Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

First: Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do. The most successful artists and entrepreneurs tend to be geniuses. But the paradox is that they are both smarter than their median consumer and dumber than all of their consumers because they don’t know how their consumers live, what they do every day, what annoys them, or what moves them. If familiarity is the key to liking, then people’s familiarities—the ideas, stories, behaviors, and habits with which they are fluent—are the keys to their heart. Loewy had his own theories of beauty, his eggshells and his chrome finishes. But he knew that designing for strangers was, at the beginning, like fumbling through a dark tunnel toward a tiny speck of light. He was obsessed with understanding the people he was designing for. Second: To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.9 At the far reaches of radical thinking, it’s critical for artists and entrepreneurs with wild ideas to heed the pull of familiarity and remember Max Planck’s warning: Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs face initial skepticism when they are too far from mainstream thought. Great art and products meet audiences where they are. But the fact that people gravitate to fluency in art and design is no excuse for dumb simplicity. The central insight of MAYA is that people actually prefer complexity—up to the point that they stop understanding something. Many of today’s museu...