Although we are always attracted by something new, we sometimes try something old to enjoy its authenticity.
For instance, when a restaurant places an nostalgic vintage signboard outside or when it serves dishes in an ugly pot, we infer that the restaurant must have been loved by many people previously. This “old is good” intuition is so strong that it can even distort the quality of the dish.
I recently visited an approximately 15-year old restaurant and ordered a fish soup for two. It was served in a pot that was all wrinkled up. Although this fish soup was not delicious, I enjoyed it simply because the pot of the soup looked old.
Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product.
4 thoughts on “Old is good intuition”
We usually like new ones. However, because of its authenticity, there are times when we choose old and old. Seeing that the restaurant put food in an old nickel-silver pot, we assume that this store has been loved by people for a long time. This intuition is so powerful that it distorts the taste of real food, the case explains.
I have experience similar to this argument. therefore I agree with this argument. It was my time to serve in the military. If you join the army for the first time, you will receive new supplies. The contents of the supplies are very diverse, including toiletries, military uniforms, activity clothes, and underwear, and shoes. In society, it is common to prefer new products to used ones. But peculiarly in the military, a different law applies to society. That’s the preference for old and old things. In other words, similar to the case, there is an intuition in the military that the old stuff is better regardless of its actual function.
I thought about why such intuition existed. The military is a group that values unity. Soldiers are asked to have the same hairstyle, the same clothes, the same behavior. But human nature wants to reveal its own personality. So people thought about how to show their personality in the military. The way was to use old items. Supplies continue to be re-designed and updated to be distributed to recruits. If this continues, there will be a shortage of old supplies in the military and a flood of new supplies. Therefore, they ask for the old supplies of their seniors who are discharged from the military, and they pass on their supplies to their juniors, whom they usually cherished. As a result, the use of scarce old supplies in the army revealed their personality and became a symbol of the high class.
In conclusion, case in point is that the old pot brings intuition to make the food taste better than it actually tastes. I talked about the intuition of why old supplies are preferred over new ones. The reason is to reveal one’s personality by using rare items within the group to which one belongs. Although the two cases may be different in content, I thought the essence was the same in explaining the power of intuition given by the old. Therefore I agree with the idea of the case, ‘Old is good intuition’.
As the article says, sometimes when we go to old restaurants or restaurants in alleys, we can see where there are old bowls. As the article said, when we look at these old bowls, we expect that the food inside will have a very deep taste. I ordered something like soybean paste stew, but if it comes out in an old pot, I can’t wait to eat it before eating it. As the author of the article experienced, people think that even tasteless food is delicious and eat it.
What makes us expect that the food inside will taste better is what Fuchs, Christoph, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer (2015) and “The Handmade Effect: What’s Love Got to Do with It?” in the article above mentioned that handmade products are more appealing because they make us feel that there is love inside rather than factory-made products. Just like the above effect, old dishes make us think that the shop is a traditional shop with craftsmanship.
However, I think there is a kind of contradiction in this article. This is because there are differences depending on the food. Let’s think that the pasta we eat comes out in an old bowl. Will our appetite increase as we look at the pasta? No. We may doubt the hygiene of our restaurants or think that pasta will not taste like the one we expect. Another example is the difference by location. Let’s think of food in a buffet at a fancy hotel, such as the ‘Silla Hotel’ in Korea, in old cutlery or bowls. In places like hotels, food that emphasizes neatness will look like delicious food.
Here’s an article that supports this idea. One article on the Internet says, “Taste without fail? Well… According to “Covid-19 Changed Restaurant Selection Criteria” (Chosun Economic Co., Ltd., 2022.02.13), there is an article that says people choose restaurants based on the cleanliness and hygiene of their restaurants rather than the taste of their restaurants after Covid-19. These articles tell us that people will not prefer the old ones.
As such, the text contains some contradictions. I think old is not necessarily good, but old is good in a place where old is suitable. Where you can feel the Korean ‘Jeong’ of an old restaurant, the old one will have a good product appeal.
A while ago, I was watching Google I/O, and to be honest, it scared me a bit. The whole ecosystem of “AI agents,” which can think on their own and take care of everyday tasks, made me feel that humans may no longer be able to beat AI, at least in terms of efficiency. Around that time, I read the post “Old Is Good Intuition,” and it stayed with me more than I expected.
The post argues that consumers sense authenticity from the traces of old things, and that this intuition is powerful enough to distort how they evaluate actual quality. I strongly agree with that point. The post was written back in 2015, so in one sense it is already old, but the core idea still feels very current. If AI technology, smarter and more efficient than humans, is “New,” then content made by humans, slowly and clumsily, while struggling through the process, is “Old.” Just as an old pot can change how people perceive the taste of food, this intuition seems to be working even more strongly in today’s digital content market, where AI is everywhere. People are still drawn, almost instinctively, not to the flawlessness of technology, but to the old, imperfect, and human traces left behind.
