An oddly ugly actor, with a strange voice who happens to also be a great character actor can become perceived as good looking and an audible charm without changing a thing.
Similarly, the repetitive and technically flawed but also predictably distinct tempo of an author who writes books that are consistently easy and enjoyable to read without too much mental hardship can become beloved.
Never underestimate the power of anything, no matter how seemingly worthless on the face of it, to signal something good to people.
When we ask “how can people like that?”, we may be seeing the reliable flaws quite accurately. What we are missing is it is exactly those particular flaws that have now become a signal of something those people like.
The flaws are just the consistently awful din outside a loved restaurant. Unacceptable anywhere else, but welcome when dining there.
What sounds like cacophony to many, is now hypnotic tempo to others.
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TLDR; Branding lesson: any distinctive disadvantage can be counter intuitively leveraging for good effect, by incorporating it as a signal of something good. Soup nazi.
TLDR2; Health lesson: You can learn to like the taste of almost anything, if it makes you feel good after you eat it.
TLDR3; Social lesson: This is how beloved assholes become loved for being despicable assholes. People like something about them in spite of their being an awful person. Then they start associating their irredeemable asshole-ishness with what they like about them. Then they love that they are a destructive asshole. It’s one of their best features!! This dynamic underlines the worship of the asshole qualities of many real and fictional assholes. Slovenly lazy rude unbathed detectives are a classic. Certain repugnant politicians.
OK Cupid, the dating website, used to have a blog that wrote on topics relevant to data analysis from their site (much of which was repurposed in the book "Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder, one of OKC's principals).
One of the topics refers just to this phenomenon. OKC data scientists found that among people who had similar attractiveness ratings (i.e., the hidden average rating you got on your looks by other users who rated you), people whose attractiveness was higher variance got many many more private messages.
In other words: imagine two people who were rated, on average, a 3/5. One way to achieve this is by always being rated 3, for 0 variance. Another way to achieve this is to be rated 50% 1, and 50% 5; high variance. The person who was half 1s and half 5s would get many more messages than the "straight 3".
OKC's blog theorized that this is because while half of the people rating the high variance person were not at all likely to reach out to them, the other half see the high variance peraon as very desirable. On the other hand, everyone sees the straight 3 as a straight 3, and are less motivated to message them.
The advice given by OKC was just like your branding advice: play up your divisive or unique characteristics, rather than downplay them. The people who like big noses (or lots of tattoos or whatever) are looking for you!
I think we also underestimate how much we value uniqueness, and therefore appreciate and admire people who can be confident despite conventionally undesirable differences. The confidence passes both a fitness test, and a test of unique value, by demonstrating that a handicap for most people, doesn’t impede them in anyway way. Those people also make us more comfortable about our own differences or insecurities.
An oddly ugly actor, with a strange voice who happens to also be a great character actor can become perceived as good looking and an audible charm without changing a thing.
Similarly, the repetitive and technically flawed but also predictably distinct tempo of an author who writes books that are consistently easy and enjoyable to read without too much mental hardship can become beloved.
Never underestimate the power of anything, no matter how seemingly worthless on the face of it, to signal something good to people.
When we ask “how can people like that?”, we may be seeing the reliable flaws quite accurately. What we are missing is it is exactly those particular flaws that have now become a signal of something those people like.
The flaws are just the consistently awful din outside a loved restaurant. Unacceptable anywhere else, but welcome when dining there.
What sounds like cacophony to many, is now hypnotic tempo to others.
—
TLDR; Branding lesson: any distinctive disadvantage can be counter intuitively leveraging for good effect, by incorporating it as a signal of something good. Soup nazi.
TLDR2; Health lesson: You can learn to like the taste of almost anything, if it makes you feel good after you eat it.
TLDR3; Social lesson: This is how beloved assholes become loved for being despicable assholes. People like something about them in spite of their being an awful person. Then they start associating their irredeemable asshole-ishness with what they like about them. Then they love that they are a destructive asshole. It’s one of their best features!! This dynamic underlines the worship of the asshole qualities of many real and fictional assholes. Slovenly lazy rude unbathed detectives are a classic. Certain repugnant politicians.