Why not making sense works

Round tea bags made no functional sense to people who knew tea bags. The water did not become wetter. The tea did not receive a promotion. Tetley still took the market lead within a year.

Category expertise creates a peculiar blindness. Insiders know which differences matter, which claims sound serious and what a proper product should look like. That knowledge saves time until the category’s habits become laws of physics. Then “I cannot explain why customers would care” gets shortened to “customers won’t care”, and an assumption acquires a clipboard.

The round bag was visible. It gave a familiar product a fresh reason to be noticed. Perhaps shoppers inferred better brewing; perhaps the shape simply made the old square suddenly look old. People did not owe the industry a respectable explanation before buying it. Research can accidentally reinforce the priesthood. Ask shoppers to explain an unfamiliar shape and they borrow the familiar category’s vocabulary; the strange thing is judged by the rules of the normal thing and rejected for being strange. On a real shelf, the round bag gets a different hearing. Someone notices it, turns the box over, tells a friend that it is ridiculous and puts it in the trolley. Behaviour supplies its own argument. Months later, once the product has won, an elegant rationale appears explaining why success was strategically inevitable.