Subhanjan Sarkar’s Post

What I Learnt Today #157 I Sales Thursdays Why people like what they like? Its MAYA. There has been many attempts to define what is likable? What is beauty? Is there a formula? It seems there is and it makes a lot of sense. It is called “Optimal Newness” as defined by a research team from Harvard University which conducted a study in 2014 to know “what sorts of proposals were most likely to win funding from prestigious institutions such as the National Institutes of Health—safely familiar proposals, or extremely novel ones? They prepared about 150 research proposals and gave each one a novelty score. Then they recruited 142 world-class scientists to evaluate the projects. The most-novel proposals got the worst ratings. Exceedingly familiar proposals fared a bit better, but they still received low scores. “Everyone dislikes novelty,” Karim Lakhani, a co-author, explained to me, and “experts tend to be overcritical of proposals in their own domain.” The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new.” writes Derek Thompson in his 2017 article for The Atlantic - The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything”. #alwayslearning #sales #maya