had backfired horribly; people were rioting, asking where their Old Coke went, and thought it was blasphemy that Coca-Cola had done such a horrible thing as to change the original formula. Within the next few months Coca-Cola was forced to completely get rid of the New Coke and went back to the original, delicious formula that everyone had known (Ch. 5 Section 2 Paragraph 6).
Gladwell uses an example of two professional food tasters to show that the reason that people are afraid of unfamiliar things is because they don’t attain the vocabulary to explain and structure their thought process on why they enjoy whatever it is that is unfamiliar, whether it is a new song, a different food dish, or a fancy wine. Important music people, industry representatives, and professionals who knew music, loved Kenna. He was a fresh, incredible sound that they believed was special (Ch. 5, Section 6 Paragraph 7). Listeners did not know how to put into words or did not understand why the sound they were hearing wasn’t bad, it was just different in their mind, and had no way to express their thoughts. Gladwell explains people get mentally attached to products through a process called transfer sensations, “This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man named Louis Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child. Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself” (Gladwell Ch. 5, Section 4 Paragraph 3).
The book Blink is an eye opener for anybody who is curious about the subconscious mind, and how it works. Chapter five is interesting in that it sheds a different light on “thin-slicing” (Gladwell Ch. 1, Section 2, Paragraph 7) and shows a new perspective on the concept of the subconscious mind.

Works Cited
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown, 2005. Kindle.