Squared Eye Notebook

It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how to dyou pursuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to costumers – not once or twice but three or four times with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.

The Pitchman by Malcom Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw

I was reading last night about a simple disruptive innovation in the cooking world that made hundreds of millions of dollars. The Veg-O-Matic. Reading that, I was thinking of another product that did virtually the same selling, the same pitching, an elegant form of an infomercial for a fruit company.