I have always been interested in social issues, so I often watch current affairs documentary channels on YouTube. One day, while lying in bed and scrolling through YouTube Shorts, I came across a video about a hot social issue. It was one of those information videos made with stitched-together photos and an AI narrator’s voice on top. The machine voice had no errors, almost like a professional announcer, and the subtitles were so clean that they looked measured with a ruler. But within five minutes, I felt strangely hollow — like something was missing — and just kept scrolling.
After that, I searched for a full-length documentary made by human producers. The video was rough. The PD was rejected dozens of times while trying to find someone to interview. The camera shook in the cold wind at the scene. In the editing room, the editor looked exhausted after staying up all night, still worrying about how to put the story together. It was not polished in the way the AI Shorts was polished. Still, I found myself watching it until the end. They had suffered for days just to get one real ten-minute interview, and somehow that made me keep watching.
Why did I end up watching the documentary, the one where the PDs were clearly struggling, instead of staying with the perfectly made AI Shorts? Maybe it was the roughness. Not a dramatic kind of roughness, but the small, natural roughness that appears when a real person makes a video. The camera shook a little. There was noise from the site. Sometimes the interviewee paused in an awkward way. If I judged them only as video techniques, they were obviously flaws. But strangely, those flaws did not bother me that much. Rather, they felt like signs that someone had actually been there. Someone had gone to the place, talked to people, got rejected, tried again, and still kept filming.
That is why I read those details as indexical cues. They were not just mistakes on the screen. They were traces of the process. And once I noticed them, I felt the effort heuristic working in my head. I started to value the video not because it was clean, but because I could see the time and trouble behind it. With the AI-generated news video, I did not feel that. It was fast, neat, and efficient. But because it looked as if it had been rendered almost automatically, I could not find much to hold onto emotionally. There was no real “trace of suffering” for me. So even though the AI video was more polished, the human documentary felt more real.
At the end of this process, what consumers feel is authenticity, and I think that is the essence of marketing. We do not simply want to buy a perfect result stamped out by a machine. We want to consume the creator’s anxiety, effort, and human story hidden behind the result. This is similar to why many people were not emotionally moved by AI itself when AlphaGo defeated Lee Se-dol. What makes us care about Lee Se-dol, or even someone like Faker, is not just the myth of never losing. It is the story of a human being enduring defeat, pain, pressure, and still trying to prove something in his own way. That kind of story touches our intuition for authenticity.
In the end, old traces are one of the strongest marketing weapons because they prove human effort and move people’s hearts. AI may change the standard of efficiency, but it cannot completely change the standard of what feels real to humans. The more technology dominates the world, the more marketers need to let go of the obsession with making every result look beautiful and perfect. Instead, in the media market and in marketing itself, showing the imperfect process behind a product — the human process of sweating, failing, worrying, and struggling on-site — may become the most persuasive differentiation strategy of this era.
We usually like new ones. However, because of its authenticity, there are times when we choose old and old. Seeing that the restaurant put food in an old nickel-silver pot, we assume that this store has been loved by people for a long time. This intuition is so powerful that it distorts the taste of real food, the case explains.
I have experience similar to this argument. therefore I agree with this argument. It was my time to serve in the military. If you join the army for the first time, you will receive new supplies. The contents of the supplies are very diverse, including toiletries, military uniforms, activity clothes, and underwear, and shoes. In society, it is common to prefer new products to used ones. But peculiarly in the military, a different law applies to society. That’s the preference for old and old things. In other words, similar to the case, there is an intuition in the military that the old stuff is better regardless of its actual function.
I thought about why such intuition existed. The military is a group that values unity. Soldiers are asked to have the same hairstyle, the same clothes, the same behavior. But human nature wants to reveal its own personality. So people thought about how to show their personality in the military. The way was to use old items. Supplies continue to be re-designed and updated to be distributed to recruits. If this continues, there will be a shortage of old supplies in the military and a flood of new supplies. Therefore, they ask for the old supplies of their seniors who are discharged from the military, and they pass on their supplies to their juniors, whom they usually cherished. As a result, the use of scarce old supplies in the army revealed their personality and became a symbol of the high class.
In conclusion, case in point is that the old pot brings intuition to make the food taste better than it actually tastes. I talked about the intuition of why old supplies are preferred over new ones. The reason is to reveal one’s personality by using rare items within the group to which one belongs. Although the two cases may be different in content, I thought the essence was the same in explaining the power of intuition given by the old. Therefore I agree with the idea of the case, ‘Old is good intuition’.
As the article says, sometimes when we go to old restaurants or restaurants in alleys, we can see where there are old bowls. As the article said, when we look at these old bowls, we expect that the food inside will have a very deep taste. I ordered something like soybean paste stew, but if it comes out in an old pot, I can’t wait to eat it before eating it. As the author of the article experienced, people think that even tasteless food is delicious and eat it.
What makes us expect that the food inside will taste better is what Fuchs, Christoph, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer (2015) and “The Handmade Effect: What’s Love Got to Do with It?” in the article above mentioned that handmade products are more appealing because they make us feel that there is love inside rather than factory-made products. Just like the above effect, old dishes make us think that the shop is a traditional shop with craftsmanship.
