Chapter 5 Summary of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

All in all, Gladwell helps paint a picture of what’s said to be behind the locked door of the subconscious. He uses repetition and rhetorical questions to stress how thin-slicing plays a crucial part in our world. The power of our minds are limitless but Gladwell is still searching for the key to unlocking the truth of our unconscious

As Gladwell conducts his argument, he writes with confidence and authority, which expresses his passion and knowledge about the subject. Gladwell’s poise throughout the essay, combined with his resume, establishes his credibility and constructs a rhetorically effective argument. Being a best-selling author as well as a professional

Gladwell carefully constructs his argument by offering the real life story of Bernie Goetz. Gladwell uses this example in order to provide a

Marketing strategies began to take broader dimensions as the soft drink industry continued to expand and became more complex. In 1976, Pepsi introduced the Pepsi Challenge in its campaigns, a moved that directly challenged Coca-Cola’s longstanding dominance. In 1985, responding to the pressure of the taste tests, which Pepsi always won, Coca-Cola decided to change its formula. This move set off a shock wave across America. Consumers angrily demanded that the old formula be returned, and Coca-Cola responded three months later with Classic Coke. Five years after the infamous Coke fiasco, the Coca-Cola

Rivalry: The rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi is extremely high; however, both companies continue to remain profitable. Prior to the 1980s, pricing wars negatively affected profitability for Coca-Cola and Pepsi. After Coca-Cola renegotiated its franchise bottling contract and both companies increased concentrate prices, the rivalry began to focus on differentiation and advertising strategies. Through creative advertising campaigns, such as the “Pepsi Challenge” where Pepsi ran blind taste tests to demonstrate that consumers

Gladwell presents an interesting concept of “thin slicing” I definitely recommend this book for others to read. I enjoyed reading this book. Malcolm Gladwell was right when he stated on the back cover of the book, that reading this book would change the way I understood every decision I made. It has changed the way I think about making decisions.

Coca-Cola, as the leading brand in the world, has the highest position in soft drink industry. Its outstanding product “Coke” has been won the heart of everyone. However, in this case, we realize that they had a failed attempt at introducing the new product called New Coke in 1985.

The competition between Coke and Pepsi reached its peak to become a real war battle by the year 1980. This war had affected the industry profit for both concentrate producers and bottlers, while the effect of bottlers was much higher. After the successful “Pepsi Challenge” (blind taste tests: sales shot up) in 1974, Coke countered with rebates, retail price cuts and significant concentrate price increases. Pepsi followed of a 15% price increase of its own. During the early 1990’s bottlers of Coke and Pepsi employed low price strategies in the supermarket channel in order to compete with store brands. The concentrate producers were always able to increase their profits by increasing the concentrate price, while the bottlers, especially the

Few people have the ability to look at someone and tell exactly what they are thinking, and whether or not they are lying. Author Malcolm Gladwell, uses the stories of famous psychologist Paul Ekman and others gifted with the ability to "read people well" to argue that people can be naturally born with this ability, gradually develop it, or learn it purposefully later on. In his essay, "The Naked Face", Gladwell suggests that there could be more to this skill than what meets the eye through complex appeals to logos, pathos, ethos.

In life, people tend to overthink and overanalyze certain situations and events that occur around them; in reality they should be focusing more on their instincts and quick decisions. This is exactly the point that Malcolm Gladwell makes in the intro to his book, Blink. In order to successfully get this point across, Gladwell blends together a number of different strategies and devices. This is a common practice for established authors, using literary and rhetorical devices in order to keep the audience interested in what they are saying. In the intro to Blink, Gladwell uses the rhetorical devices of plot progression, allusion, and narration to present his beliefs in a way the reader can easily understand.

Malcolm Gladwell embodies the entire subject of the book “Blink,” in both the title of the book, and the phrase “thin-slicing,” which is a person ability to accurately gauge what is important from a very narrow period of time. To put it simply, impulsive decisions can often be more reliable than well thought out decisions. Gladwell provided the reader with multiple examples throughout each chapter of the book to back up his thesis. My goal is to reconstruct each of these examples/arguments in a more convenient manner for the reader, to support Gladwell’s argument. Come with me on a journey into the world of snap

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell brings the idea of “thin-slicing” to a forefront. The discussion surrounds using your instincts and subconscious as a compass in times of crisis, and aims to show the power of your unconscious. He strings together a multitude of stories regarding snap-judgments and their accuracy, and compares it to similar situations in which critical analysis was used to show the merits of these snap judgments. He begins with the story of the Getty Museum who acquire a statue from ancient Greece. The museum runs advanced tests on the statue and finds it to be authentic, but many experts declared it inauthentic based solely on their initial reactions. Gladwell proved that the initial reactions could be more important that scientific

Whilst reading this scenario you may have noticed that you were constantly presented with situations where your mind was forced to jump to a set of conclusions and make a decision in the space of about two seconds. Blink is a book about those two seconds, about thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, thinking that Gladwell refers to as rapid cognition. You’re probably thinking that ‘rapid cognition’ is just a fancy way of saying instinct or intuition, so you may argue then that this book is simply about that; intuition. Whilst you may not be wrong, you’re not right either. In fact, intuition doesn’t even appear in the book. Gladwell refers to intuition as that gut feeling, emotional,

For more than a century, Coca Cola and PepsiCo have been the major competitors within the soft drink market. By employing various advertising tactics, strategies such as blind taste tests, and reward initiatives for the consumer, they have grown to become oligopolistic rivals. In the soft-drink business, “The Coca-Cola Company” and “PepsiCo, Incorporated” hold most of the market shares in virtually every region of the world. They have brands that the consumers want, whether it be soft-drink brands or in PepsioCo’s case, snacks. With only one soft-drink market, the two competitors have no choice but to increase sales by stealing the other competitor’s clients. This led to the term, the “cola wars” which was first used

Pepsi and Coca-Cola have stood the test of time through one of the strongest competition rivalries ever seen in the business world. Each time that one of these beverage giants makes an innovative move to conquer a new or existing beverage market, the other is quick to respond with even better innovations or products. Through the years, each of these companies have heralded fabulous discoveries and absolute flops as they continued their endless search for the right mix of products that might someday give them the largest market share in an ever-growing and ever-needed market. The results so far have been increased competitiveness and long product lines for both companies. In this essay, I