Certain customers spell doom
Harbingers of failure: meet the customers you don’t want to love your product

          
          
Then the researchers established which groups had frequently bought these products within the first year of their life. These are presumably the people who’d liked the product the most, and so their taste clearly differed from the mainstream, which had generally rejected the product.
Finally, they looked at what happened to other products that this group liked. Sure enough, products purchased by harbingers of failure don’t do so well in the long run: “If sales to these customers are high, the product is more likely to fail,” the researchers write.
The more harbingers of failure like the product, the worse this effect is. If they buy a product repeatedly, it’s even more likely to fail. And the logical opposites also hold true: if harbingers of failure avoid a product, it does pretty well, and popularity with a different group of consumers—the "harbingers of success"—spells good news.
The interesting thing here is that the researchers tweaked their definitions to see if the effect was robust, or whether it fell apart when they changed something small. They reran the tests, changing what constituted a failed product or what length of time they considered the "introductory phase," yet they kept finding the same thing: a certain group of customers was associated with a lot of failed products.
They say that their study can be used to help market research, because when data from harbingers of failure is incorporated into predictions of product success, the predictions get more accurate.
Niche tastes
So who are the harbingers of failure? The researchers don't have any especially insightful information on them, other than that they're people who are more likely to buy the niche products that account for a low proportion of overall sales. “Harbingers have preferences that are systematically different from other customers,” the researchers explain. If something appeals to them, it’s unlikely that it will appeal to the mainstream.

          
                  