However, I think there is a kind of contradiction in this article. This is because there are differences depending on the food. Let’s think that the pasta we eat comes out in an old bowl. Will our appetite increase as we look at the pasta? No. We may doubt the hygiene of our restaurants or think that pasta will not taste like the one we expect. Another example is the difference by location. Let’s think of food in a buffet at a fancy hotel, such as the ‘Silla Hotel’ in Korea, in old cutlery or bowls. In places like hotels, food that emphasizes neatness will look like delicious food.
Here’s an article that supports this idea. One article on the Internet says, “Taste without fail? Well… According to “Covid-19 Changed Restaurant Selection Criteria” (Chosun Economic Co., Ltd., 2022.02.13), there is an article that says people choose restaurants based on the cleanliness and hygiene of their restaurants rather than the taste of their restaurants after Covid-19. These articles tell us that people will not prefer the old ones.
As such, the text contains some contradictions. I think old is not necessarily good, but old is good in a place where old is suitable. Where you can feel the Korean ‘Jeong’ of an old restaurant, the old one will have a good product appeal.
(https://www.chosun.com/economy/economy_general/2022/02/13/XCFDC2TTY5FNBHNXVQOGIQJBPY/)
A while ago, I was watching Google I/O, and to be honest, it scared me a bit. The whole ecosystem of “AI agents,” which can think on their own and take care of everyday tasks, made me feel that humans may no longer be able to beat AI, at least in terms of efficiency. Around that time, I read the post “Old Is Good Intuition,” and it stayed with me more than I expected.
The post argues that consumers sense authenticity from the traces of old things, and that this intuition is powerful enough to distort how they evaluate actual quality. I strongly agree with that point. The post was written back in 2015, so in one sense it is already old, but the core idea still feels very current. If AI technology, smarter and more efficient than humans, is “New,” then content made by humans, slowly and clumsily, while struggling through the process, is “Old.” Just as an old pot can change how people perceive the taste of food, this intuition seems to be working even more strongly in today’s digital content market, where AI is everywhere. People are still drawn, almost instinctively, not to the flawlessness of technology, but to the old, imperfect, and human traces left behind.
I have always been interested in social issues, so I often watch current affairs documentary channels on YouTube. One day, while lying in bed and scrolling through YouTube Shorts, I came across a video about a hot social issue. It was one of those information videos made with stitched-together photos and an AI narrator’s voice on top. The machine voice had no errors, almost like a professional announcer, and the subtitles were so clean that they looked measured with a ruler. But within five minutes, I felt strangely hollow — like something was missing — and just kept scrolling.
After that, I searched for a full-length documentary made by human producers. The video was rough. The PD was rejected dozens of times while trying to find someone to interview. The camera shook in the cold wind at the scene. In the editing room, the editor looked exhausted after staying up all night, still worrying about how to put the story together. It was not polished in the way the AI Shorts was polished. Still, I found myself watching it until the end. They had suffered for days just to get one real ten-minute interview, and somehow that made me keep watching.
Why did I end up watching the documentary, the one where the PDs were clearly struggling, instead of staying with the perfectly made AI Shorts? Maybe it was the roughness. Not a dramatic kind of roughness, but the small, natural roughness that appears when a real person makes a video. The camera shook a little. There was noise from the site. Sometimes the interviewee paused in an awkward way. If I judged them only as video techniques, they were obviously flaws. But strangely, those flaws did not bother me that much. Rather, they felt like signs that someone had actually been there. Someone had gone to the place, talked to people, got rejected, tried again, and still kept filming.
That is why I read those details as indexical cues. They were not just mistakes on the screen. They were traces of the process. And once I noticed them, I felt the effort heuristic working in my head. I started to value the video not because it was clean, but because I could see the time and trouble behind it. With the AI-generated news video, I did not feel that. It was fast, neat, and efficient. But because it looked as if it had been rendered almost automatically, I could not find much to hold onto emotionally. There was no real “trace of suffering” for me. So even though the AI video was more polished, the human documentary felt more real.
At the end of this process, what consumers feel is authenticity, and I think that is the essence of marketing. We do not simply want to buy a perfect result stamped out by a machine. We want to consume the creator’s anxiety, effort, and human story hidden behind the result. This is similar to why many people were not emotionally moved by AI itself when AlphaGo defeated Lee Se-dol. What makes us care about Lee Se-dol, or even someone like Faker, is not just the myth of never losing. It is the story of a human being enduring defeat, pain, pressure, and still trying to prove something in his own way. That kind of story touches our intuition for authenticity.
In the end, old traces are one of the strongest marketing weapons because they prove human effort and move people’s hearts. AI may change the standard of efficiency, but it cannot completely change the standard of what feels real to humans. The more technology dominates the world, the more marketers need to let go of the obsession with making every result look beautiful and perfect. Instead, in the media market and in marketing itself, showing the imperfect process behind a product — the human process of sweating, failing, worrying, and struggling on-site — may become the most persuasive differentiation strategy of this era.