Are you a “harbinger of failure”? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Are you a “harbinger of failure”? (2015)

news.mit.edu

50 pointsthunderbong34 comments

The paper is here https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/111114 and is very accessible reading.

My takeaway is these ‘Harbingers of Failure’ have tastes not shared by the broader market, and so success only among the harbingers is unlikely to spread.

They also allude to an idea that overtuning tech products to early adopters is dangerous because they are possibly weird and unrepresentative of a bigger potential market.

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9839344 ("Harbingers of Failure [pdf]", 9 comments)

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10796548 ("Harbingers of failed products", 9 comments)

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25590517 ("Are you a “harbinger of failure”? (2015)", 51 comments)

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820168 ("“Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)", 262 comments)

You know, the internet is a marvelous thing: nowadays we can go look for small scale manufacturers that don't need to get enough sales to earn their place in groceries store shelves.

That paper was already a bit dated at the time, but as a kind of enshitification gets through all the main brands for domestic products, and small markets opened up more, I wonder if today it's so universal that the finding now is meaningless.

While interesting, this paper is only made possible by heinously privacy-invading data gathering.

It’s about to get way, way worse!

(2015)

I've seen this go by three times already.

The authors were supposedly going to do further research. Is there an update?

yes: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/130136/The%20...

(sorry for lack of details in my post, on mobile)

How wonderful! Not only to have the bad luck of seeing all new products you like vanish right when you get used to them, but to be also called nasty names by MIT scientists for it.

Last Christmas, controversial Lindsay Lohan filmed a controversial Pepsi commercial where she added milk to a glass of Pepsi with some help from Santa, and she called it "pilk", commenting, "That is one dirty soda!" https://youtu.be/0KTNriX6WhY

So I contemplated the Incarnation and the salvation of the world for a while, and then I realized that pilk is simply a noncontroversial Italian soda.

Not sure whether Pepsi could bottle this up, due to the curdling factor.

Laverne on the 1970s TV show Laverne and Shirly always had milk and Pepsi.

A float is pop/soda and ice cream.

Or maybe the proxy is: going for the cheaper product that is already seen as a failure by the manufacturer so they're putting the price down to clear inventory and hope it goes away ASAP

(or maybe ignoring the uncanny valley)

You might wonder if these harbingers are actually tuned into an alternate and consistent set of values not shared by the majority, rather than simply irrational consumers. In that same vein, you might wonder if the product managers of these failed products are part of that same cohort.

Surely they accounted for the fact that if a product isn't taken off the shelf you don't need to try a new potential-to-fail product.

Or that the group is more likely to buy any new products, both these that will flop and also these that will succeed.

Exactly my thought. Are these people "harbingers of failure" or "adventurous consumers"?

To be fair, the article does mention it.

“You could think of it as preference for risk,” Simester says. “People who are more willing to take a risk on an unusual product are more willing to take a risk in multiple categories.”

Seems to me a verbose and distorted rediscovery of early adopters

I had totally forgotten about Coca-Cola Blak.

I saw someone drinking a Coca Cola with Coffee tonight. Weird timing for this article

How was this done? Coffee added to a glass of cola? Cola added to coffee as a type of sweetener?

Was the coffee hot?

I do this some days when my last cup of coffee has gone cold. I’ll add Diet Coke to the coffee.

I enjoy it.

So it is more like a "sweetener for the coffee".

Not, "adding caffeine kick to a cola". On a side note, is that even possible, wouldnt all the CO2 fly away, assuming you poured cold coffee? Im considering trying it, suspect this might be quite terrible.

I've had the produced version of this [1]. I don't know if they're still selling it? I found it interesting, but the coffee half of the flavor felt inauthentic to me. I do drink coffee and cola regularly, but I've never mixed them other than the canned version.

I did also try a cola-coffee flavored carbonated water in a can from LaCroix, which I didn't care for at all. But YMMV, it's worth a try.

[1] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/media-center/coke-with-coff...

I'm feeling more than a little attacked right now and I -really- want my McDonalds habanero ranch back.

I would punch a dolphin for an old-school taco bell chili-cheese burrito.

They bring back A chili-cheese burrito every once in a while and I don't know what they think they are doing but it's not the same, the taste is different, the quality is bad even for Taco Bell, and whoever keeps doing it the wrong way should be fired.

Preferably by a cannon.

Into the sun.

Hmm maybe I’m misunderstand something, but the article says only 40% of new products are still on the shelves after years. Later, the article says a harbinger of failure buying a product 3 times means the product has 56% chance of failure. But the baseline failure percentage is 60%. So it seems like a harbinger of failure makes a product more likely to succeed compared to the baseline?

Now, project this idea to selecting technologies…

Yes, aren't these harbingers just aggressive early adopters chasing the shiny new thing?

That's my read as well.

Interestingly, having early adopters won't kill your product. It can (rarely) cause it's success.

> In a key part of the study, the researchers studied consumers whose purchases flop at least 50 percent of the time, and saw pronounced effects when these harbingers of failure buy products. When the percentage of total sales of a product accounted for by these consumers increases from 25 to 50 percent, the probability of success for that product decreases by 31 percent. And when the harbingers buy a product at least three times, it’s really bad news: The probability of success for that product drops 56 percent.

I have a hunch that this is might be some artifact from not understanding statistics, and the conditions to be able to identify causes and effects.

If the product if flopping, then more and more of its remaining consumers are curious in some way. They are not the ones causing it to have a high probability of failure.

Let's say that the percentage of these consumers among the population that is the target market segment for the product is 3%. Number out of a hat.

If the percentage of a product accounted by these consumers goes to 25%, that's just saying that the market share has dropped to 12%. Those consumers are 3% of the market. So another 9% of the market which is not those consumers still likes the product. Then when two thirds of those other people drop the product, bringing it closer to failure, we have 6% market share: 3% "harbingers" and 3% others.

You could draw the conclusion that the product is flopping just from the 12% figure dropping to 6%.

> “If you’re the kind of person who bought something that really didn’t resonate with the market, say, coffee-flavored Coca-Cola, then that also means you’re more likely to buy a type of toothpaste or laundry detergent that fails to resonate with the market.”

Some of it could be that the new products are incentivized via discounts and rebates? And that attracts a particular consumer: the penny-pinching bargain hunter, who seeks everything discounted and rebated? He or she loves the new thing, if it's 50% off because it's new. Did you say there are free samples in the mail? Sign me up! Opening week specials at the new restaurant down the street? Let's go every evening while it lasts!

That group will be very consistent in this behavior, and should be expected to trackable through the statistics. When the promotional discounts end, they will predictably move on to the next discounted, promoted thing. There is always something chea^H^H^H^Hnew to try!

You're definitely making a mistake if you think that all the people who are buying a product really like it better than the leading brands, if you've incentivized it somehow, so that you've attracted all the cheapskates.j

Nobody is going to try some weird new toothpaste brand unless it's discounted. The consumers know that Aquafresh is cheap shit, and they really want the Sensodyne for $6, which never seems to go on sale. Oh, but look, there is this new WeirdDent they've never heard of: promoted at $1.75. What the heck, try anything once or twice! It's cheaper than Aquafresh and not yet confirmed to be shit.

But how do you call people who loathe mainstream commercial products?

Would be interesting to know if this extends to digital products. For example, if these people are using Threads right now, it would predict failure for the product.

I think I’m probably one of these, but I would chalk it up to being high in trait creativity, which causes novelty seeking behaviour

I think I'm one of them. Ive lost count of things I like that disappear. In my family I'm famous for killing off products.

Sucks to be that consumer. Hopefully the internet's long tail solves this.

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